It's never been about need. We don't need the vast majority of technology out there. All you really need is access to food and water, a nice cave to shelter you from the elements, and a way to keep warm. Technology--especially tech such as this--is supposed to make things easier and/or improve quality of life.
"We don't need that" is rarely a good argument. Instead, you should investigate whether the proposed solution will make things better or worse, or have no impact (in which case you don't have to waste resources on it).
Considering he said he bought the newest book on the day of release, I would assume he already knows any potential spoilers. Or does the TV series change things?
As for the issue...I might be interested in seeing the series if I had HBO. The cost of DVDs isn't worth it, but they are available on Netflix, so maybe I'll give it a shot. If it weren't available there, I would simply not watch it. Just because I'm not willing to pay for something doesn't mean I am justified in pirating it. (If I lived in an area where I simply couldn't get it, then I may have a different attitude.)
While I would like it if it were open to everyone, it actually does make sense. Apple needs to pay for iCloud somehow, and making sure that developers don't get a free ride is the easiest way to do it.
Furthermore, this is old news. We've known this since Mountain Lion was announced.
Should Apple have the right to demand the software can only run on their hardware?
Remember when Atari tried blocking third-party software from their hardware and a judge ruled that they must allow for third-party use of their hardware?
I'm pretty sure that's not the same thing. Apple is saying that only they have the right to build machines that can run their software, not that you can't write/sell software to run on their machines.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this is at all like wearing a watch. It's in the right location, but all the watches I've ever seen (that weren't pocket watches) have had wristbands, not magnets. And, of course, iPod wristbands already exist.
Objective-C is a strict superset of C. Anything it adds over C has its own special syntax and notation, possibly to help reduce confusion. Properties didn't always use dot-notation--you used to have to do [object ivar] in order to access a member variable, and [object setIvar:ivar] to change it. The (relatively new) dot-notation and @property syntax is just shorthand for this functionality, and a welcome thing (though you can still use the old style).
Objective-C used to have a lot of irritating things about it, but I think the language has really improved over the past couple years. Properties, auto-synthesizing, automatic garbage collection, fast enumeration, etc. have all made the language much better. Once I got past the odd messaging syntax, I really came to like it, and I have to wonder how much recent experience some of these vocal haters have with the language.
I go through a reasonable amount of effort to ensure my software was up to date. I've gotten so used to Flash updating automatically on Windows that it didn't even occur to me it wasn't doing that on my Mac. After I updated to 10.7.4, it told me Flash was out of date. So I'm going to have to say this is a good move. I'd imagine most Mac users have outdated Flash versions.
It depends on the person. Lion changed a lot of things, and not everyone will be happy with those changes. Personally, I absolutely love Lion, except for the way that Mission Control clumps application windows together (at least you can enable App Expose). I even really like the new way Spaces works; I use it so much more now than I used to.
As for this bug, it's a stupid mistake, but at least one that will hit a very small set of users. It's silly not to have upgraded from FV to FV2, and most people didn't use FV in the first place. I imagine a fix will be coming soon.
...They could also say hey, if you like to pay for your account upgrade here, its a 30% surcharge....
Actually, as far as I know, they can't do that, likely because it would have the same effect as telling them to go to their website and buy instead of letting Apple get a cut. No source on that, though, so I may be wrong.
A lot of people gripe about the 30% cut for in-app purchases, and it looks like crap at first glance. At the same time, without it people could get around paying Apple anything at all by making apps "free" and then having them pay for features with an in-app purchase, and thus get 100% of the money. Same for telling users to go to a website to buy something: devs could get around paying Apple one cent if that were an allowed process.
Of course, Apple probably also wants to have a system wherein it's a more seamless experience for users to pay for something. Instead of downloading a "free" app and then going through the developer's website and entering your credit card info again to pay to actually use the app, you just pay for the app at download and have everything available at the start.
Then again, there are people who are completely against Apple taking a cut at all. To those people, I remind them that Apple is a for-profit company, not a charity, and that (by all accounts) the App Store merely pays for itself. There's also the fact that Apple handles distribution costs and payment processing, both of which do cost money.
(I may be wrong about all this. I just woke up and am still bleary-eyed, after all, which is a bad condition for posting.)
Show me a $5 mobile game with the depth and length of a good AAA title, and I'll agree there's no point in spending $60 for games (where did the $80-$100 figure come from? Only collectors' editions cost that much, and even they are often less). Also, it has to have good controls. Not "well, this is pretty good for a mobile game", but actually good. I've bought all of five games on my iPhone. Two were terrible (Scribblenauts, Angry Birds), two were ports (Chrono Trigger and Vay), and one was a decent time-waster (7 Words). Certain types of games can work pretty well on a phone or tablet, but it's a small subset of what works on PCs or consoles. And, unfortunately, the games that work well on mobile devices don't seem to be the same games as the ones I actually want to play.
