It doesn't even need to be that direct to have a real impact. How many criminals will slip the net because a police force that's already under pressure to make drastic cuts to meet tightening public spending targets is suddenly fielding hundreds of calls to report setting up legitimate geocaches?
The aim of terrorism is to disrupt the daily lives of others and spread fear. They've got us so on edge that we'll shut down a town for the sake of a plastic tupperware box that wasn't even planted by a terrorist. I'd say that's mission accomplished? When you get to the point where you don't even need bombs or martyrs anymore to throw a spanner in the works of everyone's daily lives, yeah that's an indicator you're winning.
Much as I think the current patent system is screwed, if we didn't have anything, all that would happen is the little guy would get walked over. Not many inventors creating products in their shed could afford to bankroll factories to produce the goods ahead of the competitors, and the second they showed it to a big company with a view to investment without some kind of protection, they'd have their idea stolen. In my view each additional patent you secure should increase the cost to secure more exponentially. That would allow the little guy to secure a handful of patents while effectively preventing global corporations from patenting hundreds or thousands of ideas (they'd have to cherry pick what was worth protecting and what could go to the open market).
True, but then having said that, I don't think $3,800 is a bad return for a bedroom developer's hobbyist project. It might not be feasible as a business model, but to pick up some pocket money while learning your art and getting some good experience on your CV it's not a bad route to go down - especially as you don't have any hassle over how to accept micropayments, it's all done for you. Not to mention there's a LOT of gargbage on there, which potentially means any halfway decent game is seeing much higher returns but the average is skewed by all the dross.
I was just wondering about that, on the one hand you have a client who needs ratings to get subscribers and possibly has cash to spend to secure that, on the other hand you don't want to tarnish the integrity of your rating system. I expect the ratings here to be under some close scrutiny for the next few months, anything "odd" is likely to be flagged instantly - it'll be interesting to see how it plays out and whether NYT can weather the storm if they are being heavily voted down.
Exactly this - we have a policy of no live deployments after 3pm and no live deployments on a friday whatsoever unless the client is willing to pay for out of hours support, yet we still get account managers promising clients exactly this at least once a fortnight (to which we usually tell them to go back and tell the client no, because we've been bitted too many times before). It's all well and good the client saying they're happy to accept the risks, but they have to then actually be willing to, y'know, accept the risks.
Generally when it comes to cameras the one that costs more does take better pictures, even if it does so at a lower MP. Megapixels are a fairly useless indicator of picture quality, I've seen 5MP cameras outperform cheap 12MP cameras that produce nasty, grainy photos, and if a sales rep tried to sell me on "More MP must be better" line I'd quickly walk away. Cables, on the other hand, once you've risen above the russian roulette price range, are a prime example where paying over the odds gives you a vastly diminishing ROI.
Indeed - the problem in all of this is not that scientists are arguing about the facts, it's that the media and politicians feel they should get involved at all. All they do is muddy the waters, they've turned skepticism from a healthy scientific steer into some kind of insult, meanwhile everyone is on some kind of crusade to save the planet without wondering a) if their actions are having any effect or b) whether that's just another form of interfering with nature's cycles. I'd love to know the answers but I can't hear the discussion for all of the shouting.
It's "News for nerds." What's your definition of nerd? I'm a developer working with web technologies but I also hold a degree in law. This kind of stuff is incredibly interesting to me because it plays to my interest in the law as well as potentially having a direct impact in the applications I'm building/working with on a daily basis in my job. You're never going to find news that's interesting to every single person in a sufficiently large group, even when that group has broadly similar interests. You could always stop clicking the links you don't find interesting, it's not like this thread is using up a limited slot that a more technical/scientific thread could occupy.
I have no strong feelings either way about social gaming (I don't play those games and I'm not particularly drawn to them), however, to say they're not fun because they're addictive and habit forming and are a means to get more money from users is like saying alcohol is not fun for the exact same reasons (it's addictive, it often relies on the fact that your friends are doing it, and the producers will do anything to sell you another bottle, after all, they care more about making money than producing a cultured, vintage drinking experience). This is not some kind of slave trade we're talking about - if people didn't enjoy the games, wouldn't they move on and find other ways to amuse themselves? Just because we can't see the point, it doesn't make them pointless.
