If your app isn't featured or favorited or otherwise supported by a major marketing push, you're doomed.
The little band of freelancers I work with have produce two games. One for ourselves. It was really very good, which bombed at the store. We've sold just a few hundred. We're small, we don't have a marketing budget.
The next game we bade was honestly no very fun. It was okay, not complete crap, but not great. It's been in the top 50 for several weeks.
What's the difference? That second game was done for a Major Developer who was able to spend 20x as much on marketing as development. (No joke.)
And even for them, there's no money in it for them. They're only there to show a success to shareholders and that they're beating the competition in a competitive marketplace. Couldn't have the independent devs getting the top spots, now could they? That'd be embarrassing.
The guys I know who have worked on Vegas slot machines are right up there with avionics programmers for writing reliably bulletproof code. And they're higher security. If one of them was ever looking for work I'd hire them in a second. If I could afford them.
Offshore Poker programmer? Meh. Not really a plus or a minus compared to most other web programmers. What else you got?
Forget independent scientists, Japan's government has been testing this for a number of years. It would be mandated in all new handsets so once there was a major disaster (and Japan loves it's natural disasters) emergency communication would be possible. Like the Emergency Broadcast System only not unidirectional.
Several years ago I saw a demo where text messages were relayed from phone to phone across most of Tokyo without ever connecting to the infrastructure. It wouldn't be fast, but it would be invaluably helpful with rescue and recovery efforts.
Typing was a mandatory class in my public high school in the late 80's. And while manually setting tab stops and figuring out how to center text on an electric typewriter are certainly wasted, the rest of the skills, learning to type efficiently without getting all carpel-tunnely, were very timely.
But of course at that time no one needed to type before high school. Now kids are typing as soon as they can recognize letters, and that's the time to teach typing. By high school they'll have long entrenched crappy behaviors that will be impossible to break, and frankly be a frustrating waste of time to all involved.
Server load is the primary reason you can't travel instantaneously everywhere. It prevents flashmobs from forming and driving performance through the ground. Walking/riding/flying is the in-world application of this concept. If it takes 10 minutes to get there, not everyone will come (because of course it's 10 minutes back.) Also as players approach a crowded area they ease into the lag and can decide to get away before they get into the middle of it. If humans could freely teleport around the planet, they would have crushed the UCLA Medical Center last Thursday.
From a design point of view it encourages social behavior to get people to travel in packs. The more social people are the more they play the game. In addition it becomes another improvement point for the player--faster travel, along with better armor/attack rating/spells, etc, etc. This gives players more options about what to pursue for their character which is good.
Besides time spent on a mount isn't wasted. There are tons of stuff you can do while on a mount, just not killing.
A less practical reason is to cut down twinking and PLing.
And what are you going to do when we're all charging for access?
All?
How long have you been around the Internet? Don't you get how this thing works? Of the 100,000,000 active domains out there, there will always be at least one that has the business model of only ad revenue. And since new agencies whore the news out to anyone with with a dozen readers, they'll have the same news as virtually all of the other dailys.
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
Why don't we also process outgoing HTML to get rid of tabs, linefeeds, and more than one concurrent space? It's all just wasting bandwidth!
And before you think I'm being facetious, there was a reasonably popular and just as ludicrous movement to do just this in the late 90's. Back when we were going to run out of bandwidth by 2003. One place I worked (as a freelance HTML coder) was religious about this. No page went live without going through a script that stripped rendered characters and, even image names and links were shortened to 3.3 characters. Until they lost the human-readable source and link database for one site and had to essentially de-obfuscate the entire site by hand.
Why would I go through that much effort? Why not just choose one of the nine possibilities randomly? Sure I'd only get it right 11% of the time, but it wouldn't take any skill or computational power.
Any CAPTCHA that lets you pick one of a selection is useless.
Perhaps if they had a little applet that asked you to rotate a 3d model to a matching orientation they'd be on to something, but I don't know how strong most people's 3d reasoning skills are.
Well of course deleting files could be crippling. Which is exactly why it would be a stupid thing for a hull breach app to do.
A modern virus/trojan/worm/etc doesn't want to be noticed. It wants to be an available node to be sold to the highest bidder. Just like a biological virus it can't spread if it kills or incapacitates its host.
Deleting files was something a virus did back in the 80's because hackers didn't have much imagination. That's not to say a terrorist organization couldn't buy the next payload and send out a "secure reformat on boot" app, but it would be a massive waste of a resource (a massive botnet is incredibly powerful/valuable tool not to be thrown away) and a foolishly indiscriminate target, even for terrorists. In any case they'd have to outbid the ordinary criminals who want it to spam, hijack, DoS, keylog, skim and blackmail.
