Now that blu-ray is the standard, more companies are willing to take a gamble and produce expensive luxury models. The average price will be higher even though the same lower-cost models are available at the same price. It's just that now more companies are putting weight on high-end options as well as offering affordable options. Prior to this point in the market, the focus was on adoption. Now it's on adoption as well as catering to those who are ready to invest heavily in the platform.
Apple is not the dominant one trying to force everyone to use their standards, or actually, to pay them to use their standards. Apple is just selling some all-in-one devices that run their software and some 3rd party stuff too. When you buy an Apple it's for its tightly integrated software & hardware combination... typically you're going exactly for what they provide. If not then just buy something else. At least their software plays nice with standards and doesn't try to force everyone to use their formats and apps, just those wishing to buy their systems. They're not trying to push some new document standard, or a new runtime that ties into their OS's API. I can run all my favorite OSS on OSX... the iPhone is just a phone that happens to have a web browser. It's funny because Steve Jobs was trying to sell web clips as web applets on iPhone and suddenly everyone wanted to run native code on the phone, and now basically want an open platform.
I don't have anything against that, but I don't think that was the idea really, and I think they're more worried about keeping trojans and worms off of it than anything since iPhones have unlimited data plans and because personal data is stored the same way on all iPhones and can be easily extracted and messed around with since there are built-in methods for communicating with your contacts without your initiation and of abusing your personal info that could have immediate consequences to you. Should we have a device that can run any 3rd party code that could accidentally or maliciously spread itself to all phones and start dialing 911?
Who knows if such a thing would happen, but it could, and just like the FCC tries to keep devices from interfering with each other for our benefit, do we also want to keep electronic devices hooked into essential systems that are capable of interfering with our emergency services? A lot of people say that if there's sensitive data on a machine you don't expose it to a network, and to keep back-ups off site, and all of this has the result of severing a direct line of consequence to that which we consider an important emergency resource or where privacy is concerned. I'm just wondering if everyone thinks the same thing applies here.
I guess I got off on a large tangent, my original point though was just that it doesn't seem like the iPhone was designed to turn into a platform, I just thought it was one of what would be many such all-in-one solutions, not something close to a sub-notebook.
I used to use my PC for gaming, but I don't have the luxury of spending all my earnings on upgrades every 6 months, and I can get high quality graphics on console games at a lower price. Fiddling with graphics drivers and patches just to get a playable game is annoying, and PC games don't have that much variety anymore. Some games you just can't get on PC, like Katamari, Mario Galaxy, or Ratchet & Clank. I'll use a PC for emulators instead of digging out an old console, and if I'm somewhere else I take my DS. I just use my PC for the internet, organizing my personal data, graphics apps, storing and ripping audio and video for my portable players, storing digital photos, programming, and composing music... but not really for games. I don't even feel like playing flash games when I can just play DS. Anyone else have similar habits?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedic resource for everything including our culture and all of the products we produce, all of the creatures that inhabit the earth, their histories, our histories, important events, important people, important theories, pop-culture phenomena that provides important context to all of these events, etc. It's an encyclopedia of everything we can think of, all cross-linked. If we as humans could dump all of the reference we have in our minds into a searchable resource, I guess wikipedia is the closest we can come to that right now. It's invaluable, interesting and important.
In regards to various products and companies that show up on Wikipedia, I actually often prefer going to the wikipedia page about a product I want to purchase, because it's just more informative than all of the PR that shows up on advertisements. It's more logically organized and contains more details readily available, and oftentimes you get links to the companies and to reviews, important news articles about the products (recalls, scandals)...
I don't mind it so much because the benefits outweigh the negative. We now have a resource that catalogs all products we create. Often, corporate websites vanish and get changed around, and old product pages get taken down. Now we have a resource to find information about products we might have lost the manuals to and need contact information or info on errata or who knows what else.
A lot of professors just assign homework as if their class is the only one you're taking, and don't consider the amount of homework that other professors are giving. Couple that with the need for a job to pay student loans, lodging, food, laundry, etc then students are having a helluva time just with the courseload. Imagine how few are able to take care in learning and just rush through it barely under the wire.