The first poster did a good job pointing out that the added complexity the article wants will cost more, not less. I would like to point out that these cliches aren't universal, but there are problems with trying to "solve" them. I'll use "mandatory missions" for my example, alongside the article's example of Wing Commander.
Wing Commander allowed you to progress through the story while failing every mission. Your ending would suck, but that should be expected. It was a neat idea. There were a two major problems with that, though. Orion discovered that most people never saw the "failed" paths, because people would restart missions until they succeeded. People want a sense of accomplishment, and failing a mission doesn't give that. The other big problem was the added complexity. When they set out to make Wing Commander II, they wanted a much larger, more expansive plot. It became much too difficult and costly to create all the possible branching paths, cutscenes, and script if they followed the same formula as Wing Commander. So they cheated. There are less branching paths than in the first one, but the result is a game with a better-structured story.
There's also a side issue with allowing players to fail missions: You can game the system. If you just want to see the good ending of Wing Commander, all you have to do, IIRC, is play four missions. For every other mission, just eject as soon as you have control of your ship. Want to see the bad ending? Just eject on every mission! You can finish the game in just a few minutes, this way.
I also feel like allowing a failed mission takes something away from the experience. It's more realistic, but what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
In the end, as I mentioned earlier, and as others have as well--I'm not sure how adding complexity is going to somehow magically drop down the price of games, or make them shorter to develop. I would also like to point out that games right now are cheaper than the SNES or N64 days. Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from.
I assumed that the search would be something like, "ubuntu 12.04 wifi problems", not "12.04 wifi problems". Adding "ubuntu" to the front should alleviate all but the first of your examples.
Codenames have been around forever. Just look at this list of Microsoft names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames But codenames are almost always dropped when the product is released. Apple is one of the few that keeps the codenames.
Google's search query parser has been borked for a while. I'm not sure when they changed it, but I seem to recall it being when they stopped honoring the "+" operator and said you have to use quotes now. It only sometimes seems to actually respond to search markup. At least, that's my experience.
I can't make sense of Apple's naming scheme beyond it being a "big cat". How a mountain lion is an upgrade to a "vanilla" lion is beyond me, and I'm not sure how a mountain lion is different from a puma or panther (hint: they're not!). But be that as it may, I have to imagine more people are familiar with a lion or tiger or other big cat than they are a pangolin (which I had to look up--spoilers: it's an anteater). A better name would have been Puissant Platypus. People know the platypus.
(Apple fails at hardware revision names, though. My Air is simply called a Macbook Air, even though it's the fourth generation. The new iPad is simply called "iPad". And yet the iPhone has a name, so this lack of hardware naming is inconsistent. Of course, I expect them to remedy this--but in the wrong direction.)
Wouldn't you also get specific advice if you just say 12.04? The naming is just a novelty thing, a way to make it easier to remember than a bunch of numbers--although OS X's names have been more memorable than Ubuntu's, due to a combination of a slower release cycle, shorter names, and more recognizable animals.
I was going to take issue with the "revolutionary" phrasing (though the whole sentence is odd), but at the same time, I'm not sure that "ripping off" OS X is such a bad thing. It's a nice feature. I'm never sure why UI improvements (and other aspects of technology) are always an example "damned if you do, damned if you don't": If somebody doesn't copy $FEATURE into their system, they are derided for being outdated; at the same time, if they do add $FEATURE, then they are derided for copying.
That said, the lack of a traditional menu bar might be a source for problems. I prefer the more hybrid approach of OS X.
I trust Google to be around for a while, but not necessarily any of their services beyond Search, Gmail, Youtube, and (to a smaller extent) Docs. Google may offer a nice service, but I've been trying to reduce my dependence on them, so I'll stick with Dropbox.
Maybe you should try understanding the language? Objective-C is dynamic. That means it won't do type checking the way other languages will. You have to be a little more careful than with other languages, but it does have its benefits--some of which are described here.
Also, Xcode will definitely spit out a warning if you try something like that, and you can always turn on "treat warnings as errors". You act like it will merrily leave you clueless as to your mistake, which is untrue unless you suppress warnings. (You can also use forwardInvocation: or exception handling if you have no way of avoiding the situation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention a lot of sites "helpfully" say that your +whatever address is invalid.
It's never been about need. We don't need the vast majority of technology out there. All you really need is access to food and water, a nice cave to shelter you from the elements, and a way to keep warm. Technology--especially tech such as this--is supposed to make things easier and/or improve quality of life.
"We don't need that" is rarely a good argument. Instead, you should investigate whether the proposed solution will make things better or worse, or have no impact (in which case you don't have to waste resources on it).