...[This] is the first time I have seen the infection attributed to a Russian-area site.
We've been getting virtually free heating and cooling on our 64,000 cubic foot storage building for 20 years. We simply ran a 30 foot extension from the drainage tile in the neighboring field and put a fan on the end of it. Constant 60f air. Paying electricity for a medium sized fan beats the hell out of $3,000+ heating bills in February when it gets and stays below zero or August when it gets above 100f.
If a farmer could hack this together from spare parts 20 years ago, I can only hope that the technology has gotten much better since then.
Most of my clients know me only via phone number, email address, or chat alias. I still produce work and they still pay me.
My bank and my credit cards knows me by a made up user name. They still let me move my money around.
Amazon only knows me by a made up name and they trust me enough to take my money and ship goods to some address I just gave them.
The only thing controversial about serving documents via Facebook is that I don't know how you can verify delivery, which is kind of the whole point of serving papers.
If you give this to a teenager and think this means they won't be texting or talking on a cell phone while driving, you need to spend more time with teenagers.
Which is exactly the point. This device is being marketed to people who have no understanding of teenagers--Parents afraid that their little snowflake is going to roll the car while doing 200 in a school zone while on a conference call between their pimp and coke dealer on their way to an animal sacrifice while texting an elderly priest to meet them in an out-of-state motel room. ie: People who know nothing about teenagers.
Which gives me mixed feelings. On one hand I hate people making money from fear, on the other hand I like the idea of profiting from people who have more money than sense.
I only pay AT&T for DSL and mobile contract, though there's a small code named fee in there somewhere for not having a land line.
The hardest part of getting it hooked up was explaining to the incredulous operator that no, I don't in fact watch cable TV nor do I have any interest in it. (This was two years ago before mayors and President Elects were skipping TV and putting their addresses straight on YouTube.)
The answer to ethical questions is "What would be the result if everyone did this?"
In this case if everyone did this there are two obvious problems:
- There rarely be a second printings of a book. This deprives authors of (much needed and already rare) revenue.
- There would be no purpose to used book stores, putting them out of business and depriving their customers the ability to buy affordable books.
And probably a few more.
The "My preferred format" crap is just that. To use the oft abused car metaphor: If someone doesn't make a car I want in the color I want, I'm not allowed to steal it just so I can paint it the color I want.
Why are so many people driven away from your products with such dedication that they're not only using other products, but working unpaid to defeat them? People don't create free software of a whim, they do it with a purpose in mind. Here are my guesses in order of likleyhood:
- Your prices are astronomical for the market you're trying to serve, or the markets below them. Most add-ons are developed and priced for professionals to solve a hard problem. Your widget may do something that Big Clients like to pay $1000 a pop for, but you're probably overlooking the fact that Betty Blogger has some subset of the needs as well. And she sure as shit ain't going to pay $1K for it. Solution: Find out the features those guys are using, create a free or -very- low priced point for them to enter the market turning them from pirates and cheapskates into customers.
- You have crappy follow through. You apparently can identify needs, but you don't deliver satisfactory, leaving other people to innovate. What do these freebies do differently? Are they more user friendly? Do they have a slightly different focus or a better/different feature set or workflow? Fewer bugs, and fewer longstanding issues? If so look at hiring (perm or as a consultant) the developers of some of these things to help with your development.
- No one likes dealing with your company. Your software is buggy, or maybe no one can get a response from CS. User forums are full of bitching, the CEO posts to his blog about how ungrateful the customers are. They ignore suggestions from the community. Pre-sales questions are ignored if they're from Betty Blogger rather than C-Level Chris. There's no refund policy and support only comes C&P from a 3 ring binder. Solution: Human up. Climb out of your fortress and treat your customers like people you want to attract rather than bandits at your borders.
Oh, and get that "innovateordie" tag tattooed on your forehead.
If I can get a decade run on the iPhone then that's twice as long as I've gotten from any other architecture including the Playstation.
No, Apple doesn't promise that they won't change resolution or CPU, etc, but if you look at the devepmonet environement they've accounted for it much better than Andorid has. I've looked at both Dev kits. Have you? Apple clearly has a roadmap. Android has a cobbling of specifications. I like the idea of Android but the implementation is cringeworthy for anyone who wants to make a successful business.
At very least I can be sure that I won't have to allow for QWERTY, 1/2 QWERTY, touch screen QWERTY, touch+arrows, touch+arrows*90 degrees, and T9. That saves my team a few thousand dollars of dev time right there.
The smaller the game the more time you spend on the interface. When you can take nothing for granted on the interface, it takes even more time.
