Yes they're developer kits, and nearly everything in the world is limited in supply, how does this change the situation? Secondary markets like this expand access to the product to those who want it, not limit it. It encourages people who have one to sell it, and it makes it possible for those who need one now to get it now.
The market for dev kits can't expand in time to meet consumer demand, nor would it be cost-effective to try to do so. It takes a lot of capital to ramp up to full consumer production capacities. And, any dev kit taken out of the hands of actual developers will tend to limit eventual dev support at launch time. It's crucial to get those devices into the hands of actual developers in order to ensure there is actual support for the product at launch time. There's no need to expand access to this particular product, because it's not a consumer product.
Very true, I didn't mean to imply they don't. All I'm saying is that blowing up a shopping mall is a page three story, while blowing up a 747 is a page one story - nothing more than that. I'd guess that airline bombings just play into an already existing fear of flight for many, so the psychological impact tends to be magnified beyond the simple fact of the incident.
As far as why the US hasn't been hit (I assume you're talking about shopping malls, because we've certainly been hit plenty of other ways) - I'd guess it's perhaps because most people that *would* like to do so would logistically have problems getting to the US along with their bombs. It could also be that any major terror campaign against the US would be likely to bring down the wrath of the US military / law enforcement against said organization and any supporters. It's hard to say, really.
Honestly, I find it hard to get into the mind of people who randomly kill and maim civilians, including innocent children, so who knows what they're thinking. I'm glad the US is relatively free of terrorism, but I wish the rest of the world didn't have to suffer at the hands of those animals either.
Change that to "major catastrophic accidents of large commercial planes". Keep in mind that those statistics you linked to include passenger vehicles with greater than six vehicles (i.e. short-hop puddle jumpers or private aircraft). If you only include larger passenger aircraft, the number of incidents would probably dramatically. Note that higher on the page is a summary of *major* incidents of note. As the article itself points out, the Malaysian Boeing 777 is the only major large airliner accident this year, and similar incidents occur only once every few years.
You neglect the primary reason for taking a plane down when there are bigger and softer targets available (shopping malls, theaters, huge lines at the airport) - the psychological impact. People are already, whether they want to admit it or not, slightly terrified of flying at a subconscious level. Hurtling through the air in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet is insanely unnatural act, and everyone knows it, but we've made it as safe as reasonably possible. People want to feel as though everything that can be reasonably done is being done to prevent guns or bombs from being carried on board.
Terrorism is a political statement. You want your message to be heard as loudly as possible, and there's nothing like taking down a plane for doing that, since a plane going down unexpectedly is guaranteed to generate world-wide headlines.
Some people criticize any language that doesn't meet some sort of "purity" standard, but languages and programming standards evolve over time, but perhaps they haven't clearly thought through the alternatives. There are only three possibilities that I can see.
1) The language stagnates, stubbornly refusing to fix flaws or grow over time. 2) The language rejects old "mistakes" and breaks backward compatibility in order to change or add new features, fragmenting the community. 3) The language grows to incorporate new features while retaining backward compatibility, thus becoming "bloated" or "a mess".
Personally, I think option 3 is the most attractive option of the bunch, and, if I'm not mistaken, this seems to describe Perl fairly well (I'm more familiar with C++, which has a lot of similarities in the "old cruft and baggage" department).
Obviously, many newer languages have the benefit of design-wise hindsight, but new languages also have an uphill battle to carve out a proper ecosystem and prove to be a long-term viable programming candidate. Some programmers are attracted to new and shiny things (we all are to some degree), but for serious work, devs need a language that can be counted on as a workhorse.
That's been my impression of Python as well. Fragmentation and stagnation, despite some assurances to the contrary. Granted, impressions don't necessarily equate to reality, but there you go.
It feels like some language devs tend to discount the importance of backward-compatibility for developers, or the longevity of code in general. People complain about all the cruft of C++ (which it does have in spades, of course), but part of the enormous success of C++ was undoubtedly due to the refusal of the standards committee to impose wholesale incompatibilities upon the language, even when that would have made serious improvements, and of course, the original decision to make C++ compatible with C as a starting point. Had they done otherwise, the result likely would have been the stillbirth of the language or the later fragmentation or damn near stagnation you see in Python, where years after the release of 3.x, developers *still* are stuck on 2.x because of the compatibility issues.
There are some cases where community forums make a lot of sense, of course. On occasion, you genuinely have a "community" of users that would be willing to help others answer questions with both technical and creative problems to solve, so why not take advantage of that? Some products are extremely high-volume and low-margin, and a single support call from even a small percentage of users would kill profits. Most users are smart enough to figure out that the quality of support should, by nature, tend to go up with the cost of the product. For instance, I wouldn't expect anything beyond community forums type support for Mozilla products, since I paid nothing for them in the first place.
Unfortunately, I feel too many companies simply try to use the "customer support forum" as a cheap alternative to real support. And it's frustrating to users when the only answer they can get from other users is "sorry, it's working great for me", and aren't even sure that the company in question is aware they're having problems, and can't even provide any sort of feedback.
Delegating that responsibility to a community forum (at least, without an alternative for "official" support) says to me, as a customer "I really can't be bothered about answering your questions. Here, you guys can collectively figure it out". Frankly, if a bunch of customers are asking the same question over and over, maybe the company who created the product should pay attention to what those questions are and try to design their product to be a bit more intuitive. Yes, good customer service is likely expensive, but the smart response is to design your products to minimize user questions and problems, not to cut out call centers.
There have been some companies I do business with which have surprised me with excellent one-on-one support, and it makes me much more willing to do business with them in the future, since I know I always have the option of working with a live and helpful human being to resolve any issues. Perhaps as importantly, I know they will work with me in an official capacity as a company representative, and they'll stick with the problem until it's actually resolved to my satisfaction. No matter how nice the people on the community forum are, they *are* only volunteering their time, and can't be expected to demonstrate that level of commitment unless you happen to get *extremely* lucky. It's one of those intangible expenses that is likely tempting for bean counter mentalities to cut back on, but which smart companies realize is an important investment in keeping customers satisfied.
For an experienced programmer in a statically typed language (like C++), there are three things that catch bugs before you even get to a debugger: the static type checker, runtime assertions, and unit tests. If any one of them triggers, it is usually obvious how to fix stuff even without a debugger.
Debuggers should be simple, minimal, and reliable, so that the 1-2 times a year that you need them, they get the job done correctly and without having to remember a lot of complicated stuff.
1-2 times a year? That's certainly not typical for game development, at least in my experience. We're in our debuggers all the time - in fact, it's considered good practice to step through new code you've just written to make sure everything seems to be looking and working as you'd expect it to. With the development we do, there's not always an obvious correct or known solution to the problem you're trying to solve. Or, even if it is a problem with a well-known solution, it can involve writing rather complex algorithms and data structures that very few programmers could get perfectly the first time (i.e. the A* pathfinding algorithm). I can't imagine writing that sort of code without having a debugger available to watch the internals of your code along with development.
What do you do that only requires running the debugger once or twice a year? I'm guessing you're not using an integrated environment, or have deployment consideration which make using a debugger somewhat non-trivial.
I like 'Loser pays the lowest amount either side paid'. In other words, if big corp spends $1,000,000 suing citizen A, who spends $5,000 for his defense, and Citizen A loses, he pays $5,000 of big corps bills. If it's reversed, same applies.
That would discourage massively disparate spending in court, while still protecting the innocent target of lawsuits to some degree.