Considering he said he bought the newest book on the day of release, I would assume he already knows any potential spoilers. Or does the TV series change things?
As for the issue...I might be interested in seeing the series if I had HBO. The cost of DVDs isn't worth it, but they are available on Netflix, so maybe I'll give it a shot. If it weren't available there, I would simply not watch it. Just because I'm not willing to pay for something doesn't mean I am justified in pirating it. (If I lived in an area where I simply couldn't get it, then I may have a different attitude.)
While I would like it if it were open to everyone, it actually does make sense. Apple needs to pay for iCloud somehow, and making sure that developers don't get a free ride is the easiest way to do it.
Furthermore, this is old news. We've known this since Mountain Lion was announced.
Should Apple have the right to demand the software can only run on their hardware?
Remember when Atari tried blocking third-party software from their hardware and a judge ruled that they must allow for third-party use of their hardware?
I'm pretty sure that's not the same thing. Apple is saying that only they have the right to build machines that can run their software, not that you can't write/sell software to run on their machines.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this is at all like wearing a watch. It's in the right location, but all the watches I've ever seen (that weren't pocket watches) have had wristbands, not magnets. And, of course, iPod wristbands already exist.
Objective-C is a strict superset of C. Anything it adds over C has its own special syntax and notation, possibly to help reduce confusion. Properties didn't always use dot-notation--you used to have to do [object ivar] in order to access a member variable, and [object setIvar:ivar] to change it. The (relatively new) dot-notation and @property syntax is just shorthand for this functionality, and a welcome thing (though you can still use the old style).
Objective-C used to have a lot of irritating things about it, but I think the language has really improved over the past couple years. Properties, auto-synthesizing, automatic garbage collection, fast enumeration, etc. have all made the language much better. Once I got past the odd messaging syntax, I really came to like it, and I have to wonder how much recent experience some of these vocal haters have with the language.
I go through a reasonable amount of effort to ensure my software was up to date. I've gotten so used to Flash updating automatically on Windows that it didn't even occur to me it wasn't doing that on my Mac. After I updated to 10.7.4, it told me Flash was out of date. So I'm going to have to say this is a good move. I'd imagine most Mac users have outdated Flash versions.
Thanks for the suggestion, but that just showed up as a bunch of asterisks for me. (Maybe that would be a good password?)
Another important metric: How many of those 100k downloads were from people who wouldn't have bought a ticket even if they couldn't pirate it?
It depends on the person. Lion changed a lot of things, and not everyone will be happy with those changes. Personally, I absolutely love Lion, except for the way that Mission Control clumps application windows together (at least you can enable App Expose). I even really like the new way Spaces works; I use it so much more now than I used to.
As for this bug, it's a stupid mistake, but at least one that will hit a very small set of users. It's silly not to have upgraded from FV to FV2, and most people didn't use FV in the first place. I imagine a fix will be coming soon.
...They could also say hey, if you like to pay for your account upgrade here, its a 30% surcharge. ...
Actually, as far as I know, they can't do that, likely because it would have the same effect as telling them to go to their website and buy instead of letting Apple get a cut. No source on that, though, so I may be wrong.
A lot of people gripe about the 30% cut for in-app purchases, and it looks like crap at first glance. At the same time, without it people could get around paying Apple anything at all by making apps "free" and then having them pay for features with an in-app purchase, and thus get 100% of the money. Same for telling users to go to a website to buy something: devs could get around paying Apple one cent if that were an allowed process.
Of course, Apple probably also wants to have a system wherein it's a more seamless experience for users to pay for something. Instead of downloading a "free" app and then going through the developer's website and entering your credit card info again to pay to actually use the app, you just pay for the app at download and have everything available at the start.
Then again, there are people who are completely against Apple taking a cut at all. To those people, I remind them that Apple is a for-profit company, not a charity, and that (by all accounts) the App Store merely pays for itself. There's also the fact that Apple handles distribution costs and payment processing, both of which do cost money.
(I may be wrong about all this. I just woke up and am still bleary-eyed, after all, which is a bad condition for posting.)
Thanks for the recommendation; I'll check it out. It doesn't fit the mobile requirement, but I'll take a good $5 PC game.
Show me a $5 mobile game with the depth and length of a good AAA title, and I'll agree there's no point in spending $60 for games (where did the $80-$100 figure come from? Only collectors' editions cost that much, and even they are often less). Also, it has to have good controls. Not "well, this is pretty good for a mobile game", but actually good. I've bought all of five games on my iPhone. Two were terrible (Scribblenauts, Angry Birds), two were ports (Chrono Trigger and Vay), and one was a decent time-waster (7 Words). Certain types of games can work pretty well on a phone or tablet, but it's a small subset of what works on PCs or consoles. And, unfortunately, the games that work well on mobile devices don't seem to be the same games as the ones I actually want to play.