The problem is most PHBs aren't qualified to know good code from bad. They don't realise that the extra hours are just churning out garbage, they just know "Ooh, we wrote an extra X thousand lines of code in the same time period as my predecessor". They'd probably have a better product in about half the time if they restricted work hours and made sure their employees were well rested.
That's pretty much the standard for all games. For portable games it's far more convenient to be able to put your entire collection on a flash drive (backed up in case it gets lost or stolen while you're out and about) and take it with you than to carry a bunch of little disks or cartidges - not to mention support for things like saving the exact state - not everyone has enough free time that they can play to the next arbitrary in game checkpoint. For non-portable games you get to ditch the DRM, or play from HDD without needing the disk. Even taking piracy wholly out of the picture it's still, in pretty much every case, better to have a cracked version of the games you own.
One of the reasons I rarely buy games from bricks and mortar stores now is that I always insist on a sealed copy. Over here in the UK I only know one retailer who sell games sealed over the counter as standard, everywhere else you have to be lucky to get one just as new stock is in and they've not yet opened them. It's not because I'm worried they've played it, but more that I don't trust them to throw the disks in those stupid little card sleeves without scratching them, and I know how hard it is to get a scratched game exchanged.
Somehow I doubt it. Look at the cinema comparison. Going to the cinema is like owning this game while buying a DVD/BDR is like owning a regular game - yet it still costs me double the DVD price to take myself and my GF to watch a movie at the cinema, even though it's less comfy than my living room, I have to put up with people walking in front of me to go to the toilet or playing with their phones and I can't fast forward the advertisements and I can only watch it once unless I pay again. In every way the home solution is better, but we don't see massive price slashes in cinemas.
That's assuming Gamestop are happy at being cut out of the resale market, which is apparently incredibly lucrative for them. If you're reliant on the store pushing your products to customers, it's a bit of a risk to steal their profitable business right out from under them - I guess it's less of an issue with online stores, I wonder what the online/offline split is for the average game.
Dead right - if they make it inconvenient for legitimate customers to play the game without stripping DRM, they're basically encouraging their paying customers to go learn all the skills they need to pirate. From there surely it's a small step for a lot of people to just cut out the whole payment part of the process. That's especially the case if you live in a jurisdiction where DRM circumvention is illegal anyway - in that case you've already broken the law just to make it easier to play something you legally own, what's the disincentive of going that bit further?
You're forgetting all of the people who sit in between and both love the slick styling AND the ability to customise their own device how they like. This move doesn't really affect people from group A (they want the security so more security is only good for them) or group B (they hate the current level of lock down so more of it won't change their minds) but it has a huge impact on people from group C who now potentially have a sacrifice to make either way.
For the average user, they won't even notice the difference. The issue are the edge case users - people who want Apple styling but still want control over their device. I don't know if those people exist in sufficient numbers (or if they value customisation over styling sufficiently) to hurt Apple on sales of a more locked down device, but it sounds like Apple is banking on the answer being no.
If all boxes could do that, we'd also see the crisis in our education system averted, as the kids have no reason to stay home anymore...
Aside from lack of engagement in boring lessons, being bullied at school, peer pressure, parents who takes kids out of school during term time (to be able to go on cheaper holidays or whatever), etc. I knew plenty of kids who skipped school all the time, none of them stayed home and watched TV, if kids are doing that then it sounds more like they're doing it because it's all that's available and they'd still skip school and do something else if the TV wasn't on (after all, if they have DVR they can record shows if they really care about missing stuff, so it can't be the "entertainment value" of TV that's causing them to stay home).
Better use of flash technology would be a big help, too. Not only is the hard drive in the average DVR sucking up more juice, it's also hotter and usually noisier (since they often use the cheapest drive they can source). Again, it doesn't necessarily have to record everything to the flash drive, a smallish 4 or 8GB drive would give a few hours of recording time for live TV.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't even need to be that direct to have a real impact. How many criminals will slip the net because a police force that's already under pressure to make drastic cuts to meet tightening public spending targets is suddenly fielding hundreds of calls to report setting up legitimate geocaches?