The problem, I guess, is that could encourage patent trolls to simply hold down their own expenses while attempting to incur massive expenses on the plaintif. The idea is to discourage the "lottery mentality" of our current system, where patent trolls are attacking giant corporations in the hopes of a massive settlement or patent licensing fee. They're currently safe because their own expenses are relatively fixed (with retained lawyers on staff, or lawyers paid on commission - only if they win), while the defendant may be forced to spent a lot on their defense simply because of what's at state, or because of what they're being asked to prove.
Dryeo's answer probably makes the most sense here - leave it to the discretion of the judge. If they felt that the suit was brought without merit, they can order the plaintiff to pay 100% of the defendant's bills. If the suit was felt to be merited, then perhaps set at some minimum threshold, like what happens with criminal sentences.
It's not perfect, since it's still subject to the same sort of abuses by "specialty" judges. That, incidentally, is something that's may need to change as well - plaintiffs shouldn't be allowed to pick their private little courtroom to sue from. We see the abuse there as well. If you forced plaintiffs to sue in the home courts of the defendants, it might not be fair, as the judge may well be influenced by a powerful industry and act as its protector. Well, as it turns out, it's not fucking fair the other way either, as patent troll have built a nice little industry around judges that tend to favor their practices. Maybe for interstate disputes we should have to use some sort of lottery system, so these cases are randomly assigned to the territory of a disinterested 3rd party.
I don't know... things just get messy whenever lawyers are involved, because it's their damned jobs to find the maximum advantage within the framework of rules, and they'll keep doing so even if the rules change. It's sort of hard to fix a system like that, but for all we rant at lawyers, it's still better than the alternative. That is, it means that we're a society that's based on the idea, if not always the perfect execution, of the rule of law, and not the simple exercising of power.
Interesting, thanks for the link. According to the article at least, it sounds like the bill has been just delayed a bit longer rather than stalling outright. Also, the writer of that article appears optimistic that it could actually pass, which makes sense, given that it's apparently a bi-partisan bill.
Republicans want the law to require the losing party in a patent-infringement suit to pay the other’s legal fees. A reasonable idea, certainly. Democrats appear worried that some suits that do have merit may not be undertaken, provided the possibility of larger legal fees if an even reasonable suit fails.
Hopefully they'll hammer out a reasonable compromise. I can see the merits of both arguments here. The big issue is whether there have been any significant number of legitimate patent suits which would otherwise have been discouraged. Call me cynical, but I'd sort of be surprised if there actually were that many, given how badly the system is being abused right now. At this point, I'm probably willing to swing the pendulum a bit to the other side and go with "loser pays" penalties, since for so long there's been a massive financial incentive for actually abusing the system. I think it would help to balance the equation a bit. The law can always be amended in the future if the "loser pays" option turns out to be too harsh.
Should be interesting to see what happens with this.
Unless Texas is on that list, I'll give the states an "atta-boy", but it's not as though it will make a serious difference except for smaller business that can't afford regional offices. And let's face it, they're not the serious problem, since it's really only larger firms and patent trolls who go out of their way to set up offices in East Texas that are the problem.
Well, here's hoping that the federal government does the right thing here eventually. I'm typically not one to jump with knee-jerk reactions in favor of government regulation, as over-regulation gone overboard can have a stifling effect on business. Any reasonable analysis demonstrates massive and obvious problems with the current patent system, and the private sector has absolutely demonstrated an inability to handle this problem in a sane solution. In fact, the private sector has gleefully demonstrated that it's perfectly willing to exploit the situation and actually make a fucking business out of the problem. That's about the time for the government to step in and put the hammer down.
The only danger is that whenever the government steps in, there's a very real danger of making a problem worse despite all the best intentions. The individual state's efforts real legacy may be of giving some real, working examples of how to potentially fix the issue before it's tried out on a national level - that's certainly not unprecedented.
BTW, does anyone know why, in fact, the senate's patent reform bill is actually being held up (other than "politics" or "lobbyist")?
When gamers complain about unnecessary voice acting, I often wonder if they're reacting more to the poor writing and storytelling within a game. There's no need for voice acting if the dialogue is written poorly - it will only exacerbate the issue. Likewise, there's no need even for good writing if there's no interesting or coherent narrative to hang it off of, or gameplay that actually supports that narrative. This makes the dialogue, however well written, feel like a separate and therefore unnecessary part of the experience - more of a chore for the player to get past rather than something interesting for them to listen to and enjoy. I've seen a number of modern MMOs that suffer from this especially.
However, when gameplay, writing, and voice-acting combine into a seamless and coherent experience, the result is fantastic. There are plenty of modern examples of games that do this very well, like Mass Effect (ignoring the pooched ending of ME3), The Last of Us, the Uncharted, and many others. I haven't heard much in the way of complaints about the writing / voice-acting in those games because it's relatively seamless part of the gaming experience.
There are also players who are much more interested in the mechanics of games than the narratives of games, often heard in arguments against cinematics as well ("I want to play a game, not watch a damn movie!") I happen to love a well-told story integrated within my games. For me, a cutscene always feels like a reward after reaching some point in the game, but some players just see it as an interruption in the "fun" part of the game (i.e. gameplay). That's fine for those players, but many people actually do care about lore and story. These two sets of gamers will probably never agree on whether adding voice-acting is beneficial or a waste of money, because they're seeking fundamentally different things from the game experience.
Not every game needs cinematics or voice, of course. I think Limbo is a great example of a very minimalist game that does well without it. Likewise, it's hard to see how Minecraft would be enhanced by fancy cinematics and voice acting.
Having written several technical books and contributed to many others, I can't imagine why an author should have a problem using MS Word or the OpenOffice equivalent for writing - that's what the program was designed for, after all. If you want to just "focus on the text", it's easy enough to turn off the rules you don't like and pick a simple, plain font to work in. In fact, that's what my publisher actually required of me - they took care of all the formatting, of course, and I just turned in a plain, double-spaced manuscript.
I never really felt distracted by Word, and in fact, it was especially helpful when it came to editing / review time. For example, you can easily track changes you make within the document, then reject or approve those changed. This would be much more difficult to do without built-in support within the word processor. Likewise, it's easy for an editor to highlight a section and add a "sticky-note" like comment or question about it. Again, none of this is impossible without a word processor, but why would you want to throw that functionality away?
If someone wants to use a text editor instead of a word processor, that's fine. A few authors still use typewriters, or write longhand even. Don't pretend it will someone make someone a better or more efficient writer, though, or that it's even a good idea for most authors. This article only makes news because it's unusual. No one cares about the other 95% of authors who happily use Word or some equivalent on a modern computer.
My advice would be to just use the tools you're most comfortable with. If it's MS-Word, that's fine (that's what most authors I know use). If you want to use a text editor, that's fine too. Personally, I think someone who doesn't use a modern word processor is just making more unnecessarily work for themselves, but it's no skin off my nose. Ultimately, though, I don't think the tools matter a whole lot. I have a suspicion that the most successful authors/writers don't fret about about their tools nearly so much as they fret about their writing/stories.
Software doesn't age. Hence all the angst (my own included) about having to throw away perfectly good Windows XP. I still use lots of old software, including Winamp, Textpad, and DVDShrink, just to name a few. Many people's obsession with the newest *thing* is really fucking stupid, in many cases (word processing being one of them).
Software does, in fact, age. It ages against changing conditions, demands, and threat vectors. Semantically, it doesn't really matter if the software "ages" or the threats simply become more advanced. The result is the same. That's fine if you're not exposed to changing conditions or threat vectors. Don't fool yourself though - modern OS's are harder for malware to penetrate than XP is because of address-space layout randomization, enhanced security models, etc. The big advantage older software has is that it's more battle-hardened than newer software, and security can only every be "proven" through actual, real-world use. If you're in a perfectly static environment (at home off the net, or an embedded XP machine, etc), then obviously there's no need to worry. Or in the author's case, if he's only using that old machine to write novels, then obviously it's as safe as a typewriter and perfectly fine for him.