If you're making money at it, great for you. It shows you're more of a masochist than most. Lets meet up for coffee in two years and we can talk about where both of us were wrong.
Yup. Android still has the same problems that drove my company away from mobile development for years. There are just too many variables. Sure there's only one Android phone now, but a year from now... Here's a short list of variables that need to be accounted for on an android phone:
Resolution Aspect ratio Anamorphic pixels (yes, really, on a few handsets) Button placement and layout. (Nothing at all can be taken for granted. Not even the existence of buttons.) System permissions (which are determined on both a per model and per network basis.) Memory availability CPU speed. System events (incoming call handling, etc.) Optional input (GPS, Motion, multitouch, microphone, etc.)
"Yes" you say, "But don't I have to take into account these things on any desktop application?" No. Not to this extent. It's easy to make an interface that works at both 800x600 and 1920×1080. It's a much greater challenge to make one that looks good at 480x320 work at 128x160. (Even class A publishers are guilty of making games that are readable in HD but not SD. Phones are a much greater challenge.)
Catching and dealing with all of these fringe cases in programming and testing is a nightmare and significantly drives up the cost of something that is, frankly, very low margin to begin with. We found even developing for Palm was a better decision than mobile phones. (Though we even decided against that in the end.)
As one example of the blah of the market, the only reason anyone developed N-Gauge games was that Nokia financed 100% of the development.
However we're prototyping games for the iPhone at the moment. The SDK, path to market, and hardware support, and handsets in the field make it much more attractive than we've ever seen the mobile market in any country at any time.
Except fooling a computer that relies on robots.txt is pretty trivial. And if Google didn't abide by robots.txt then they'd catch hell for that.
Compared to the tens (hundreds) of millions of ads Google serves a day, a single one being unpleasant is not statistically significant. Go out there and find us some valid data.
Slashdot Mirror
After you build the house you don't keep the builders around. That would be awkward.
This is also false.
Go to this URL:
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html
Enjoy.
Well sure, but do you expect a lawyer getting paid by the hour to take that chance with his client mone--uh trademarks?
Good point, I should have submitted this post to testing before releasing it.
If your app isn't featured or favorited or otherwise supported by a major marketing push, you're doomed.
The little band of freelancers I work with have produce two games. One for ourselves. It was really very good, which bombed at the store. We've sold just a few hundred. We're small, we don't have a marketing budget.
The next game we bade was honestly no very fun. It was okay, not complete crap, but not great. It's been in the top 50 for several weeks.
What's the difference? That second game was done for a Major Developer who was able to spend 20x as much on marketing as development. (No joke.)
And even for them, there's no money in it for them. They're only there to show a success to shareholders and that they're beating the competition in a competitive marketplace. Couldn't have the independent devs getting the top spots, now could they? That'd be embarrassing.
The guys I know who have worked on Vegas slot machines are right up there with avionics programmers for writing reliably bulletproof code. And they're higher security. If one of them was ever looking for work I'd hire them in a second. If I could afford them.
Offshore Poker programmer? Meh. Not really a plus or a minus compared to most other web programmers. What else you got?
Forget independent scientists, Japan's government has been testing this for a number of years. It would be mandated in all new handsets so once there was a major disaster (and Japan loves it's natural disasters) emergency communication would be possible. Like the Emergency Broadcast System only not unidirectional.
Several years ago I saw a demo where text messages were relayed from phone to phone across most of Tokyo without ever connecting to the infrastructure. It wouldn't be fast, but it would be invaluably helpful with rescue and recovery efforts.
I'm also surprised to hear it isn't mandatory.
Typing was a mandatory class in my public high school in the late 80's. And while manually setting tab stops and figuring out how to center text on an electric typewriter are certainly wasted, the rest of the skills, learning to type efficiently without getting all carpel-tunnely, were very timely.
But of course at that time no one needed to type before high school. Now kids are typing as soon as they can recognize letters, and that's the time to teach typing. By high school they'll have long entrenched crappy behaviors that will be impossible to break, and frankly be a frustrating waste of time to all involved.
Server load is the primary reason you can't travel instantaneously everywhere. It prevents flashmobs from forming and driving performance through the ground. Walking/riding/flying is the in-world application of this concept. If it takes 10 minutes to get there, not everyone will come (because of course it's 10 minutes back.) Also as players approach a crowded area they ease into the lag and can decide to get away before they get into the middle of it. If humans could freely teleport around the planet, they would have crushed the UCLA Medical Center last Thursday.