The aim of terrorism is to disrupt the daily lives of others and spread fear. They've got us so on edge that we'll shut down a town for the sake of a plastic tupperware box that wasn't even planted by a terrorist. I'd say that's mission accomplished? When you get to the point where you don't even need bombs or martyrs anymore to throw a spanner in the works of everyone's daily lives, yeah that's an indicator you're winning.
If they're based on components that nobody else has access to and won't for some time
If nobody else had access to capacitive touchscreen
And if you can find them... maybe you can hire the A(pple) Team...
Much as I think the current patent system is screwed, if we didn't have anything, all that would happen is the little guy would get walked over. Not many inventors creating products in their shed could afford to bankroll factories to produce the goods ahead of the competitors, and the second they showed it to a big company with a view to investment without some kind of protection, they'd have their idea stolen. In my view each additional patent you secure should increase the cost to secure more exponentially. That would allow the little guy to secure a handful of patents while effectively preventing global corporations from patenting hundreds or thousands of ideas (they'd have to cherry pick what was worth protecting and what could go to the open market).
Could be interesting for cycling fanatics if it let you ride famouse bike race routes from the comfort of your own home.
Works fine for me in the UK, where are you?
True, but then having said that, I don't think $3,800 is a bad return for a bedroom developer's hobbyist project. It might not be feasible as a business model, but to pick up some pocket money while learning your art and getting some good experience on your CV it's not a bad route to go down - especially as you don't have any hassle over how to accept micropayments, it's all done for you. Not to mention there's a LOT of gargbage on there, which potentially means any halfway decent game is seeing much higher returns but the average is skewed by all the dross.
I was just wondering about that, on the one hand you have a client who needs ratings to get subscribers and possibly has cash to spend to secure that, on the other hand you don't want to tarnish the integrity of your rating system. I expect the ratings here to be under some close scrutiny for the next few months, anything "odd" is likely to be flagged instantly - it'll be interesting to see how it plays out and whether NYT can weather the storm if they are being heavily voted down.
Exactly this - we have a policy of no live deployments after 3pm and no live deployments on a friday whatsoever unless the client is willing to pay for out of hours support, yet we still get account managers promising clients exactly this at least once a fortnight (to which we usually tell them to go back and tell the client no, because we've been bitted too many times before). It's all well and good the client saying they're happy to accept the risks, but they have to then actually be willing to, y'know, accept the risks.
Generally when it comes to cameras the one that costs more does take better pictures, even if it does so at a lower MP. Megapixels are a fairly useless indicator of picture quality, I've seen 5MP cameras outperform cheap 12MP cameras that produce nasty, grainy photos, and if a sales rep tried to sell me on "More MP must be better" line I'd quickly walk away. Cables, on the other hand, once you've risen above the russian roulette price range, are a prime example where paying over the odds gives you a vastly diminishing ROI.
Indeed - the problem in all of this is not that scientists are arguing about the facts, it's that the media and politicians feel they should get involved at all. All they do is muddy the waters, they've turned skepticism from a healthy scientific steer into some kind of insult, meanwhile everyone is on some kind of crusade to save the planet without wondering a) if their actions are having any effect or b) whether that's just another form of interfering with nature's cycles. I'd love to know the answers but I can't hear the discussion for all of the shouting.
It's "News for nerds." What's your definition of nerd? I'm a developer working with web technologies but I also hold a degree in law. This kind of stuff is incredibly interesting to me because it plays to my interest in the law as well as potentially having a direct impact in the applications I'm building/working with on a daily basis in my job. You're never going to find news that's interesting to every single person in a sufficiently large group, even when that group has broadly similar interests. You could always stop clicking the links you don't find interesting, it's not like this thread is using up a limited slot that a more technical/scientific thread could occupy.
I personally want to get into the game industry just so I can have something fun to play in my leisure time once again...
Good luck with that. From what I gather, if you get into the game industry you won't have any leisure time.
I have no strong feelings either way about social gaming (I don't play those games and I'm not particularly drawn to them), however, to say they're not fun because they're addictive and habit forming and are a means to get more money from users is like saying alcohol is not fun for the exact same reasons (it's addictive, it often relies on the fact that your friends are doing it, and the producers will do anything to sell you another bottle, after all, they care more about making money than producing a cultured, vintage drinking experience). This is not some kind of slave trade we're talking about - if people didn't enjoy the games, wouldn't they move on and find other ways to amuse themselves? Just because we can't see the point, it doesn't make them pointless.
