Areed - it's at the point where fees become transparent to the customer that people will begin shopping around. Currently, in the UK at least, the merchant usually swallows the fee (and probably distributes it across all payment methods so they can have a single price point). It's rare to see a fee advertised for using credit over debit cards (and when there is a fee it's usually flat across all credit cards), but for something like regular eBay purchases, a minor % difference could be enough to motivate people to move.
Said systems were designed decades ago and are at the point where they would be naturally decommissioned shortly anyway. Modern systems are much safer, but like most human endeavours the first footsteps on the path were often frought with danger. I wouldn't have wanted to fly the first plane but these days the risk is barely a factor for consideration, or look at advances in medicine and surgery - what is routine today is only routine because early pioneers put their lives on the line to get us here.
Regardless, it dispells a few myths about Macs being impenetrable. They're not as soft a target as Windows but clearly still exploitable - if that gets a few more people thinking about security instead of falling into the trap of complacency, it's probably no bad thing even if it's not truly representative of the situation "in the wild".
It's still a non-trivial task that they're now considering doubling. And for what purpose? They'd need the (expensive if it's a government service) IT infrastructure to support this, they'd prevent people without mobiles from sending letters (unless they keep both methods, in which case it's even more insane), I'm not seeing the upside. Well, I guess it would pretty much end anonymous mail, which conspiracy theorists might think is the reason, but I'm failing to see a sane reason.
They might not play Crysis, but they can certainly play Angry Birds. Have a think about which has sold more copies before you dismiss phones as gaming devices (and for a lot of these devices the UI is the problem when it comes to gaming - having a dock with a full keyboard and mouse would eliminate that problem). When the average user is happy playing Farmville, the phone is already capable of meeting the gaming needs of most people.
Just because it doesn't suit your needs, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a "failure". I have a beefy desktop machine for doing image manipulation and video encoding, but most of my computing time at home is spent using my little ultraportable laptop for exactly the kind of tasks this device is optimised for. I would guess in the average home this is going to be closer to optimal than an over specified power PC. How close to optimal it actually is will determine whether it's a failure or not, but it's certainly an interesting idea and almost certainly the way things will go in the future.
Aside from the fact that there are ads in GMail, the very fact that they're providing a service that makes people happy and that people then associate that with their name and are more likely to use their other services will generate them income elsewhere. To ignore that is to suggest that advertising doesn't work, and there's a multi-billion dollar industry out there that would seem to suggest otherwise.
Actually, given the technical ability of the average person, that's probably not a bad thing. This way they have at least some chance of someone technically competent at Google solving the issue for them. If they'd stored it locally and wiped it they'd probably be kissing goodbye to it instead of having a reasonable chance of recovering it. For most people's lolcat and pyramid mails that's a good enough solution - obviously if you're relying on it for storing your company accounts then that's another matter.
I think even that would be a happy compromise for those sites - after all it's the current position and it seems to work (besides, people who hate ads enough to jump through the additional hoops probably wouldn't buy anyway). What isn't in anyone's interests is for the major browser to block all ads by default - I say this as someone who has had adblock installed almost from day one but rarely uses it. I don't mind site owners getting paid based on my viewing their content but it's also nice to know I have a fallback if I ever come across an ad that abuses its position. This move will more likely either mean much more pervasive advertising across the board with measures to prevent blocking or everything moves to a subscription model (and a lot of niche interest sites die out through lack of financial support).
IE has conditional comments which would be the obvious method of blocking content to IE users and wouldn't be negated by UA-spoofing (not to mention that users capable of spoofing the user agent probably already have plenty of options for ad blocking using alternative browsers + plugins).
Why does there have to be an alternative to protectionism? Why not just protectionism but taken to a reasonable degree. Go after the pirates and ban modded consoles from connecting to your network, but don't physically raid people's homes and take away their property and buy laws that criminalise them because they have the audacity to play around with a piece of kit they legally purchased.
It might not be easy to make a PS3 game, but certainly for a big company with experience of doing so it creates another avenue for making profit without giving any of it to Sony. I'm thinking something like a free download with a subscription model that would cut Sony out of the loop entirely, or just a paid download system (ala Steam) so that Sony don't get a cut of the physical media distribution. You then only need one or two developers to make a success of that route for the others to follow in droves.
You're confusing hard drive and hard disk. GP is correct - non-technical users often referred to 3.5" disks as hard disks (probably fairly understandably, since the case they were enclosed in was much more inflexible than the previous 5.25" incarnation), while the box under the monitor is often the "hard drive".
If you start arbitrarily changing the meaning of words people stop understanding what you mean.
English has been evolving for centuries. Even the term "bricked" is an evolution of the language (and a very recent one at that). Expecting language at this point in time to suddenly become immutable in order to make communication easier in the future is a nice dream but it will never happen. Spend the day speaking Chaucerian English and let us know how you get on communicating with others.