Clearly, Microsoft knows something that we don't know, and, I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass for them to be really concerned about it. I wonder how much trouble Microsoft realizes it is in.
I agree that Linux is attractive for developers who want to build their own integrated solution from the ground up and have control at each level, plus many existing libraries that they can modify for their specific uses. Companies are starting to realize that they can't put all of their eggs in the MS basket and have the control they want later on when they need to grow or change in ways that MS won't allow or that is deemed too costly because of licenses that must be changed or 'upgraded' for further capability. However Visual Studio is a very good tool and it seems like many people are kind of stuck on it because they're used to it and also they have a lot of historical files (code snippets, projects) tied to the development environment that cannot easily be transcribed to another environment, and also where a lot of shortcuts and snippets won't work exactly the same when you're going for cross-platform or non-Windows targets.
The whole Windows environment and API is different enough to make it a real hassle for people who haven't started from the beginning to build easily portable applications. Perhaps updating to Vista is also making things significantly different, and now even developers who target Windows are beginning to build things to be portable from the start because even changes between the various Windows versions are different enough, and new development environments and libraries make it easy to target multiple platforms. I think bringing the KDE environment to multiple platforms shows just how powerful and well-done such software can be. Now if we can only get some sort of stack like "LAMP" or something to catch on when concerning cross-platform development.
Even funnier is what he said about this... that the true reward was being world-reknowned and knowing that tons of people are enjoying something you made. This was covered in either in the book "Game Over" or "1-Up." "Game Over" was the book with extensive coverage of the beginnings of Tetris, especially regarding Nintendo's exclusivity in distributing this for portables and consoles, but also regarding talks between Minoru Arakawa, then head of NOA, Howard Lincoln, then head of NOA's legal, and Alexy Pajitnov.
You're missing the GP's point... MS can continue behaving illegally as long as they keep paying the fines. Since the fines are ~2%/year, that's what they will pay to continue behaving illegally. You said that if they don't change their behaviour they'll get fined again, and apparently they can afford that with no problems.
So then what for example, movie distributors get pissed because they aren't able to sell you as many digital movie downloads as you are willing to purchase? Will they get mad at ISPs for forcing people to use brick & mortar options, causing studios to give more of the profit to the middle-man? The internet is used for commerce, and bandwidth-intensive "commodities" will only become more popular. The PS3, XBox 360 and Wii are all using the internet for content distribution, not to mention multiplayer gaming. With the next generation of consoles, will that go down? Does MS plan on giving up on its movie download service too? How about Unbox? Things seem only to be moving into a more bandwidth-intensive direction, and people want to make money. Will it be consumers vs ISPs or will it be content distributors vs ISPs?
A lot of people are pretty self-righteous and tend to remark snidely "Why do you need privacy if you've got nothing to hide?" What are you supposed to say to someone that seems pretty opposed to privacy... they don't even care about your privacy much less their own. Now that 'terrorism' is a buzzword, people are even demonizing those who even bring up privacy as a concern.
It's funny, I didn't even notice. I just buy shows I want to watch on DVD, I don't even watch TV, plain and simple. I'd rather pay for DVDs I really like, and get to keep, than pay monthly for a deluge of commercials and ticker-tapes and 'bugs' during shows. If studios just released shows straight-to-dvd and TV was just a medium for advertising DVDs then I'd be perfectly happy.
Wouldn't the house of the future be made up of easily interchangable parts that can be easily retrofitted to existing structures? It wouldn't be something designed from the ground up with today's bleeding-edge technologies. Part of the hassle of doing work in the houses of today are parts, fixtures, or even the location of holes, that are of a new standard and plain just don't work with anything else.
