It's about the long term. I don't think users will migrate in great numbers from Steam to the Windows Store. But in time, new users will be familiar with the Windows Store, see lots of games available there and won't see the point of downloading & installing Steam. It's no so much about Windows 8 as it is about Windows 10 and later.
This hasn't been true since version 12. In that release they added an auto-updating service that runs in the background and handles installing updates without the user's permission.
Ah, that explains why my office mate was still on Firefox 6.0 without realizing he was way behind.
My colleague in the office at work does and he was still at version 6.0 or something a little while back because he didn't check his version for a while. I've never been this far behind, but I always have to update my Firefox manually by going through the about box when I read in own of my RSS feeds that a new version is out. I've never seen Firefox updating itself automagically like Chrome does.
Opera may be great, but I've never needed to bother to try it out, and aren't you supposed to pay for it?
Yes, the Opera browser is not free of charge. If you're living before the year 2000. The software was ad-supported for a while, but they dropped that back in 2005. It has been completely free (as in beer of course) ever since.
The problem is actually that Mozilla isn't forcing their updates upon users. Someone who doesn't check it "about Firefox" box in a while easily gets 6 versions behind in no time.
Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward without being obnoxious about it towards your users.
Yeah, there are no games for Linux because nobody uses Linux and nobody uses Linux because there are no games.
The sad thing is that Wine is somewhat of a solution for the "my games don't run on Linux" problem, but it's also the reason the number of games created for Linux is actually lowered, because a lot of the developers are simply writing for Windows and relying on Wine for Linux support.
Yeah but that took the better part of a decade and a half.
No, the transition of DOS to Windows went surprisingly quick. You just have to know when to start counting.
Before Windows 95, Windows was not really considered a full operating system by Microsoft or its users, but merely a GUI to run applications on top of DOS. This was nice for productivity apps or file management, but no gamer was interested in any of that. Most users were very aware of the fact Windows was running on top of DOS as most of them didn't even start Windows by default, but only launched it when needed. Windows didn't facilitate gaming in any way, but there was also no need as everyone was completely fine with running games straight from DOS with which they were already familiar with.
When Windows 95 came out, things changed as it was no longer possible to boot up to DOS and launch Windows later, as it was common with prior versions of Windows. So only when the GUI became the default environment, the need started to arise for games to run on the Windows platform instead of relying on DOS. The problem with this was however that Windows 95 didn't allow programs direct access to the hardware, which caused problems with achieving the required performance to run games properly. Microsoft actually saw this problem coming (oh how the times have changed) and started working on DirectX to solve this in 1994. By the end of 1995 (the year Windows 95 was released) the first version of DirectX became available to the public.
Just a year later in 1996 the first batch of "real" games became available which made use of this new technology (C&C: Red Alert and Diablo to name a few come to mind). In 1997 a huge amount of PC games were making use of DirectX to run directly in Windows (Age of Empires, Tomb Raider 2, Quake II, Dungeon Keeper etc. etc.). In 1998 the amount of games released for MS-DOS was close to zero.
All in all the transition from DOS to DirectX was one of the biggest leaps in PC gaming technology. And the entire operation was basically completed in under three years. It's one of the bigger success stories of the industry and certainly not something to talk down.
Because of the integration of Microsoft Marketplace in Windows 8 of course.
Games on Steam are non-exclusive. Nobody is preventing publishers who are already selling through Steam from adding their products to Microsoft Marketplace. In time this may mean people will look for games on Microsoft Marketplace (which is already on their system) and not even bother to download & install Steam.
The big difference is that Windows actually was just capable of shitty-looking Reversi or Solitaire back in the day when DOS was still the primary PC gaming platform. DirectX changed that and it was only after the release of DirectX that gaming on Windows became viable.
Linux however has had gaming capabilities for a long time, but still there's a huge lack of compelling titles. The reason why gaming on Linux isn't taking of is because of politics, not a technical reason like with DOS/Windows.
I'm not aware of any other functions of the home button than the four I've stated. Could you name one instead of pointing me towards Google?
Well, you can't. See, the single-press on the home button doesn't always just bring you to the home screen.
The only situation I can think of is when you are already at your home screen. Pressing the button in that situation brings you to the search screen. Pressing the home button again brings to back home again, as it does in any other situation. I don't see how that is "bad design". It seems to make sense in my view.