The first poster did a good job pointing out that the added complexity the article wants will cost more, not less. I would like to point out that these cliches aren't universal, but there are problems with trying to "solve" them. I'll use "mandatory missions" for my example, alongside the article's example of Wing Commander.
Wing Commander allowed you to progress through the story while failing every mission. Your ending would suck, but that should be expected. It was a neat idea. There were a two major problems with that, though. Orion discovered that most people never saw the "failed" paths, because people would restart missions until they succeeded. People want a sense of accomplishment, and failing a mission doesn't give that. The other big problem was the added complexity. When they set out to make Wing Commander II, they wanted a much larger, more expansive plot. It became much too difficult and costly to create all the possible branching paths, cutscenes, and script if they followed the same formula as Wing Commander. So they cheated. There are less branching paths than in the first one, but the result is a game with a better-structured story.
There's also a side issue with allowing players to fail missions: You can game the system. If you just want to see the good ending of Wing Commander, all you have to do, IIRC, is play four missions. For every other mission, just eject as soon as you have control of your ship. Want to see the bad ending? Just eject on every mission! You can finish the game in just a few minutes, this way.
I also feel like allowing a failed mission takes something away from the experience. It's more realistic, but what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
In the end, as I mentioned earlier, and as others have as well--I'm not sure how adding complexity is going to somehow magically drop down the price of games, or make them shorter to develop. I would also like to point out that games right now are cheaper than the SNES or N64 days. Heck, even NES games retailed at $50, and that's before you take inflation into account. I'm not sure where this "gaming is too expensive these days!" myth came from.
I assumed that the search would be something like, "ubuntu 12.04 wifi problems", not "12.04 wifi problems". Adding "ubuntu" to the front should alleviate all but the first of your examples.
Ever seen a magazine? Their ads are persistent. They don't even need power!
Codenames have been around forever. Just look at this list of Microsoft names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_codenames
But codenames are almost always dropped when the product is released. Apple is one of the few that keeps the codenames.
Google's search query parser has been borked for a while. I'm not sure when they changed it, but I seem to recall it being when they stopped honoring the "+" operator and said you have to use quotes now. It only sometimes seems to actually respond to search markup. At least, that's my experience.
Is it? I didn't notice it in the screenshots. If so, then I retract the statement.
I can't make sense of Apple's naming scheme beyond it being a "big cat". How a mountain lion is an upgrade to a "vanilla" lion is beyond me, and I'm not sure how a mountain lion is different from a puma or panther (hint: they're not!). But be that as it may, I have to imagine more people are familiar with a lion or tiger or other big cat than they are a pangolin (which I had to look up--spoilers: it's an anteater). A better name would have been Puissant Platypus. People know the platypus.
(Apple fails at hardware revision names, though. My Air is simply called a Macbook Air, even though it's the fourth generation. The new iPad is simply called "iPad". And yet the iPhone has a name, so this lack of hardware naming is inconsistent. Of course, I expect them to remedy this--but in the wrong direction.)
Interesting. Perhaps the posters use the names more than the version numbers?
Wouldn't you also get specific advice if you just say 12.04? The naming is just a novelty thing, a way to make it easier to remember than a bunch of numbers--although OS X's names have been more memorable than Ubuntu's, due to a combination of a slower release cycle, shorter names, and more recognizable animals.
I was going to take issue with the "revolutionary" phrasing (though the whole sentence is odd), but at the same time, I'm not sure that "ripping off" OS X is such a bad thing. It's a nice feature. I'm never sure why UI improvements (and other aspects of technology) are always an example "damned if you do, damned if you don't": If somebody doesn't copy $FEATURE into their system, they are derided for being outdated; at the same time, if they do add $FEATURE, then they are derided for copying.
That said, the lack of a traditional menu bar might be a source for problems. I prefer the more hybrid approach of OS X.
I trust Google to be around for a while, but not necessarily any of their services beyond Search, Gmail, Youtube, and (to a smaller extent) Docs. Google may offer a nice service, but I've been trying to reduce my dependence on them, so I'll stick with Dropbox.
Maybe you should try understanding the language? Objective-C is dynamic. That means it won't do type checking the way other languages will. You have to be a little more careful than with other languages, but it does have its benefits--some of which are described here.
Also, Xcode will definitely spit out a warning if you try something like that, and you can always turn on "treat warnings as errors". You act like it will merrily leave you clueless as to your mistake, which is untrue unless you suppress warnings. (You can also use forwardInvocation: or exception handling if you have no way of avoiding the situation.)