Even then, I wish some of the more popular games (Resident Evil 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid, etc) would get ported to Wii. I really don't care if they have stripped-down graphics & watered-down textures... I really don't even care if it's just bare gouraud-shaded polys, as long as I can play with the Wiimote instead of a gamepad. Some games that will go on to sell tons of copies only come out for the 360 and PS3 on the premise that people wouldn't want to play a scaled-back version, but that simply is not true. Give it to me on Wii!
If what you're suggesting would work, training users to acknowledge or whitelist appropriate actions, then UAC would probably be considered a great security feature.
Arcades can evolve too. The market is there for people who want to rent out movie-theatre sized screens to play multiplayer games. How about an arcade that contains actual consoles where you just bring your memory cards or wiimotes (w/character data on) and just pay a cover charge and for drinks, or for a private room with friends (like billiards) all so you can play with a crowd on a giant screen? I'm sure parents would appreciate the break, and kids can be as loud as they want or game with their friends all night.
There is a giant rift between arcade games and their console counterparts because we cannot exchange character data between them or game on a console vs an arcade cabinet. If we allow this, then the popularity of the living room will also be interchangable with that of the public gaming outlets, and both can coexist and benefit from each other. Perhaps if you visit the arcades you can get the newest demos first, or the arcades can download them for you and burn them on disc and charge a token fee. Wii demos for full games could be distributed exclusively at arcades. There are many opportunities to increase the popularity of both at the same time.
I don't know about you, but there are some games I bought made for Windows that don't even run on many Windows versions at all. Wipeout XL is a big example. That's not to say that Vista has horrible game compatibility, but that compatibility on Windows in general is pretty fragmented. I just can't keep some really old and useful apps, or run some of the games I purchased, because Windows keeps changing and it really IS affecting compatibility. Major apps may be supported very well (but they even need patches now and then), but some programs are just left to rot and Windows does not provide a good environment for allowing you to run old programs. I have tried the compatibility tool and it really hasn't helped in a lot of cases.
If their profits slow, investors will want to pull out, confidence will wane, they won't be able to sustain much less add to the profits they are getting now (especially considering how much research and development costs), and they won't be able to sustain their other ventures that aren't turning a profit yet. They won't be able to buy any new businesses if their own decisions and solutions aren't gaining them market share.
Or... government officials could be paid the minimum wage that they themselves dictate, be excluded of all gifts and other monies, and constantly audited watched and surveyed by the public (with those little traffic cameras set up in every room, hey they're good enough for us), guaranteeing those who get the job really want it and does a really good job.
I pretty much like it less because it's a lossy HD format that has a lower video bitrate. If we're going lossy here, I want the highest bitrate possible. This is HD, we're not supposed to see artifacts anymore. I want to see the least amount possible. I really don't care that it doesn't have a DVD side, I don't care about any interactive features, I just want a really good looking movie.
Good, now we found a way to show that an election hasn't been rigged. Shouldn't we be doing this everywhere? That way if the machine is rigged, the hand count will show it. If the hand count is rigged, the machine count will show it. It's better than having a single point of failure.
All this shows was that people didn't care who won, they were just waiting until whatever tipping point to jump onto a bandwagon. Doesn't matter if the format's not dead yet, consumers just want to know what to buy NOW to be future-proof. Once this idea gets in their heads, the landslide then begins.
Sounds like the person in the article hasn't experienced video games before, and doesn't understand what people get out of it. Presumably they have no idea about what goes on in someone's head when they're playing them. The decision making skills, the prioritizing, having to figure out the best and quickest way to understand properties about unknown entities (learning new gameplay mechanics and how to defeat various enemies/obstacles when they are flying quickly at your face, etc). They even claim there could be games they would enjoy but haven't even bothered playing them or finding out how games can benefit them. Now this individual is ready to start making decisions about how to deal with them? As far as they're aware, it's something you plug in and hypnotizes you. This person seems to be having a nightmare about kids being "plugged in" and "brain rot" rather than actually trying to find anything out.
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They're definitely fans of just sitting in on committees... know your enemy I guess (when the enemy is everything that's not your own 'standard').