Theoretically I have unlimited free text messages, but I'm pretty sure my phone company wouldn't thank me for testing this out :)
The problem is most PHBs aren't qualified to know good code from bad. They don't realise that the extra hours are just churning out garbage, they just know "Ooh, we wrote an extra X thousand lines of code in the same time period as my predecessor". They'd probably have a better product in about half the time if they restricted work hours and made sure their employees were well rested.
That's pretty much the standard for all games. For portable games it's far more convenient to be able to put your entire collection on a flash drive (backed up in case it gets lost or stolen while you're out and about) and take it with you than to carry a bunch of little disks or cartidges - not to mention support for things like saving the exact state - not everyone has enough free time that they can play to the next arbitrary in game checkpoint. For non-portable games you get to ditch the DRM, or play from HDD without needing the disk. Even taking piracy wholly out of the picture it's still, in pretty much every case, better to have a cracked version of the games you own.
One of the reasons I rarely buy games from bricks and mortar stores now is that I always insist on a sealed copy. Over here in the UK I only know one retailer who sell games sealed over the counter as standard, everywhere else you have to be lucky to get one just as new stock is in and they've not yet opened them. It's not because I'm worried they've played it, but more that I don't trust them to throw the disks in those stupid little card sleeves without scratching them, and I know how hard it is to get a scratched game exchanged.
Somehow I doubt it. Look at the cinema comparison. Going to the cinema is like owning this game while buying a DVD/BDR is like owning a regular game - yet it still costs me double the DVD price to take myself and my GF to watch a movie at the cinema, even though it's less comfy than my living room, I have to put up with people walking in front of me to go to the toilet or playing with their phones and I can't fast forward the advertisements and I can only watch it once unless I pay again. In every way the home solution is better, but we don't see massive price slashes in cinemas.
That's assuming Gamestop are happy at being cut out of the resale market, which is apparently incredibly lucrative for them. If you're reliant on the store pushing your products to customers, it's a bit of a risk to steal their profitable business right out from under them - I guess it's less of an issue with online stores, I wonder what the online/offline split is for the average game.
Dead right - if they make it inconvenient for legitimate customers to play the game without stripping DRM, they're basically encouraging their paying customers to go learn all the skills they need to pirate. From there surely it's a small step for a lot of people to just cut out the whole payment part of the process. That's especially the case if you live in a jurisdiction where DRM circumvention is illegal anyway - in that case you've already broken the law just to make it easier to play something you legally own, what's the disincentive of going that bit further?
You're forgetting all of the people who sit in between and both love the slick styling AND the ability to customise their own device how they like. This move doesn't really affect people from group A (they want the security so more security is only good for them) or group B (they hate the current level of lock down so more of it won't change their minds) but it has a huge impact on people from group C who now potentially have a sacrifice to make either way.
For the average user, they won't even notice the difference. The issue are the edge case users - people who want Apple styling but still want control over their device. I don't know if those people exist in sufficient numbers (or if they value customisation over styling sufficiently) to hurt Apple on sales of a more locked down device, but it sounds like Apple is banking on the answer being no.
If all boxes could do that, we'd also see the crisis in our education system averted, as the kids have no reason to stay home anymore...
Aside from lack of engagement in boring lessons, being bullied at school, peer pressure, parents who takes kids out of school during term time (to be able to go on cheaper holidays or whatever), etc. I knew plenty of kids who skipped school all the time, none of them stayed home and watched TV, if kids are doing that then it sounds more like they're doing it because it's all that's available and they'd still skip school and do something else if the TV wasn't on (after all, if they have DVR they can record shows if they really care about missing stuff, so it can't be the "entertainment value" of TV that's causing them to stay home).
Better use of flash technology would be a big help, too. Not only is the hard drive in the average DVR sucking up more juice, it's also hotter and usually noisier (since they often use the cheapest drive they can source). Again, it doesn't necessarily have to record everything to the flash drive, a smallish 4 or 8GB drive would give a few hours of recording time for live TV.