The "absurd number of functions crammed into the home button" is actually four.
- click to go home - double click to quickly switch to another application - hold for voice control - combine with power button for a screenshot
Lots of people are able to comprehend this, but the real beauty is that people who aren't able to work this out don't have to. If you don't care about learning how your device works, you can simply ignore the extra functions and just use the home button as the home button. Nothing wrong with that.
The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA.
He does know Dolly died at the age of six, while the average life span of sheep is at least twice that long and lots of sheep (when properly cared for) live up to 20 years?
Unless he's ok with his T-Rex barely reaching adulthood, he might want to look elsewhere for better cloning scientists.
He answers only to the CEO, as do all senior VP's. There are just nine of these guys and they're each responsible for a fundamental aspect of Apple's operation.
I agree most corporate titles are complete bullshit, and I'm sure there are also lots of these folks running around at Apple Inc. But imho Apple's Senior VPs aren't really part of that nonsense as their titles actually show their responsibility and function pretty well.
The widening gap between the tech savvy and the average consumer really is more serious of a problem in IT than any company dares to admit. It's pretty crazy to be in a business where you sell products and services to customers who don't really know what it is they're purchasing.
Most people say they use "Google", although most are also easy to admit they do not know what a browser is, according to this little investigation by Google: http://youtu.be/o4MwTvtyrUQ
Other people point out the low quality of apps in the Google Play store as a cause of all the piracy, but I think it's actually the other way around. Not a lot of developers are willing to invest time and money into making high quality software for a platform where most users don't pay for their applications. The odds of getting your investment back and making a little profit are a lot better on other platforms.
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It's about the long term. I don't think users will migrate in great numbers from Steam to the Windows Store. But in time, new users will be familiar with the Windows Store, see lots of games available there and won't see the point of downloading & installing Steam. It's no so much about Windows 8 as it is about Windows 10 and later.
This hasn't been true since version 12. In that release they added an auto-updating service that runs in the background and handles installing updates without the user's permission.
Ah, that explains why my office mate was still on Firefox 6.0 without realizing he was way behind.
My colleague in the office at work does and he was still at version 6.0 or something a little while back because he didn't check his version for a while. I've never been this far behind, but I always have to update my Firefox manually by going through the about box when I read in own of my RSS feeds that a new version is out. I've never seen Firefox updating itself automagically like Chrome does.
Opera may be great, but I've never needed to bother to try it out, and aren't you supposed to pay for it?
Yes, the Opera browser is not free of charge. If you're living before the year 2000. The software was ad-supported for a while, but they dropped that back in 2005. It has been completely free (as in beer of course) ever since.
The problem is actually that Mozilla isn't forcing their updates upon users. Someone who doesn't check it "about Firefox" box in a while easily gets 6 versions behind in no time.
Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward without being obnoxious about it towards your users.
Yeah, there are no games for Linux because nobody uses Linux and nobody uses Linux because there are no games.
The sad thing is that Wine is somewhat of a solution for the "my games don't run on Linux" problem, but it's also the reason the number of games created for Linux is actually lowered, because a lot of the developers are simply writing for Windows and relying on Wine for Linux support.
Why would this be such a tall order? Everything on your list Microsoft already does with Xbox Live.
Yeah but that took the better part of a decade and a half.
No, the transition of DOS to Windows went surprisingly quick. You just have to know when to start counting.
Before Windows 95, Windows was not really considered a full operating system by Microsoft or its users, but merely a GUI to run applications on top of DOS. This was nice for productivity apps or file management, but no gamer was interested in any of that. Most users were very aware of the fact Windows was running on top of DOS as most of them didn't even start Windows by default, but only launched it when needed. Windows didn't facilitate gaming in any way, but there was also no need as everyone was completely fine with running games straight from DOS with which they were already familiar with.
When Windows 95 came out, things changed as it was no longer possible to boot up to DOS and launch Windows later, as it was common with prior versions of Windows. So only when the GUI became the default environment, the need started to arise for games to run on the Windows platform instead of relying on DOS. The problem with this was however that Windows 95 didn't allow programs direct access to the hardware, which caused problems with achieving the required performance to run games properly. Microsoft actually saw this problem coming (oh how the times have changed) and started working on DirectX to solve this in 1994. By the end of 1995 (the year Windows 95 was released) the first version of DirectX became available to the public.