Now that blu-ray is the standard, more companies are willing to take a gamble and produce expensive luxury models. The average price will be higher even though the same lower-cost models are available at the same price. It's just that now more companies are putting weight on high-end options as well as offering affordable options. Prior to this point in the market, the focus was on adoption. Now it's on adoption as well as catering to those who are ready to invest heavily in the platform.
Apple is not the dominant one trying to force everyone to use their standards, or actually, to pay them to use their standards. Apple is just selling some all-in-one devices that run their software and some 3rd party stuff too. When you buy an Apple it's for its tightly integrated software & hardware combination... typically you're going exactly for what they provide. If not then just buy something else. At least their software plays nice with standards and doesn't try to force everyone to use their formats and apps, just those wishing to buy their systems. They're not trying to push some new document standard, or a new runtime that ties into their OS's API. I can run all my favorite OSS on OSX... the iPhone is just a phone that happens to have a web browser. It's funny because Steve Jobs was trying to sell web clips as web applets on iPhone and suddenly everyone wanted to run native code on the phone, and now basically want an open platform.
I don't have anything against that, but I don't think that was the idea really, and I think they're more worried about keeping trojans and worms off of it than anything since iPhones have unlimited data plans and because personal data is stored the same way on all iPhones and can be easily extracted and messed around with since there are built-in methods for communicating with your contacts without your initiation and of abusing your personal info that could have immediate consequences to you. Should we have a device that can run any 3rd party code that could accidentally or maliciously spread itself to all phones and start dialing 911?
Who knows if such a thing would happen, but it could, and just like the FCC tries to keep devices from interfering with each other for our benefit, do we also want to keep electronic devices hooked into essential systems that are capable of interfering with our emergency services? A lot of people say that if there's sensitive data on a machine you don't expose it to a network, and to keep back-ups off site, and all of this has the result of severing a direct line of consequence to that which we consider an important emergency resource or where privacy is concerned. I'm just wondering if everyone thinks the same thing applies here.
I guess I got off on a large tangent, my original point though was just that it doesn't seem like the iPhone was designed to turn into a platform, I just thought it was one of what would be many such all-in-one solutions, not something close to a sub-notebook.
I used to use my PC for gaming, but I don't have the luxury of spending all my earnings on upgrades every 6 months, and I can get high quality graphics on console games at a lower price. Fiddling with graphics drivers and patches just to get a playable game is annoying, and PC games don't have that much variety anymore. Some games you just can't get on PC, like Katamari, Mario Galaxy, or Ratchet & Clank. I'll use a PC for emulators instead of digging out an old console, and if I'm somewhere else I take my DS. I just use my PC for the internet, organizing my personal data, graphics apps, storing and ripping audio and video for my portable players, storing digital photos, programming, and composing music... but not really for games. I don't even feel like playing flash games when I can just play DS. Anyone else have similar habits?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedic resource for everything including our culture and all of the products we produce, all of the creatures that inhabit the earth, their histories, our histories, important events, important people, important theories, pop-culture phenomena that provides important context to all of these events, etc. It's an encyclopedia of everything we can think of, all cross-linked. If we as humans could dump all of the reference we have in our minds into a searchable resource, I guess wikipedia is the closest we can come to that right now. It's invaluable, interesting and important.
In regards to various products and companies that show up on Wikipedia, I actually often prefer going to the wikipedia page about a product I want to purchase, because it's just more informative than all of the PR that shows up on advertisements. It's more logically organized and contains more details readily available, and oftentimes you get links to the companies and to reviews, important news articles about the products (recalls, scandals)...
I don't mind it so much because the benefits outweigh the negative. We now have a resource that catalogs all products we create. Often, corporate websites vanish and get changed around, and old product pages get taken down. Now we have a resource to find information about products we might have lost the manuals to and need contact information or info on errata or who knows what else.
A lot of professors just assign homework as if their class is the only one you're taking, and don't consider the amount of homework that other professors are giving. Couple that with the need for a job to pay student loans, lodging, food, laundry, etc then students are having a helluva time just with the courseload. Imagine how few are able to take care in learning and just rush through it barely under the wire.