It's a valid question - since so many kids manage to get hold of and play the games even with a mature rating. Is it really more damaging for a kid to watch a movie about a guy killing his way through an underwater world than to play a game where he is the guy killing his way through said world? Or is it all about difficulty of policing one versus the other?
Even the game copped out to some extent by making it (eventually) pay off more to not harvest the sisters (via gifts they give you towards the end of the game). A really much tougher choice would be to punish the player more for not harvesting, so that the morally good path is much more difficult (y'know, largely like real life). Otherwise I agree with your point entirely - even the basic gameplay mechanic, whether you play it "good" or "evil", boils down to "genetically engineered assassin kills off the mentally ill", which is always going to struggle to play as a teen movie.
The problem is that the people responsible for the standards are failing. Too long phases between the key gateways, huge periods where the standard is effectively finalised but nor formalised, while the people developing browsers have to implement something or they get accused of not supporting the standards. IE gave the standards committee the perfect platform to sort this mess out but they have dropped the ball - I agree it's still the right way to do it but maybe they're not the right people.
This one should be different because, as is obvious to everyone, this is more and more going to have to compete with mobile phones. A huge selection of which allow generic SD memory use. It's just one extra inconvenience of buying this for gaming over a good phone (which, as a bonus, operates as a phone).
You would have a valid point if we could trust any of these companies not to change the terms after they've drawn in a large user base. We already know Sony's track record on that.
Whether you agree with the reason or not, you have to admit that, by screwing over OtherOS users, Sony have gifted this excuse to the modders. Great example of shooting yourself in the foot to save a few pennies.
Moreover, if MW2 is a realistic simulation of your airport security model, you probably need to begin by looking at your security model rather than MW2. They're seriously underestimating terrorists if they think they're incapable of working out that large_crowd_of_people == good_target, though.
Not useful for clicking in a web browser but much better for scrolling - rear pad for scroll, thumbstick for cursor and button or stick click for page click sounds like a combination which would make reading documents or using the web on a handheld device a lot more comfortable than it currently is. Maybe they're thinking outside the gaming realm (although I can also think of ways they could start to incorporate it into games, too).
Agreed, and especially not for a major gaming session (like a looong plane/train/coach/car journey). Having said that, I can see more possibilities for 3D in games than I can for 3D in movies right now, I'd expect this to be marginally the more popular of the two formats in the immediate future.
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Areed - it's at the point where fees become transparent to the customer that people will begin shopping around. Currently, in the UK at least, the merchant usually swallows the fee (and probably distributes it across all payment methods so they can have a single price point). It's rare to see a fee advertised for using credit over debit cards (and when there is a fee it's usually flat across all credit cards), but for something like regular eBay purchases, a minor % difference could be enough to motivate people to move.
Said systems were designed decades ago and are at the point where they would be naturally decommissioned shortly anyway. Modern systems are much safer, but like most human endeavours the first footsteps on the path were often frought with danger. I wouldn't have wanted to fly the first plane but these days the risk is barely a factor for consideration, or look at advances in medicine and surgery - what is routine today is only routine because early pioneers put their lives on the line to get us here.
Regardless, it dispells a few myths about Macs being impenetrable. They're not as soft a target as Windows but clearly still exploitable - if that gets a few more people thinking about security instead of falling into the trap of complacency, it's probably no bad thing even if it's not truly representative of the situation "in the wild".
It's still a non-trivial task that they're now considering doubling. And for what purpose? They'd need the (expensive if it's a government service) IT infrastructure to support this, they'd prevent people without mobiles from sending letters (unless they keep both methods, in which case it's even more insane), I'm not seeing the upside. Well, I guess it would pretty much end anonymous mail, which conspiracy theorists might think is the reason, but I'm failing to see a sane reason.
They might not play Crysis, but they can certainly play Angry Birds. Have a think about which has sold more copies before you dismiss phones as gaming devices (and for a lot of these devices the UI is the problem when it comes to gaming - having a dock with a full keyboard and mouse would eliminate that problem). When the average user is happy playing Farmville, the phone is already capable of meeting the gaming needs of most people.
Just because it doesn't suit your needs, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's a "failure". I have a beefy desktop machine for doing image manipulation and video encoding, but most of my computing time at home is spent using my little ultraportable laptop for exactly the kind of tasks this device is optimised for. I would guess in the average home this is going to be closer to optimal than an over specified power PC. How close to optimal it actually is will determine whether it's a failure or not, but it's certainly an interesting idea and almost certainly the way things will go in the future.
If it were that simple, Sony could just arrange for a third party distributor to bring them into Europe.
Aside from the fact that there are ads in GMail, the very fact that they're providing a service that makes people happy and that people then associate that with their name and are more likely to use their other services will generate them income elsewhere. To ignore that is to suggest that advertising doesn't work, and there's a multi-billion dollar industry out there that would seem to suggest otherwise.