I'd argue that most slashdotters probably are expert-enough users to safely use Windows XP. Use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE. Install no-script and ad-blocker. If possible, remove Flash and Java. Don't browse sketchy sites or open e-mail attachments or docs from *anyone* unless you're expecting them. Blah, blah. Unfortunately, average users will not do this. They'll download all sorts of malware or spyware and install it themselves. They'll open any attachment from anyone they get, even if it's named infect_your_computer.exe. For the "average" computer user, they probably need a more modern OS to help protect them. Hell, that's why tablets and phones with high-security models are better for the average user anyhow.
Since it only takes about 1 year to pay off the cost of laying fiber infrastructure...
I was curious how you arrived at the conclusion that fiber would only take a year to pay off. I'd have guessed, given the amount of work I saw as fiber was being buried beneath my own street a number of years ago, that the costs probably ran a couple thousand dollars per house.
A quick search turned up this paper to give me an estimate of per-mile costs. Depending on the type of installation, laying fiber can range from $50K per mile (aerial lines) to $400,000 per mile max (installed underground via boring). My neighborhood was likely on the middle to high end, as they did indeed appear to be using boring techniques, and the neighborhood isn't super-dense.
Let's see... I'd guess that an average home in my neighborhood maybe takes up about 75 ft or so of street space on average, so fiber is reaching about 140 homes per linear mile (70 houses per linear mile x 2 sides of the street). Assuming a total installation cost of about $250K per mile, that would means each home cost a bit under $1800 to connect. With these costs, I think you're looking at more of a 10-15 years to recoup that investment.
Anyone with more real-world knowledge about this know if that's anywhere close to a reasonable estimate?
I wonder if Nintendo is now paying the price for the Wii with sluggish Wii U sales?
Speaking for myself, I was rather disappointed with the Wii, and ultimately purchased only a handful of titles for it, especially compared to my Xbox 360. You'll notice that even with high console sales numbers, Nintendo couldn't really relate that into significant game sales for anything except their first party titles. Now, with both gamers and publishers burned by Nintendo's last console, is it any wonder that their newest offering is seriously sagging in sales, possibly because of the lack of 3rd party developer interest?
The Kinect has been mandatory for a while now (including all of initial pre-launch development), yet still most of what we see are horrible, gimmicky Kinect games trying to turn an interesting piece of technology into a game controller, and outside of very specialized types of games (dancing games, exercise trainers, rail shooters, etc), it doesn't work half as good as a standard controller. Developers have been trying for years now to overcome the difficulties with lag and imprecision, and even with much improved hardware in its latest iteration, the Xbone still has significant problems in those areas. In the end, controlling your console with your body is still very much a gimmick, and doesn't justify 1/5th the price of the entire console.
I own a Wii, and I became so sick of having to waggle a stick around during gameplay that I stopped buying Wii titles largely out of fear of how much unnecessary motion-control would be shoved into an otherwise excellent title. What's the point of waggling a stick back and forth when pressing a button accomplishes the same task faster, more reliably, and without straining your wrist? Motion control is a cute gimmick that, despite excellent sales of the Wii, ultimately proved to be more of a hindrance to most games than a help, as evidenced by the fact that no current gen consoles rely on motion control as a core component of their controller functionality.
Motion control is now largely considered to be an ancillary function for game controllers, only used sparingly or judiciously as demanded by the gameplay. I think Kinect should fall into this same category - cool tech, but really not appropriate for most titles. If game developers want to add a few extra features here and there to optionally support the Kinect, or build a specialty title around Kinect since lots of people will still have them, nothing is stopping them from doing so.
Or, or they could just allow USB mics like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band type of mics.
Rock Band isn't even available on the newest consoles, is it? And I'm pretty sure you can't just plug in a generic USB mic or probably even a 360 version of a mic into your Xbox One. Even if USB mics could be hooked up and used, that's still a lot of work for a very minor feature. I have a hard time faulting MS for not supporting what I'd consider to be an edge case at best. The console will work just fine without voice support, after all.
There's plenty else they've botched - this is actually something they've finally done right. If people want voice support, they can *choose* to purchase a Kinnect now. If not, they don't have to. Isn't that what everyone was asking for from nearly day one?
As for the always-on requirement, sure, you can play the pedant by pointing out it only needed to phone home once a day rather than constantly, but that's pointless, since it does nothing to address why the requirement was such a source of contention. The reason it was annoying was because it immediately eliminated a number of valid and legitimate use cases in which gamers wouldn't have a regular connection to the Internet. In the armed forces? Too bad. Internet down for a few days? Too bad. Just moved? Too bad. Traveling? Too bad. Out at sea? Too bad. Vacationing in your summer cabin? Too bad. Don't want to connect devices that have no practical need to be online? Too bad. Don't think a company has any business tracking what you're doing with offline, disc-based, single-player games? Too bad.
Well said. I think a lot of folks (apparently including MS execs) tend to fall into a bubble of sorts where they assume that since *they* have ubiquitous access to extremely fast, always-on internet, then *everyone* has access to extremely fast, always-on internet. It's certainly true that *most* people do at this point, but the fact that MS execs basically flipped the bird at anyone who didn't certainly didn't endear them to potential consumers. One more example: my brother works on a tug in Alaska - they currently have a 360 console in their boat, and the original Xbone plan would have ensured that they couldn't use it.
Interestingly, this seems to be in midst of Microsoft's "arrogant" phase (well, more arrogant than usual) - the same time period in which they also dismissed customer feedback about Windows 8 usability. Having seen MS from the inside several times in the past, Adam Orth's comments don't seem out of line for an exec, except that most MS execs have the brains not to post things like that publicly. From his twitter history, Mr Orth obviously enjoyed trolling the internet, yet somehow seemed surprised when the internet eventually raged back. It seems that MS as a company finally figured out that even *they* can't afford to ignore so much consumer feedback or openly mock their customers, and seem to be taking a slightly more humble approach, at least in public. As bad as they are, could you imagine what MS would be like without competition from Sony? Oh, yeah, I can. Just think of the cable companies.
I'm like you - own all three last gen consoles (and all three before that), and none of the current gen. For the first time, my first console might be a Playstation rather than an Xbox, but it will probably depend on who gets the first must-have game.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
Because the mic hardware was originally part of Kinnect. MS would have to create and manufacture a dedicated peripheral device with only a mic instead of the cameras + mic, and then include that or sell it separately. And since all current software was assuming that having a Kinnect meant both the mic and cameras were there, that would have meant rewriting many assumptions that the software is probably currently making, so there's even more cost.
In short, it's not at all practical or cost-effective, especially not for the likely few people who wanted a mic but NOT a camera. The entire point of this move is to shave off costs for those that want nothing to do with the Kinnect. Given the fact that the Kinnect has already proven to be rather unpopular, this sort of investment would simply be throwing good money after bad. If you want voice control (and I mean that in a generic sense, as you've acknowledged that you personally wouldn't even want that feature), get a Kinnect.
For the past two console generations (since the original Xbox came out), I've owned every major console brand, but have generally preferred the Xbox. As such, all my games, except for console exclusives, were for Xbox. I found the original Xbox controllers to be superior to Nintendo's or Sony's consoles, and this trend continued until now. MS's "gamer score" was also rather addictive, and was one of their more brilliant ideas of the last generation of consoles. I've also been maintaining a gold account for many years, since most of my friends are on Live, and let's face it, the service was *vastly* superior to the offerings of any other company - of course, for a paid service, it damn well better be.