Just a year later in 1996 the first batch of "real" games became available which made use of this new technology (C&C: Red Alert and Diablo to name a few come to mind). In 1997 a huge amount of PC games were making use of DirectX to run directly in Windows (Age of Empires, Tomb Raider 2, Quake II, Dungeon Keeper etc. etc.). In 1998 the amount of games released for MS-DOS was close to zero.
All in all the transition from DOS to DirectX was one of the biggest leaps in PC gaming technology. And the entire operation was basically completed in under three years. It's one of the bigger success stories of the industry and certainly not something to talk down.
Because of the integration of Microsoft Marketplace in Windows 8 of course.
Games on Steam are non-exclusive. Nobody is preventing publishers who are already selling through Steam from adding their products to Microsoft Marketplace. In time this may mean people will look for games on Microsoft Marketplace (which is already on their system) and not even bother to download & install Steam.
The big difference is that Windows actually was just capable of shitty-looking Reversi or Solitaire back in the day when DOS was still the primary PC gaming platform. DirectX changed that and it was only after the release of DirectX that gaming on Windows became viable.
Linux however has had gaming capabilities for a long time, but still there's a huge lack of compelling titles. The reason why gaming on Linux isn't taking of is because of politics, not a technical reason like with DOS/Windows.
I'm not aware of any other functions of the home button than the four I've stated. Could you name one instead of pointing me towards Google?
Well, you can't. See, the single-press on the home button doesn't always just bring you to the home screen.
The only situation I can think of is when you are already at your home screen. Pressing the button in that situation brings you to the search screen. Pressing the home button again brings to back home again, as it does in any other situation. I don't see how that is "bad design". It seems to make sense in my view.
The "absurd number of functions crammed into the home button" is actually four.
- click to go home
- double click to quickly switch to another application
- hold for voice control
- combine with power button for a screenshot
Lots of people are able to comprehend this, but the real beauty is that people who aren't able to work this out don't have to. If you don't care about learning how your device works, you can simply ignore the extra functions and just use the home button as the home button. Nothing wrong with that.
This is why my grandmother can use an iPad.
Ah, so you could keep popping out little dino's that die once they start to get dangerous. That's actually pretty clever!
Yeah, that's what I would say too if I were a failing sheep cloning scientist.
Scientifically it would be amazing. But I don't think it will exactly make up for the investment as a tourist attraction.
The billionaire has already been in touch with the scientists who helped clone Dolly the sheep to see what it would take to clone a dinosaur from DNA.
He does know Dolly died at the age of six, while the average life span of sheep is at least twice that long and lots of sheep (when properly cared for) live up to 20 years?
Unless he's ok with his T-Rex barely reaching adulthood, he might want to look elsewhere for better cloning scientists.
So tell me, which modern operating system is a joy to use with only 2 gigs or memory? Windows 8? Ubuntu 12.04? I don't think so.
The real killer feature is that ML is faster than Lion and runs better on systems with less than 4 GB of RAM.
He answers only to the CEO, as do all senior VP's. There are just nine of these guys and they're each responsible for a fundamental aspect of Apple's operation.
I agree most corporate titles are complete bullshit, and I'm sure there are also lots of these folks running around at Apple Inc. But imho Apple's Senior VPs aren't really part of that nonsense as their titles actually show their responsibility and function pretty well.
The widening gap between the tech savvy and the average consumer really is more serious of a problem in IT than any company dares to admit. It's pretty crazy to be in a business where you sell products and services to customers who don't really know what it is they're purchasing.
Most people say they use "Google", although most are also easy to admit they do not know what a browser is, according to this little investigation by Google: http://youtu.be/o4MwTvtyrUQ
Right. So Windows is successful as an open platform because it allows others to run close platforms on it (or "stores" as everybody calls them now).
Doesn't that just proves the point that actual money is to be made in closed platforms?
You said it exactly right.
Other people point out the low quality of apps in the Google Play store as a cause of all the piracy, but I think it's actually the other way around. Not a lot of developers are willing to invest time and money into making high quality software for a platform where most users don't pay for their applications. The odds of getting your investment back and making a little profit are a lot better on other platforms.
Good luck with that. I sincerely mean it.
Too low for what?
Too low for independent developers to make any money from.