Actually, given the technical ability of the average person, that's probably not a bad thing. This way they have at least some chance of someone technically competent at Google solving the issue for them. If they'd stored it locally and wiped it they'd probably be kissing goodbye to it instead of having a reasonable chance of recovering it. For most people's lolcat and pyramid mails that's a good enough solution - obviously if you're relying on it for storing your company accounts then that's another matter.
I think even that would be a happy compromise for those sites - after all it's the current position and it seems to work (besides, people who hate ads enough to jump through the additional hoops probably wouldn't buy anyway). What isn't in anyone's interests is for the major browser to block all ads by default - I say this as someone who has had adblock installed almost from day one but rarely uses it. I don't mind site owners getting paid based on my viewing their content but it's also nice to know I have a fallback if I ever come across an ad that abuses its position. This move will more likely either mean much more pervasive advertising across the board with measures to prevent blocking or everything moves to a subscription model (and a lot of niche interest sites die out through lack of financial support).
IE has conditional comments which would be the obvious method of blocking content to IE users and wouldn't be negated by UA-spoofing (not to mention that users capable of spoofing the user agent probably already have plenty of options for ad blocking using alternative browsers + plugins).
That's exactly what Kang and Kodos are waiting for. On that day, our superior intellect won't be a match for their puny weapons.
Why does there have to be an alternative to protectionism? Why not just protectionism but taken to a reasonable degree. Go after the pirates and ban modded consoles from connecting to your network, but don't physically raid people's homes and take away their property and buy laws that criminalise them because they have the audacity to play around with a piece of kit they legally purchased.
It might not be easy to make a PS3 game, but certainly for a big company with experience of doing so it creates another avenue for making profit without giving any of it to Sony. I'm thinking something like a free download with a subscription model that would cut Sony out of the loop entirely, or just a paid download system (ala Steam) so that Sony don't get a cut of the physical media distribution. You then only need one or two developers to make a success of that route for the others to follow in droves.
You're confusing hard drive and hard disk. GP is correct - non-technical users often referred to 3.5" disks as hard disks (probably fairly understandably, since the case they were enclosed in was much more inflexible than the previous 5.25" incarnation), while the box under the monitor is often the "hard drive".
If you start arbitrarily changing the meaning of words people stop understanding what you mean.
English has been evolving for centuries. Even the term "bricked" is an evolution of the language (and a very recent one at that). Expecting language at this point in time to suddenly become immutable in order to make communication easier in the future is a nice dream but it will never happen. Spend the day speaking Chaucerian English and let us know how you get on communicating with others.
It's a valid question - since so many kids manage to get hold of and play the games even with a mature rating. Is it really more damaging for a kid to watch a movie about a guy killing his way through an underwater world than to play a game where he is the guy killing his way through said world? Or is it all about difficulty of policing one versus the other?
Even the game copped out to some extent by making it (eventually) pay off more to not harvest the sisters (via gifts they give you towards the end of the game). A really much tougher choice would be to punish the player more for not harvesting, so that the morally good path is much more difficult (y'know, largely like real life). Otherwise I agree with your point entirely - even the basic gameplay mechanic, whether you play it "good" or "evil", boils down to "genetically engineered assassin kills off the mentally ill", which is always going to struggle to play as a teen movie.
The problem is that the people responsible for the standards are failing. Too long phases between the key gateways, huge periods where the standard is effectively finalised but nor formalised, while the people developing browsers have to implement something or they get accused of not supporting the standards. IE gave the standards committee the perfect platform to sort this mess out but they have dropped the ball - I agree it's still the right way to do it but maybe they're not the right people.
This one should be different because, as is obvious to everyone, this is more and more going to have to compete with mobile phones. A huge selection of which allow generic SD memory use. It's just one extra inconvenience of buying this for gaming over a good phone (which, as a bonus, operates as a phone).
You would have a valid point if we could trust any of these companies not to change the terms after they've drawn in a large user base. We already know Sony's track record on that.
Whether you agree with the reason or not, you have to admit that, by screwing over OtherOS users, Sony have gifted this excuse to the modders. Great example of shooting yourself in the foot to save a few pennies.
Moreover, if MW2 is a realistic simulation of your airport security model, you probably need to begin by looking at your security model rather than MW2. They're seriously underestimating terrorists if they think they're incapable of working out that large_crowd_of_people == good_target, though.
Not useful for clicking in a web browser but much better for scrolling - rear pad for scroll, thumbstick for cursor and button or stick click for page click sounds like a combination which would make reading documents or using the web on a handheld device a lot more comfortable than it currently is. Maybe they're thinking outside the gaming realm (although I can also think of ways they could start to incorporate it into games, too).
Agreed, and especially not for a major gaming session (like a looong plane/train/coach/car journey). Having said that, I can see more possibilities for 3D in games than I can for 3D in movies right now, I'd expect this to be marginally the more popular of the two formats in the immediate future.