Clearly, Microsoft knows something that we don't know, and, I think it is that Linux development is starting to reach a critical mass for them to be really concerned about it. I wonder how much trouble Microsoft realizes it is in.
I agree that Linux is attractive for developers who want to build their own integrated solution from the ground up and have control at each level, plus many existing libraries that they can modify for their specific uses. Companies are starting to realize that they can't put all of their eggs in the MS basket and have the control they want later on when they need to grow or change in ways that MS won't allow or that is deemed too costly because of licenses that must be changed or 'upgraded' for further capability. However Visual Studio is a very good tool and it seems like many people are kind of stuck on it because they're used to it and also they have a lot of historical files (code snippets, projects) tied to the development environment that cannot easily be transcribed to another environment, and also where a lot of shortcuts and snippets won't work exactly the same when you're going for cross-platform or non-Windows targets.
The whole Windows environment and API is different enough to make it a real hassle for people who haven't started from the beginning to build easily portable applications. Perhaps updating to Vista is also making things significantly different, and now even developers who target Windows are beginning to build things to be portable from the start because even changes between the various Windows versions are different enough, and new development environments and libraries make it easy to target multiple platforms. I think bringing the KDE environment to multiple platforms shows just how powerful and well-done such software can be. Now if we can only get some sort of stack like "LAMP" or something to catch on when concerning cross-platform development.
Even funnier is what he said about this... that the true reward was being world-reknowned and knowing that tons of people are enjoying something you made. This was covered in either in the book "Game Over" or "1-Up." "Game Over" was the book with extensive coverage of the beginnings of Tetris, especially regarding Nintendo's exclusivity in distributing this for portables and consoles, but also regarding talks between Minoru Arakawa, then head of NOA, Howard Lincoln, then head of NOA's legal, and Alexy Pajitnov.
You're missing the GP's point... MS can continue behaving illegally as long as they keep paying the fines. Since the fines are ~2%/year, that's what they will pay to continue behaving illegally. You said that if they don't change their behaviour they'll get fined again, and apparently they can afford that with no problems.
So then what for example, movie distributors get pissed because they aren't able to sell you as many digital movie downloads as you are willing to purchase? Will they get mad at ISPs for forcing people to use brick & mortar options, causing studios to give more of the profit to the middle-man? The internet is used for commerce, and bandwidth-intensive "commodities" will only become more popular. The PS3, XBox 360 and Wii are all using the internet for content distribution, not to mention multiplayer gaming. With the next generation of consoles, will that go down? Does MS plan on giving up on its movie download service too? How about Unbox? Things seem only to be moving into a more bandwidth-intensive direction, and people want to make money. Will it be consumers vs ISPs or will it be content distributors vs ISPs?
A lot of people are pretty self-righteous and tend to remark snidely "Why do you need privacy if you've got nothing to hide?" What are you supposed to say to someone that seems pretty opposed to privacy... they don't even care about your privacy much less their own. Now that 'terrorism' is a buzzword, people are even demonizing those who even bring up privacy as a concern.
It's funny, I didn't even notice. I just buy shows I want to watch on DVD, I don't even watch TV, plain and simple. I'd rather pay for DVDs I really like, and get to keep, than pay monthly for a deluge of commercials and ticker-tapes and 'bugs' during shows. If studios just released shows straight-to-dvd and TV was just a medium for advertising DVDs then I'd be perfectly happy.
Wouldn't the house of the future be made up of easily interchangable parts that can be easily retrofitted to existing structures? It wouldn't be something designed from the ground up with today's bleeding-edge technologies. Part of the hassle of doing work in the houses of today are parts, fixtures, or even the location of holes, that are of a new standard and plain just don't work with anything else.