I may eventually purchase an Xbone, but it might very well come after a PS4, which surprised me. For every Wii or PS3 game, I probably have seven or eight Xbox/Xbox 360 games. I'm thinking about cancelling my Live account (although I recently signed up for another year, so it will be a while), as I rarely seem to play online with my friends these days, preferring solo play.
How did Microsoft lose me as a customer, at least so far?
1) No backward compatibility. I've got a pretty big Xbox 360 library, with a number of games I haven't started/finished or would like to perhaps play again. Backward compatibility would have virtually assured a purchase of an Xbone device, since I know that eventually there will be games on it that I'd like to play. However, I've got to decide now which console in my entertainment center will be displaced by a new console (I've currently got four - all three last gen plus a PS2), and that's my current limit of the switching box I have installed. Microsoft should have stuck with an x86 architecture for the 360, and we'd be able to play all three versions of Xbox games on the latest console with few issues. People argue that compatibility isn't critical (which is admittedly true), since I obviously already have a 360, but I'm literally at the point where I don't have any more room to plug in another console. So now that's just one more device I need to keep connected indefinitely as long as there exists a possibility of wanting to play a 360 game. There's also another message that no backward compatibility sends: we don't care about your loyalty as a customer.
2) Xbox as an advertising billboard. Microsoft decided to heavily monetize their console's connectivity with ads, even for those of us with Gold Live accounts. Either/or, Microsoft. I don't appreciate you double-dipping like that, and every time I see the massive wall of advertisements on every single page of my Xbox One, I get annoyed when I realized that I'm also paying for that service. At this point, I'm largely paying for Microsoft to simply serve me advertisements on my gaming console. Fuck that. Why should I pay hundreds of dollars for another platform that can assault me with non-stop ads between gaming sessions.
3) Disappointing "next-gen" experience. In general, the next-gen experience hasn't really wowed me. Games can barely even render at a full 1080p, for heaven's sake, which I certainly didn't expect of a "next-gen" console at this point. The hard drives are pathetically small, and the Xbone's, of all the idiotic things, is not user-upgradeable (unlike the PS4). It won't take too many installs or downloads before that's all used up, and then you're playing the shuffling game with your drive space.
4) Consumer-unfriendly arrogance. Phone home once per day or your Xbox bricks? Ok, I actually like the idea of being able to install your games and not having to put the disc in for validation. The only practical way to do this is to have an online check to make sure more than one person isn't using the same disc, but this could have been an optional setting, and the way they decided to ram this down people's throat was ridiculous. There was also the specter of killing the used-game market, and frankly, MS didn't have a lot of trust to spare at
There's a couple of things to point out here. One significant point is that the game works with the player's personal avatars, called mii's. The very point of the mii avatar is that it's supposed to represent you as a person. By creating a "life simulator" for those mii avatars, they should really have known to include the game features that people find important to them. Also, even if gay marriage isn't legal in Japan, it's not like the game is not allowed to depict it, nor does it mean there aren't gay people in Japan who would like to pretend their mii is getting married to someone of the same sex.
Moreover, they did know from the start that this would certainly be ported to countries in which gay marriage is legal and expected as a feature. As a game developer, you have to make allowances for cultural differences in your product if they expect to sell in different locals. That's both common and business sense.
All that being said - I don't think this snafu is worth forever writing off Nintendo. It was probably an honest oversight, simply slipping below their cultural radar.
They eventually realized and owned up to their mistake. More importantly, it feels like no one even noticed this, but they stated that while it wouldn't be practical to rework this game, they pledged to properly design in the desired features in their next game of this type. Has anyone realized that, unless they're blatantly lying, and we have no reason to believe they are, this campaign scored a significant victory?
Here's the actual quote from Nintendo:
We pledge that if we create a next installment in the Tomodachi series, we will strive to design a game-play experience from the ground up that is more inclusive, and better represents all players.
You guys actually won... not an immediate or full victory, but a victory nonetheless, and no one seems to have noticed. My sig seems more appropriate than ever.
Forget Fortran, I want to know why anybody in their right mind is still using the obtuse juggernaut mongrel of a language known as C++ in 2014. (Even with the 11 and 14 versions don't make things any better, they only wallpaper over obtuse features with other obtuse features... very few people alive truly know all the weird quirks of C++ inside and out.)
// Project sanity check ProjectCriteria projCrit; projCrit.requireEfficientRuntime = true; projCrit.requireEfficientMemoryUse = true; projCrit.requireEfficientNativeLibInterop = true; projCrit.legacyProjectInterop = true; projCrit.buzzwordCompliant = false; auto langChoice = languageCollection.find(projCrit); if (langChoice != Language.Cpp) {
string s = "It appears C++ may not the be appropriate language for your project. Have you considered ";
DisplayMessage(s + langChoice.name + " instead?");
return; }
Most OUYA games that I've tried use a shareware model, where the user can buy the paid version as an "entitlement", a purchase that the user keeps as long as the platform remains in operation. A lot of the hated freemium games, on the other hand, tend to offer no way to pay once to unlock everything permanently. They handle all purchases as "consumables", which need to be purchased multiple times in order to keep playing.
That's a very good point - the F2P definitely is much more of a "rental" model with heavy use of one-time consumables, although that's not necessarily always the case. So, maybe the "demo" analogy doesn't always apply, but that tends to happen with analogies.
I'm not a fan of the overall model, of course, but one way in which I think it works pretty well is when the core gameplay is free, but customers can optionally spend money on more cosmetic items. Some of Valves games work this way. Guild Wars 2 is a buy-to-play, and only supplements their income with a more cosmetic-focused in-game shop, and I sort of like that balance.
Frankly, though, what irks me most is when companies double-dip, or even triple-dip. Some MMOs would not only charge a monthly fee, but also made you purchase the box as well. Then on top of that, they started selling in-store items. Seriously? Thankfully, no one can really get away with that anymore - possibly the only positive thing I can say about the F2P trend.
We're certainly seeing the pendulum swinging pretty wildly to the F2P model, but I'm not convinced that it's necessarily an indicator of a permanent trend in gaming. It's just that the phone market is still pretty new, so I think a lot of people are going to be suckered into these things at first. Get enough of them disgusted with the sleazy nature of it, and we could well see a backlash, but it will take some time for that to happen.
Agreed. My thought at reading the summary was "Do older languages have some sort of expiration date I don't know about?" What's odd about it? Also, it's not like the language has been stagnant. English is an old "legacy" human language with lots of cruft and inconsistent rules, but it works well enough for us that it's not worth jumping ship for Esperanto.
A large part of it is probably the simple inertia of legacy, both in code, systems, and personnel. However legacy systems tends to eventually be replaced if a demonstrably superior product can improve performance in some way. Any significant change, even one for the better, causes pain and friction, so the change typically has to be worth the pain involved. Obviously in the eyes of many science-focused projects, it hasn't been worth switching to a new language. There's also value in having a body of work in an older and very well understood and documented language, as it means new team members are much more likely to already be proficient with the language than a newer and less popular language.
I can also understand not wanting to switch to some "flavor of the month" language when you're not sure how long it will be actively supported. FORTRAN has credibility simply based on it's incredible longevity. No, it's not new and sexy, but you can bet it will probably be around for another half-century.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they're developer kits, and nearly everything in the world is limited in supply, how does this change the situation? Secondary markets like this expand access to the product to those who want it, not limit it. It encourages people who have one to sell it, and it makes it possible for those who need one now to get it now.