From a design point of view it encourages social behavior to get people to travel in packs. The more social people are the more they play the game. In addition it becomes another improvement point for the player--faster travel, along with better armor/attack rating/spells, etc, etc. This gives players more options about what to pursue for their character which is good.
Besides time spent on a mount isn't wasted. There are tons of stuff you can do while on a mount, just not killing.
A less practical reason is to cut down twinking and PLing.
All?
How long have you been around the Internet? Don't you get how this thing works? Of the 100,000,000 active domains out there, there will always be at least one that has the business model of only ad revenue. And since new agencies whore the news out to anyone with with a dozen readers, they'll have the same news as virtually all of the other dailys.
Which is why this is a great move. Not for Murdoch or News Corps employees of course, but for all of the free news web sites out there. News Corp is removing its self from the gene pool and will drive traffic to the sites that 'get it'. And with increased traffic comes ad revenue, commenters ^H unpaid content providers, and with more revenue and more content they can offer a better product.
Owning a newspaper has always been about the vanity of owning a newspaper, they've never made money.
Why don't we also process outgoing HTML to get rid of tabs, linefeeds, and more than one concurrent space? It's all just wasting bandwidth!
And before you think I'm being facetious, there was a reasonably popular and just as ludicrous movement to do just this in the late 90's. Back when we were going to run out of bandwidth by 2003. One place I worked (as a freelance HTML coder) was religious about this. No page went live without going through a script that stripped rendered characters and, even image names and links were shortened to 3.3 characters. Until they lost the human-readable source and link database for one site and had to essentially de-obfuscate the entire site by hand.
Why would I go through that much effort? Why not just choose one of the nine possibilities randomly? Sure I'd only get it right 11% of the time, but it wouldn't take any skill or computational power.
Any CAPTCHA that lets you pick one of a selection is useless.
Perhaps if they had a little applet that asked you to rotate a 3d model to a matching orientation they'd be on to something, but I don't know how strong most people's 3d reasoning skills are.
Well of course deleting files could be crippling. Which is exactly why it would be a stupid thing for a hull breach app to do.
A modern virus/trojan/worm/etc doesn't want to be noticed. It wants to be an available node to be sold to the highest bidder. Just like a biological virus it can't spread if it kills or incapacitates its host.
Deleting files was something a virus did back in the 80's because hackers didn't have much imagination. That's not to say a terrorist organization couldn't buy the next payload and send out a "secure reformat on boot" app, but it would be a massive waste of a resource (a massive botnet is incredibly powerful/valuable tool not to be thrown away) and a foolishly indiscriminate target, even for terrorists. In any case they'd have to outbid the ordinary criminals who want it to spam, hijack, DoS, keylog, skim and blackmail.
You really don't get out much, do you.
We've been getting virtually free heating and cooling on our 64,000 cubic foot storage building for 20 years. We simply ran a 30 foot extension from the drainage tile in the neighboring field and put a fan on the end of it. Constant 60f air. Paying electricity for a medium sized fan beats the hell out of $3,000+ heating bills in February when it gets and stays below zero or August when it gets above 100f.
If a farmer could hack this together from spare parts 20 years ago, I can only hope that the technology has gotten much better since then.
What trog wrote the summary?
Most of my clients know me only via phone number, email address, or chat alias. I still produce work and they still pay me.
My bank and my credit cards knows me by a made up user name. They still let me move my money around.
Amazon only knows me by a made up name and they trust me enough to take my money and ship goods to some address I just gave them.
The only thing controversial about serving documents via Facebook is that I don't know how you can verify delivery, which is kind of the whole point of serving papers.
So... the most desirable applications for 64 bit Linux are virtual machines to run applications meant for somewhere else?
So much for the "mainstream" myth.
Which is exactly the point. This device is being marketed to people who have no understanding of teenagers--Parents afraid that their little snowflake is going to roll the car while doing 200 in a school zone while on a conference call between their pimp and coke dealer on their way to an animal sacrifice while texting an elderly priest to meet them in an out-of-state motel room. ie: People who know nothing about teenagers.
Which gives me mixed feelings. On one hand I hate people making money from fear, on the other hand I like the idea of profiting from people who have more money than sense.
I only pay AT&T for DSL and mobile contract, though there's a small code named fee in there somewhere for not having a land line.
The hardest part of getting it hooked up was explaining to the incredulous operator that no, I don't in fact watch cable TV nor do I have any interest in it. (This was two years ago before mayors and President Elects were skipping TV and putting their addresses straight on YouTube.)
Well lets face it: Two days ago if anyone had seen that photo they wouldn't have thought anything of it. Not that many would have seen it.
And now the whole Internet is looking at it and discussing its sexual/erotic potential.