Even then, I wish some of the more popular games (Resident Evil 5, Grand Theft Auto 4, Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid, etc) would get ported to Wii. I really don't care if they have stripped-down graphics & watered-down textures... I really don't even care if it's just bare gouraud-shaded polys, as long as I can play with the Wiimote instead of a gamepad. Some games that will go on to sell tons of copies only come out for the 360 and PS3 on the premise that people wouldn't want to play a scaled-back version, but that simply is not true. Give it to me on Wii!
If what you're suggesting would work, training users to acknowledge or whitelist appropriate actions, then UAC would probably be considered a great security feature.
Arcades can evolve too. The market is there for people who want to rent out movie-theatre sized screens to play multiplayer games. How about an arcade that contains actual consoles where you just bring your memory cards or wiimotes (w/character data on) and just pay a cover charge and for drinks, or for a private room with friends (like billiards) all so you can play with a crowd on a giant screen? I'm sure parents would appreciate the break, and kids can be as loud as they want or game with their friends all night.
There is a giant rift between arcade games and their console counterparts because we cannot exchange character data between them or game on a console vs an arcade cabinet. If we allow this, then the popularity of the living room will also be interchangable with that of the public gaming outlets, and both can coexist and benefit from each other. Perhaps if you visit the arcades you can get the newest demos first, or the arcades can download them for you and burn them on disc and charge a token fee. Wii demos for full games could be distributed exclusively at arcades. There are many opportunities to increase the popularity of both at the same time.
Funny because a lot of Apogee's success was due to copying Nintendo (Wacky Races, for example...)
I don't know about you, but there are some games I bought made for Windows that don't even run on many Windows versions at all. Wipeout XL is a big example. That's not to say that Vista has horrible game compatibility, but that compatibility on Windows in general is pretty fragmented. I just can't keep some really old and useful apps, or run some of the games I purchased, because Windows keeps changing and it really IS affecting compatibility. Major apps may be supported very well (but they even need patches now and then), but some programs are just left to rot and Windows does not provide a good environment for allowing you to run old programs. I have tried the compatibility tool and it really hasn't helped in a lot of cases.
If their profits slow, investors will want to pull out, confidence will wane, they won't be able to sustain much less add to the profits they are getting now (especially considering how much research and development costs), and they won't be able to sustain their other ventures that aren't turning a profit yet. They won't be able to buy any new businesses if their own decisions and solutions aren't gaining them market share.
Or... government officials could be paid the minimum wage that they themselves dictate, be excluded of all gifts and other monies, and constantly audited watched and surveyed by the public (with those little traffic cameras set up in every room, hey they're good enough for us), guaranteeing those who get the job really want it and does a really good job.
People who don't want to cache all that shit in RAM at runtime or load it off the hard disk every time they boot?
I pretty much like it less because it's a lossy HD format that has a lower video bitrate. If we're going lossy here, I want the highest bitrate possible. This is HD, we're not supposed to see artifacts anymore. I want to see the least amount possible. I really don't care that it doesn't have a DVD side, I don't care about any interactive features, I just want a really good looking movie.
Good, now we found a way to show that an election hasn't been rigged. Shouldn't we be doing this everywhere? That way if the machine is rigged, the hand count will show it. If the hand count is rigged, the machine count will show it. It's better than having a single point of failure.
All this shows was that people didn't care who won, they were just waiting until whatever tipping point to jump onto a bandwagon. Doesn't matter if the format's not dead yet, consumers just want to know what to buy NOW to be future-proof. Once this idea gets in their heads, the landslide then begins.
Sounds like the person in the article hasn't experienced video games before, and doesn't understand what people get out of it. Presumably they have no idea about what goes on in someone's head when they're playing them. The decision making skills, the prioritizing, having to figure out the best and quickest way to understand properties about unknown entities (learning new gameplay mechanics and how to defeat various enemies/obstacles when they are flying quickly at your face, etc). They even claim there could be games they would enjoy but haven't even bothered playing them or finding out how games can benefit them. Now this individual is ready to start making decisions about how to deal with them? As far as they're aware, it's something you plug in and hypnotizes you. This person seems to be having a nightmare about kids being "plugged in" and "brain rot" rather than actually trying to find anything out.