The market for dev kits can't expand in time to meet consumer demand, nor would it be cost-effective to try to do so. It takes a lot of capital to ramp up to full consumer production capacities. And, any dev kit taken out of the hands of actual developers will tend to limit eventual dev support at launch time. It's crucial to get those devices into the hands of actual developers in order to ensure there is actual support for the product at launch time. There's no need to expand access to this particular product, because it's not a consumer product.
Very true, I didn't mean to imply they don't. All I'm saying is that blowing up a shopping mall is a page three story, while blowing up a 747 is a page one story - nothing more than that. I'd guess that airline bombings just play into an already existing fear of flight for many, so the psychological impact tends to be magnified beyond the simple fact of the incident.
As far as why the US hasn't been hit (I assume you're talking about shopping malls, because we've certainly been hit plenty of other ways) - I'd guess it's perhaps because most people that *would* like to do so would logistically have problems getting to the US along with their bombs. It could also be that any major terror campaign against the US would be likely to bring down the wrath of the US military / law enforcement against said organization and any supporters. It's hard to say, really.
Honestly, I find it hard to get into the mind of people who randomly kill and maim civilians, including innocent children, so who knows what they're thinking. I'm glad the US is relatively free of terrorism, but I wish the rest of the world didn't have to suffer at the hands of those animals either.
We're now to the point where it's so safe we go 2-5 years between accidents.
Huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Change that to "major catastrophic accidents of large commercial planes". Keep in mind that those statistics you linked to include passenger vehicles with greater than six vehicles (i.e. short-hop puddle jumpers or private aircraft). If you only include larger passenger aircraft, the number of incidents would probably dramatically. Note that higher on the page is a summary of *major* incidents of note. As the article itself points out, the Malaysian Boeing 777 is the only major large airliner accident this year, and similar incidents occur only once every few years.
You neglect the primary reason for taking a plane down when there are bigger and softer targets available (shopping malls, theaters, huge lines at the airport) - the psychological impact. People are already, whether they want to admit it or not, slightly terrified of flying at a subconscious level. Hurtling through the air in an aluminum tube at 30,000 feet is insanely unnatural act, and everyone knows it, but we've made it as safe as reasonably possible. People want to feel as though everything that can be reasonably done is being done to prevent guns or bombs from being carried on board.
Terrorism is a political statement. You want your message to be heard as loudly as possible, and there's nothing like taking down a plane for doing that, since a plane going down unexpectedly is guaranteed to generate world-wide headlines.
Some people criticize any language that doesn't meet some sort of "purity" standard, but languages and programming standards evolve over time, but perhaps they haven't clearly thought through the alternatives. There are only three possibilities that I can see.
1) The language stagnates, stubbornly refusing to fix flaws or grow over time.
2) The language rejects old "mistakes" and breaks backward compatibility in order to change or add new features, fragmenting the community.
3) The language grows to incorporate new features while retaining backward compatibility, thus becoming "bloated" or "a mess".
Personally, I think option 3 is the most attractive option of the bunch, and, if I'm not mistaken, this seems to describe Perl fairly well (I'm more familiar with C++, which has a lot of similarities in the "old cruft and baggage" department).
Obviously, many newer languages have the benefit of design-wise hindsight, but new languages also have an uphill battle to carve out a proper ecosystem and prove to be a long-term viable programming candidate. Some programmers are attracted to new and shiny things (we all are to some degree), but for serious work, devs need a language that can be counted on as a workhorse.
That's been my impression of Python as well. Fragmentation and stagnation, despite some assurances to the contrary. Granted, impressions don't necessarily equate to reality, but there you go.
It feels like some language devs tend to discount the importance of backward-compatibility for developers, or the longevity of code in general. People complain about all the cruft of C++ (which it does have in spades, of course), but part of the enormous success of C++ was undoubtedly due to the refusal of the standards committee to impose wholesale incompatibilities upon the language, even when that would have made serious improvements, and of course, the original decision to make C++ compatible with C as a starting point. Had they done otherwise, the result likely would have been the stillbirth of the language or the later fragmentation or damn near stagnation you see in Python, where years after the release of 3.x, developers *still* are stuck on 2.x because of the compatibility issues.
There are some cases where community forums make a lot of sense, of course. On occasion, you genuinely have a "community" of users that would be willing to help others answer questions with both technical and creative problems to solve, so why not take advantage of that? Some products are extremely high-volume and low-margin, and a single support call from even a small percentage of users would kill profits. Most users are smart enough to figure out that the quality of support should, by nature, tend to go up with the cost of the product. For instance, I wouldn't expect anything beyond community forums type support for Mozilla products, since I paid nothing for them in the first place.
Unfortunately, I feel too many companies simply try to use the "customer support forum" as a cheap alternative to real support. And it's frustrating to users when the only answer they can get from other users is "sorry, it's working great for me", and aren't even sure that the company in question is aware they're having problems, and can't even provide any sort of feedback.
Delegating that responsibility to a community forum (at least, without an alternative for "official" support) says to me, as a customer "I really can't be bothered about answering your questions. Here, you guys can collectively figure it out". Frankly, if a bunch of customers are asking the same question over and over, maybe the company who created the product should pay attention to what those questions are and try to design their product to be a bit more intuitive. Yes, good customer service is likely expensive, but the smart response is to design your products to minimize user questions and problems, not to cut out call centers.
There have been some companies I do business with which have surprised me with excellent one-on-one support, and it makes me much more willing to do business with them in the future, since I know I always have the option of working with a live and helpful human being to resolve any issues. Perhaps as importantly, I know they will work with me in an official capacity as a company representative, and they'll stick with the problem until it's actually resolved to my satisfaction. No matter how nice the people on the community forum are, they *are* only volunteering their time, and can't be expected to demonstrate that level of commitment unless you happen to get *extremely* lucky. It's one of those intangible expenses that is likely tempting for bean counter mentalities to cut back on, but which smart companies realize is an important investment in keeping customers satisfied.
For an experienced programmer in a statically typed language (like C++), there are three things that catch bugs before you even get to a debugger: the static type checker, runtime assertions, and unit tests. If any one of them triggers, it is usually obvious how to fix stuff even without a debugger.
Debuggers should be simple, minimal, and reliable, so that the 1-2 times a year that you need them, they get the job done correctly and without having to remember a lot of complicated stuff.
1-2 times a year? That's certainly not typical for game development, at least in my experience. We're in our debuggers all the time - in fact, it's considered good practice to step through new code you've just written to make sure everything seems to be looking and working as you'd expect it to. With the development we do, there's not always an obvious correct or known solution to the problem you're trying to solve. Or, even if it is a problem with a well-known solution, it can involve writing rather complex algorithms and data structures that very few programmers could get perfectly the first time (i.e. the A* pathfinding algorithm). I can't imagine writing that sort of code without having a debugger available to watch the internals of your code along with development.
What do you do that only requires running the debugger once or twice a year? I'm guessing you're not using an integrated environment, or have deployment consideration which make using a debugger somewhat non-trivial.
I like 'Loser pays the lowest amount either side paid'. In other words, if big corp spends $1,000,000 suing citizen A, who spends $5,000 for his defense, and Citizen A loses, he pays $5,000 of big corps bills. If it's reversed, same applies.
That would discourage massively disparate spending in court, while still protecting the innocent target of lawsuits to some degree.