Nicely done.
The answer to ethical questions is "What would be the result if everyone did this?"
In this case if everyone did this there are two obvious problems:
- There rarely be a second printings of a book. This deprives authors of (much needed and already rare) revenue.
- There would be no purpose to used book stores, putting them out of business and depriving their customers the ability to buy affordable books.
And probably a few more.
The "My preferred format" crap is just that. To use the oft abused car metaphor: If someone doesn't make a car I want in the color I want, I'm not allowed to steal it just so I can paint it the color I want.
Why are so many people driven away from your products with such dedication that they're not only using other products, but working unpaid to defeat them? People don't create free software of a whim, they do it with a purpose in mind. Here are my guesses in order of likleyhood:
- Your prices are astronomical for the market you're trying to serve, or the markets below them. Most add-ons are developed and priced for professionals to solve a hard problem. Your widget may do something that Big Clients like to pay $1000 a pop for, but you're probably overlooking the fact that Betty Blogger has some subset of the needs as well. And she sure as shit ain't going to pay $1K for it. Solution: Find out the features those guys are using, create a free or -very- low priced point for them to enter the market turning them from pirates and cheapskates into customers.
- You have crappy follow through. You apparently can identify needs, but you don't deliver satisfactory, leaving other people to innovate. What do these freebies do differently? Are they more user friendly? Do they have a slightly different focus or a better/different feature set or workflow? Fewer bugs, and fewer longstanding issues? If so look at hiring (perm or as a consultant) the developers of some of these things to help with your development.
- No one likes dealing with your company. Your software is buggy, or maybe no one can get a response from CS. User forums are full of bitching, the CEO posts to his blog about how ungrateful the customers are. They ignore suggestions from the community. Pre-sales questions are ignored if they're from Betty Blogger rather than C-Level Chris. There's no refund policy and support only comes C&P from a 3 ring binder. Solution: Human up. Climb out of your fortress and treat your customers like people you want to attract rather than bandits at your borders.
Oh, and get that "innovateordie" tag tattooed on your forehead.
If I can get a decade run on the iPhone then that's twice as long as I've gotten from any other architecture including the Playstation.
No, Apple doesn't promise that they won't change resolution or CPU, etc, but if you look at the devepmonet environement they've accounted for it much better than Andorid has. I've looked at both Dev kits. Have you? Apple clearly has a roadmap. Android has a cobbling of specifications. I like the idea of Android but the implementation is cringeworthy for anyone who wants to make a successful business.
At very least I can be sure that I won't have to allow for QWERTY, 1/2 QWERTY, touch screen QWERTY, touch+arrows, touch+arrows*90 degrees, and T9. That saves my team a few thousand dollars of dev time right there.
The smaller the game the more time you spend on the interface. When you can take nothing for granted on the interface, it takes even more time.
If you're making money at it, great for you. It shows you're more of a masochist than most. Lets meet up for coffee in two years and we can talk about where both of us were wrong.
Yup. Android still has the same problems that drove my company away from mobile development for years. There are just too many variables. Sure there's only one Android phone now, but a year from now... Here's a short list of variables that need to be accounted for on an android phone:
Resolution
Aspect ratio
Anamorphic pixels (yes, really, on a few handsets)
Button placement and layout. (Nothing at all can be taken for granted. Not even the existence of buttons.)
System permissions (which are determined on both a per model and per network basis.)
Memory availability
CPU speed.
System events (incoming call handling, etc.)
Optional input (GPS, Motion, multitouch, microphone, etc.)
"Yes" you say, "But don't I have to take into account these things on any desktop application?" No. Not to this extent. It's easy to make an interface that works at both 800x600 and 1920×1080. It's a much greater challenge to make one that looks good at 480x320 work at 128x160. (Even class A publishers are guilty of making games that are readable in HD but not SD. Phones are a much greater challenge.)
Catching and dealing with all of these fringe cases in programming and testing is a nightmare and significantly drives up the cost of something that is, frankly, very low margin to begin with. We found even developing for Palm was a better decision than mobile phones. (Though we even decided against that in the end.)
As one example of the blah of the market, the only reason anyone developed N-Gauge games was that Nokia financed 100% of the development.
However we're prototyping games for the iPhone at the moment. The SDK, path to market, and hardware support, and handsets in the field make it much more attractive than we've ever seen the mobile market in any country at any time.
Except fooling a computer that relies on robots.txt is pretty trivial. And if Google didn't abide by robots.txt then they'd catch hell for that.
Compared to the tens (hundreds) of millions of ads Google serves a day, a single one being unpleasant is not statistically significant. Go out there and find us some valid data.