The problem, I guess, is that could encourage patent trolls to simply hold down their own expenses while attempting to incur massive expenses on the plaintif. The idea is to discourage the "lottery mentality" of our current system, where patent trolls are attacking giant corporations in the hopes of a massive settlement or patent licensing fee. They're currently safe because their own expenses are relatively fixed (with retained lawyers on staff, or lawyers paid on commission - only if they win), while the defendant may be forced to spent a lot on their defense simply because of what's at state, or because of what they're being asked to prove.
Dryeo's answer probably makes the most sense here - leave it to the discretion of the judge. If they felt that the suit was brought without merit, they can order the plaintiff to pay 100% of the defendant's bills. If the suit was felt to be merited, then perhaps set at some minimum threshold, like what happens with criminal sentences.
It's not perfect, since it's still subject to the same sort of abuses by "specialty" judges. That, incidentally, is something that's may need to change as well - plaintiffs shouldn't be allowed to pick their private little courtroom to sue from. We see the abuse there as well. If you forced plaintiffs to sue in the home courts of the defendants, it might not be fair, as the judge may well be influenced by a powerful industry and act as its protector. Well, as it turns out, it's not fucking fair the other way either, as patent troll have built a nice little industry around judges that tend to favor their practices. Maybe for interstate disputes we should have to use some sort of lottery system, so these cases are randomly assigned to the territory of a disinterested 3rd party.
I don't know... things just get messy whenever lawyers are involved, because it's their damned jobs to find the maximum advantage within the framework of rules, and they'll keep doing so even if the rules change. It's sort of hard to fix a system like that, but for all we rant at lawyers, it's still better than the alternative. That is, it means that we're a society that's based on the idea, if not always the perfect execution, of the rule of law, and not the simple exercising of power.
Who knows, it was Leahy's call.
Interesting, thanks for the link. According to the article at least, it sounds like the bill has been just delayed a bit longer rather than stalling outright. Also, the writer of that article appears optimistic that it could actually pass, which makes sense, given that it's apparently a bi-partisan bill.
Republicans want the law to require the losing party in a patent-infringement suit to pay the other’s legal fees. A reasonable idea, certainly. Democrats appear worried that some suits that do have merit may not be undertaken, provided the possibility of larger legal fees if an even reasonable suit fails.
Hopefully they'll hammer out a reasonable compromise. I can see the merits of both arguments here. The big issue is whether there have been any significant number of legitimate patent suits which would otherwise have been discouraged. Call me cynical, but I'd sort of be surprised if there actually were that many, given how badly the system is being abused right now. At this point, I'm probably willing to swing the pendulum a bit to the other side and go with "loser pays" penalties, since for so long there's been a massive financial incentive for actually abusing the system. I think it would help to balance the equation a bit. The law can always be amended in the future if the "loser pays" option turns out to be too harsh.
Should be interesting to see what happens with this.
Unless Texas is on that list, I'll give the states an "atta-boy", but it's not as though it will make a serious difference except for smaller business that can't afford regional offices. And let's face it, they're not the serious problem, since it's really only larger firms and patent trolls who go out of their way to set up offices in East Texas that are the problem.
Well, here's hoping that the federal government does the right thing here eventually. I'm typically not one to jump with knee-jerk reactions in favor of government regulation, as over-regulation gone overboard can have a stifling effect on business. Any reasonable analysis demonstrates massive and obvious problems with the current patent system, and the private sector has absolutely demonstrated an inability to handle this problem in a sane solution. In fact, the private sector has gleefully demonstrated that it's perfectly willing to exploit the situation and actually make a fucking business out of the problem. That's about the time for the government to step in and put the hammer down.
The only danger is that whenever the government steps in, there's a very real danger of making a problem worse despite all the best intentions. The individual state's efforts real legacy may be of giving some real, working examples of how to potentially fix the issue before it's tried out on a national level - that's certainly not unprecedented.
BTW, does anyone know why, in fact, the senate's patent reform bill is actually being held up (other than "politics" or "lobbyist")?
When gamers complain about unnecessary voice acting, I often wonder if they're reacting more to the poor writing and storytelling within a game. There's no need for voice acting if the dialogue is written poorly - it will only exacerbate the issue. Likewise, there's no need even for good writing if there's no interesting or coherent narrative to hang it off of, or gameplay that actually supports that narrative. This makes the dialogue, however well written, feel like a separate and therefore unnecessary part of the experience - more of a chore for the player to get past rather than something interesting for them to listen to and enjoy. I've seen a number of modern MMOs that suffer from this especially.
However, when gameplay, writing, and voice-acting combine into a seamless and coherent experience, the result is fantastic. There are plenty of modern examples of games that do this very well, like Mass Effect (ignoring the pooched ending of ME3), The Last of Us, the Uncharted, and many others. I haven't heard much in the way of complaints about the writing / voice-acting in those games because it's relatively seamless part of the gaming experience.
There are also players who are much more interested in the mechanics of games than the narratives of games, often heard in arguments against cinematics as well ("I want to play a game, not watch a damn movie!") I happen to love a well-told story integrated within my games. For me, a cutscene always feels like a reward after reaching some point in the game, but some players just see it as an interruption in the "fun" part of the game (i.e. gameplay). That's fine for those players, but many people actually do care about lore and story. These two sets of gamers will probably never agree on whether adding voice-acting is beneficial or a waste of money, because they're seeking fundamentally different things from the game experience.
Not every game needs cinematics or voice, of course. I think Limbo is a great example of a very minimalist game that does well without it. Likewise, it's hard to see how Minecraft would be enhanced by fancy cinematics and voice acting.
Having written several technical books and contributed to many others, I can't imagine why an author should have a problem using MS Word or the OpenOffice equivalent for writing - that's what the program was designed for, after all. If you want to just "focus on the text", it's easy enough to turn off the rules you don't like and pick a simple, plain font to work in. In fact, that's what my publisher actually required of me - they took care of all the formatting, of course, and I just turned in a plain, double-spaced manuscript.
I never really felt distracted by Word, and in fact, it was especially helpful when it came to editing / review time. For example, you can easily track changes you make within the document, then reject or approve those changed. This would be much more difficult to do without built-in support within the word processor. Likewise, it's easy for an editor to highlight a section and add a "sticky-note" like comment or question about it. Again, none of this is impossible without a word processor, but why would you want to throw that functionality away?
If someone wants to use a text editor instead of a word processor, that's fine. A few authors still use typewriters, or write longhand even. Don't pretend it will someone make someone a better or more efficient writer, though, or that it's even a good idea for most authors. This article only makes news because it's unusual. No one cares about the other 95% of authors who happily use Word or some equivalent on a modern computer.
My advice would be to just use the tools you're most comfortable with. If it's MS-Word, that's fine (that's what most authors I know use). If you want to use a text editor, that's fine too. Personally, I think someone who doesn't use a modern word processor is just making more unnecessarily work for themselves, but it's no skin off my nose. Ultimately, though, I don't think the tools matter a whole lot. I have a suspicion that the most successful authors/writers don't fret about about their tools nearly so much as they fret about their writing/stories.
Software doesn't age. Hence all the angst (my own included) about having to throw away perfectly good Windows XP. I still use lots of old software, including Winamp, Textpad, and DVDShrink, just to name a few. Many people's obsession with the newest *thing* is really fucking stupid, in many cases (word processing being one of them).
Software does, in fact, age. It ages against changing conditions, demands, and threat vectors. Semantically, it doesn't really matter if the software "ages" or the threats simply become more advanced. The result is the same. That's fine if you're not exposed to changing conditions or threat vectors. Don't fool yourself though - modern OS's are harder for malware to penetrate than XP is because of address-space layout randomization, enhanced security models, etc. The big advantage older software has is that it's more battle-hardened than newer software, and security can only every be "proven" through actual, real-world use. If you're in a perfectly static environment (at home off the net, or an embedded XP machine, etc), then obviously there's no need to worry. Or in the author's case, if he's only using that old machine to write novels, then obviously it's as safe as a typewriter and perfectly fine for him.
I'd argue that most slashdotters probably are expert-enough users to safely use Windows XP. Use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE. Install no-script and ad-blocker. If possible, remove Flash and Java. Don't browse sketchy sites or open e-mail attachments or docs from *anyone* unless you're expecting them. Blah, blah. Unfortunately, average users will not do this. They'll download all sorts of malware or spyware and install it themselves. They'll open any attachment from anyone they get, even if it's named infect_your_computer.exe. For the "average" computer user, they probably need a more modern OS to help protect them. Hell, that's why tablets and phones with high-security models are better for the average user anyhow.
Since it only takes about 1 year to pay off the cost of laying fiber infrastructure...
I was curious how you arrived at the conclusion that fiber would only take a year to pay off. I'd have guessed, given the amount of work I saw as fiber was being buried beneath my own street a number of years ago, that the costs probably ran a couple thousand dollars per house.
A quick search turned up this paper to give me an estimate of per-mile costs. Depending on the type of installation, laying fiber can range from $50K per mile (aerial lines) to $400,000 per mile max (installed underground via boring). My neighborhood was likely on the middle to high end, as they did indeed appear to be using boring techniques, and the neighborhood isn't super-dense.
Let's see... I'd guess that an average home in my neighborhood maybe takes up about 75 ft or so of street space on average, so fiber is reaching about 140 homes per linear mile (70 houses per linear mile x 2 sides of the street). Assuming a total installation cost of about $250K per mile, that would means each home cost a bit under $1800 to connect. With these costs, I think you're looking at more of a 10-15 years to recoup that investment.
Anyone with more real-world knowledge about this know if that's anywhere close to a reasonable estimate?
And hey, the Xbox360 won last time
The underpowered Wii won last time.
I wonder if Nintendo is now paying the price for the Wii with sluggish Wii U sales?
Speaking for myself, I was rather disappointed with the Wii, and ultimately purchased only a handful of titles for it, especially compared to my Xbox 360. You'll notice that even with high console sales numbers, Nintendo couldn't really relate that into significant game sales for anything except their first party titles. Now, with both gamers and publishers burned by Nintendo's last console, is it any wonder that their newest offering is seriously sagging in sales, possibly because of the lack of 3rd party developer interest?
The Kinect has been mandatory for a while now (including all of initial pre-launch development), yet still most of what we see are horrible, gimmicky Kinect games trying to turn an interesting piece of technology into a game controller, and outside of very specialized types of games (dancing games, exercise trainers, rail shooters, etc), it doesn't work half as good as a standard controller. Developers have been trying for years now to overcome the difficulties with lag and imprecision, and even with much improved hardware in its latest iteration, the Xbone still has significant problems in those areas. In the end, controlling your console with your body is still very much a gimmick, and doesn't justify 1/5th the price of the entire console.
I own a Wii, and I became so sick of having to waggle a stick around during gameplay that I stopped buying Wii titles largely out of fear of how much unnecessary motion-control would be shoved into an otherwise excellent title. What's the point of waggling a stick back and forth when pressing a button accomplishes the same task faster, more reliably, and without straining your wrist? Motion control is a cute gimmick that, despite excellent sales of the Wii, ultimately proved to be more of a hindrance to most games than a help, as evidenced by the fact that no current gen consoles rely on motion control as a core component of their controller functionality.
Motion control is now largely considered to be an ancillary function for game controllers, only used sparingly or judiciously as demanded by the gameplay. I think Kinect should fall into this same category - cool tech, but really not appropriate for most titles. If game developers want to add a few extra features here and there to optionally support the Kinect, or build a specialty title around Kinect since lots of people will still have them, nothing is stopping them from doing so.
Or, or they could just allow USB mics like the Guitar Hero/Rock Band type of mics.
Rock Band isn't even available on the newest consoles, is it? And I'm pretty sure you can't just plug in a generic USB mic or probably even a 360 version of a mic into your Xbox One. Even if USB mics could be hooked up and used, that's still a lot of work for a very minor feature. I have a hard time faulting MS for not supporting what I'd consider to be an edge case at best. The console will work just fine without voice support, after all.
There's plenty else they've botched - this is actually something they've finally done right. If people want voice support, they can *choose* to purchase a Kinnect now. If not, they don't have to. Isn't that what everyone was asking for from nearly day one?
As for the always-on requirement, sure, you can play the pedant by pointing out it only needed to phone home once a day rather than constantly, but that's pointless, since it does nothing to address why the requirement was such a source of contention. The reason it was annoying was because it immediately eliminated a number of valid and legitimate use cases in which gamers wouldn't have a regular connection to the Internet. In the armed forces? Too bad. Internet down for a few days? Too bad. Just moved? Too bad. Traveling? Too bad. Out at sea? Too bad. Vacationing in your summer cabin? Too bad. Don't want to connect devices that have no practical need to be online? Too bad. Don't think a company has any business tracking what you're doing with offline, disc-based, single-player games? Too bad.
Well said. I think a lot of folks (apparently including MS execs) tend to fall into a bubble of sorts where they assume that since *they* have ubiquitous access to extremely fast, always-on internet, then *everyone* has access to extremely fast, always-on internet. It's certainly true that *most* people do at this point, but the fact that MS execs basically flipped the bird at anyone who didn't certainly didn't endear them to potential consumers. One more example: my brother works on a tug in Alaska - they currently have a 360 console in their boat, and the original Xbone plan would have ensured that they couldn't use it.
Interestingly, this seems to be in midst of Microsoft's "arrogant" phase (well, more arrogant than usual) - the same time period in which they also dismissed customer feedback about Windows 8 usability. Having seen MS from the inside several times in the past, Adam Orth's comments don't seem out of line for an exec, except that most MS execs have the brains not to post things like that publicly. From his twitter history, Mr Orth obviously enjoyed trolling the internet, yet somehow seemed surprised when the internet eventually raged back. It seems that MS as a company finally figured out that even *they* can't afford to ignore so much consumer feedback or openly mock their customers, and seem to be taking a slightly more humble approach, at least in public. As bad as they are, could you imagine what MS would be like without competition from Sony? Oh, yeah, I can. Just think of the cable companies.
I'm like you - own all three last gen consoles (and all three before that), and none of the current gen. For the first time, my first console might be a Playstation rather than an Xbox, but it will probably depend on who gets the first must-have game.
I personally hate using voice command with eletronics because they can't talk back to me but some people like it, couldn't they have left the mic in? How expensive even is the mic?
Because the mic hardware was originally part of Kinnect. MS would have to create and manufacture a dedicated peripheral device with only a mic instead of the cameras + mic, and then include that or sell it separately. And since all current software was assuming that having a Kinnect meant both the mic and cameras were there, that would have meant rewriting many assumptions that the software is probably currently making, so there's even more cost.
In short, it's not at all practical or cost-effective, especially not for the likely few people who wanted a mic but NOT a camera. The entire point of this move is to shave off costs for those that want nothing to do with the Kinnect. Given the fact that the Kinnect has already proven to be rather unpopular, this sort of investment would simply be throwing good money after bad. If you want voice control (and I mean that in a generic sense, as you've acknowledged that you personally wouldn't even want that feature), get a Kinnect.
For the past two console generations (since the original Xbox came out), I've owned every major console brand, but have generally preferred the Xbox. As such, all my games, except for console exclusives, were for Xbox. I found the original Xbox controllers to be superior to Nintendo's or Sony's consoles, and this trend continued until now. MS's "gamer score" was also rather addictive, and was one of their more brilliant ideas of the last generation of consoles. I've also been maintaining a gold account for many years, since most of my friends are on Live, and let's face it, the service was *vastly* superior to the offerings of any other company - of course, for a paid service, it damn well better be.
I may eventually purchase an Xbone, but it might very well come after a PS4, which surprised me. For every Wii or PS3 game, I probably have seven or eight Xbox/Xbox 360 games. I'm thinking about cancelling my Live account (although I recently signed up for another year, so it will be a while), as I rarely seem to play online with my friends these days, preferring solo play.
How did Microsoft lose me as a customer, at least so far?
1) No backward compatibility. I've got a pretty big Xbox 360 library, with a number of games I haven't started/finished or would like to perhaps play again. Backward compatibility would have virtually assured a purchase of an Xbone device, since I know that eventually there will be games on it that I'd like to play. However, I've got to decide now which console in my entertainment center will be displaced by a new console (I've currently got four - all three last gen plus a PS2), and that's my current limit of the switching box I have installed. Microsoft should have stuck with an x86 architecture for the 360, and we'd be able to play all three versions of Xbox games on the latest console with few issues. People argue that compatibility isn't critical (which is admittedly true), since I obviously already have a 360, but I'm literally at the point where I don't have any more room to plug in another console. So now that's just one more device I need to keep connected indefinitely as long as there exists a possibility of wanting to play a 360 game. There's also another message that no backward compatibility sends: we don't care about your loyalty as a customer.
2) Xbox as an advertising billboard. Microsoft decided to heavily monetize their console's connectivity with ads, even for those of us with Gold Live accounts. Either/or, Microsoft. I don't appreciate you double-dipping like that, and every time I see the massive wall of advertisements on every single page of my Xbox One, I get annoyed when I realized that I'm also paying for that service. At this point, I'm largely paying for Microsoft to simply serve me advertisements on my gaming console. Fuck that. Why should I pay hundreds of dollars for another platform that can assault me with non-stop ads between gaming sessions.
3) Disappointing "next-gen" experience. In general, the next-gen experience hasn't really wowed me. Games can barely even render at a full 1080p, for heaven's sake, which I certainly didn't expect of a "next-gen" console at this point. The hard drives are pathetically small, and the Xbone's, of all the idiotic things, is not user-upgradeable (unlike the PS4). It won't take too many installs or downloads before that's all used up, and then you're playing the shuffling game with your drive space.
4) Consumer-unfriendly arrogance. Phone home once per day or your Xbox bricks? Ok, I actually like the idea of being able to install your games and not having to put the disc in for validation. The only practical way to do this is to have an online check to make sure more than one person isn't using the same disc, but this could have been an optional setting, and the way they decided to ram this down people's throat was ridiculous. There was also the specter of killing the used-game market, and frankly, MS didn't have a lot of trust to spare at
There's a couple of things to point out here. One significant point is that the game works with the player's personal avatars, called mii's. The very point of the mii avatar is that it's supposed to represent you as a person. By creating a "life simulator" for those mii avatars, they should really have known to include the game features that people find important to them. Also, even if gay marriage isn't legal in Japan, it's not like the game is not allowed to depict it, nor does it mean there aren't gay people in Japan who would like to pretend their mii is getting married to someone of the same sex.
Moreover, they did know from the start that this would certainly be ported to countries in which gay marriage is legal and expected as a feature. As a game developer, you have to make allowances for cultural differences in your product if they expect to sell in different locals. That's both common and business sense.
All that being said - I don't think this snafu is worth forever writing off Nintendo. It was probably an honest oversight, simply slipping below their cultural radar.
They eventually realized and owned up to their mistake. More importantly, it feels like no one even noticed this, but they stated that while it wouldn't be practical to rework this game, they pledged to properly design in the desired features in their next game of this type. Has anyone realized that, unless they're blatantly lying, and we have no reason to believe they are, this campaign scored a significant victory?
Here's the actual quote from Nintendo:
We pledge that if we create a next installment in the Tomodachi series, we will strive to design a game-play experience from the ground up that is more inclusive, and better represents all players.
You guys actually won... not an immediate or full victory, but a victory nonetheless, and no one seems to have noticed. My sig seems more appropriate than ever.
Forget Fortran, I want to know why anybody in their right mind is still using the obtuse juggernaut mongrel of a language known as C++ in 2014. (Even with the 11 and 14 versions don't make things any better, they only wallpaper over obtuse features with other obtuse features... very few people alive truly know all the weird quirks of C++ inside and out.)
ProjectCriteria projCrit;
projCrit.requireEfficientRuntime = true;
projCrit.requireEfficientMemoryUse = true;
projCrit.requireEfficientNativeLibInterop = true;
projCrit.legacyProjectInterop = true;
projCrit.buzzwordCompliant = false;
auto langChoice = languageCollection.find(projCrit);
if (langChoice != Language.Cpp) {
string s = "It appears C++ may not the be appropriate language for your project. Have you considered ";
DisplayMessage(s + langChoice.name + " instead?");
return;
}
langChoice.doActualWork();
Most OUYA games that I've tried use a shareware model, where the user can buy the paid version as an "entitlement", a purchase that the user keeps as long as the platform remains in operation. A lot of the hated freemium games, on the other hand, tend to offer no way to pay once to unlock everything permanently. They handle all purchases as "consumables", which need to be purchased multiple times in order to keep playing.
That's a very good point - the F2P definitely is much more of a "rental" model with heavy use of one-time consumables, although that's not necessarily always the case. So, maybe the "demo" analogy doesn't always apply, but that tends to happen with analogies.
I'm not a fan of the overall model, of course, but one way in which I think it works pretty well is when the core gameplay is free, but customers can optionally spend money on more cosmetic items. Some of Valves games work this way. Guild Wars 2 is a buy-to-play, and only supplements their income with a more cosmetic-focused in-game shop, and I sort of like that balance.
Frankly, though, what irks me most is when companies double-dip, or even triple-dip. Some MMOs would not only charge a monthly fee, but also made you purchase the box as well. Then on top of that, they started selling in-store items. Seriously? Thankfully, no one can really get away with that anymore - possibly the only positive thing I can say about the F2P trend.
We're certainly seeing the pendulum swinging pretty wildly to the F2P model, but I'm not convinced that it's necessarily an indicator of a permanent trend in gaming. It's just that the phone market is still pretty new, so I think a lot of people are going to be suckered into these things at first. Get enough of them disgusted with the sleazy nature of it, and we could well see a backlash, but it will take some time for that to happen.
Agreed. My thought at reading the summary was "Do older languages have some sort of expiration date I don't know about?" What's odd about it? Also, it's not like the language has been stagnant. English is an old "legacy" human language with lots of cruft and inconsistent rules, but it works well enough for us that it's not worth jumping ship for Esperanto.
A large part of it is probably the simple inertia of legacy, both in code, systems, and personnel. However legacy systems tends to eventually be replaced if a demonstrably superior product can improve performance in some way. Any significant change, even one for the better, causes pain and friction, so the change typically has to be worth the pain involved. Obviously in the eyes of many science-focused projects, it hasn't been worth switching to a new language. There's also value in having a body of work in an older and very well understood and documented language, as it means new team members are much more likely to already be proficient with the language than a newer and less popular language.
I can also understand not wanting to switch to some "flavor of the month" language when you're not sure how long it will be actively supported. FORTRAN has credibility simply based on it's incredible longevity. No, it's not new and sexy, but you can bet it will probably be around for another half-century.