Surely load times are the one thing that's got better over time, or maybe I'm just too old that I can remember playing games off cassettes (five minutes to load then the thing would crash and you'd have to rewind and start again). For me the big issue is that I tend towards things like sandbox games/free roaming RPGs. Unless I can finish the game over the course of a few days, going back even a month later can be incredibly frustrating when the game does little to remind me of what I was doing prior to the break, and even worse when it's vague on what I'm meant to be doing next. This seems to be the aspect of these games that's most overlooked. Give me a screen with all of my recent quests/dialogue/sidequests and a summary of where I am in the story, a decent map and clear instructions about where I'm meant to go next and I'll happily go back and finish the game. This goes for DLC, too - if you want me to go back to the game in six months to play an expansion, don't leave me lost with no idea what's meant to be happening.
I'm sure the reporter doesn't even care. He got his "OMG former Apple guy says Android will win" shock headline, he's already forgotten it and moved on to the next sensationalist story. This is only of interest to people who like to hear the facts, and those people doubtless don't buy that guy's newspaper. As for apologising, have you read a newspaper lately? Apologies come if they're forced by court action, and even then they'll be a two line retraction buried somewhere nobody will ever see. I always thought there should be a law that said if newspapers misquoted or outright lied, they should be forced to give the same prominence to the retraction as they did to the original story (i.e. if the original story was on the front-page and spread over three more pages inside, they should be made to lead with a front-page apology and three page retraction). That might get them to care more about the truth!
This. I admit I didn't RTFA the first time around, but I never got the impression from the summary or the comments that he was saying anything about the quality of either OS. He was talking purely quantity, and it's fairly obvious that Android's main competition is not iOS (which is locked to a single device) but every other mobile OS that sells over a multitude of handsets. Given the showing from those other operating systems so far, I'd say it's actually pretty clear Android will end up as the dominant OS unless Google makes some serious missteps.
Having experience of both Android market place and the App store, I can say that both suffer from a high rate of dross to a low rate of gems. There are probably more gems on the App store (understandable, it's been around longer and it attracted the first big wave of mobile app developers in this new generation of smart-phones for the masses), but you still have to wade through a lot of rubbish to find them. The one thing that really surprises me about Android is just how difficult it is to find decent apps - not that they aren't there, but simply that the search interface isn't up to the task. I generally really like my Desire, but I would have thought the one thing Google could absolutely nail (and maybe leapfrog ahead of Apple) is the ability to search for apps. At the moment it's much better to use a third party website or a service like Appbrain than it is to look for apps on the phone.
I'm with O2 (if you wanted an example of the "biggest", they're apparently the third largest network, by subscriber numbers, in the whole world) and there is practically zero "controlling what I do" with my Android phone. A splash screen, and the name "O2" at the top of the pull down notification menu seems to be the extent of their control. I've never run into an issue installing or accessing any of the features of my phone. On top of that, I could have bought the exact same contract through a third party handset provider (like these guys) and even the minimal branding wouldn't be on there.
It's incredibly speculative, but I suppose Amazon do have good form - they've already survived one burst dot com bubble, so as far as "risky" ventures go, they're as close as you can get to a safe bet (even if they failed someone would buy them out just for the name). They also arguably have a lot more revenue channels they can explore, meaning it's easier for them to respond to their customers than Apple, who rely on a set of core (sorry, pun not intended) products today that themselves rely on holding people's interests tomorrow. To a certain degree the same goes for Google (they have diversity but their revenue is all ad-based so it's all based around getting more eyes on their customer's ads than anyone else).
Even HTC have some gems - I love my HTC Desire, it doesn't feel like a "cheapie version" of iPhone 4, it feels like a quality handset that's got its own individual style rather than copying someone else (I really like the brushed-metal button placement, a big omission for iPhone IMHO and evidence that you can have buttons on a touch screen device and still have it feel classy and minimalist).
I suspect such a limitation would be an incentive to carriers not to update more than once. Much better for them if you have to buy a new phone to access the marketplace and they get to lock you in for another 18 months.
If you want true freedom with the iPhone, you have to jailbreak it. If you want true freedom with an Android phone, you sometimes have to root it, depending on carrier. I fail to see how the former is a better choice simply because you know from the outset that you're not getting freedom.
It seems like a pretty flaky way to ruin the guy, considering how much difficulty victims have in securing a conviction where there has been a rape (either because it's difficult to collect evidence or because a lot of the time it comes down to one person's word against another). If there were shady government-funded agencies at work here, couldn't they have come up with something that left no shadow of doubt as to guilt to ensure a conviction, an acquaintance stabbed and a bloody knife found in his car, or indecent images planted on his computer or something? It seems like subjecting him to a craps shoot where there's a reasonable chance he'll come out of it looking better than he went in isn't the best way to ruin him (of course, it could be a double bluff because they know they'll get a conviction, but it's a lot riskier rigging a trial than planting some evidence).
What it got him? According to the Wikipedia article, he did hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage yet was fined only $10,000 and escaped jail time and instead was given community service. Since then it looks like he's had a pretty full and rewarding career in the industry. I agree what he unleashed was bad for the world (although if not him, someone else would have done it soon), but from a personal perspective it doesn't seem to have done him too much harm - he was even awarded tenure at MIT, the very university he released the worm from to disguise the fact that it actually came from a grad student at Cornell!
It's Microsoft's legendary marketing department in action. "A story's about to break about some innovative use of clever technology that's only just been released? That might cause people to look on MS products, and by extraction the company itself, favourably! Quick, let's put out a press release about how Kinect watches you channel surfing in your underwear."
True, but a remote control mechanism that you have to go cover up/uncover every time you need to use it doesn't seem very effective. Unfortunately I suspect most people would just take the privacy hit and leave it uncovered. It raises a LOT of tricky issues though. What are they capturing precisely and where does it go (if they're capturing video for instance, is all the analytics done locally and the video discarded, or does the stream get sent back to MS or even out to third parties - considering these are going to get a lot of use from kids that sounds like an instant recipe for a PR disaster).
Simpler and more effective to have the drone remotely controlled by a human. It might seem cheaper to have them autonomous, but they'd be too easily fooled - for instance, put a pistol inside a doll, the robot thinks you're innocently carrying a child, bang - one dead lump of expensive hardware, how do you react to that, shoot on sight anyone carrying a baby?
Indeed. I used to leave the ads on because they didn't bother me and occasionally you'd see a funny one that everyone would be talking about the next day. However, I have pretty sensitive hearing and if I have the TV at a volume that is right for the programs, I physically can't stand to sit through ads any more, I have no choice but to instantly change channel (or just DVR everything and fast forward the ads). I guess there must be enough people for who this isn't an issue to make it worth their annoying a few potential customers, but I honestly can't see how anyone can willingly sit through ads anymore.
I thought Kinect did that out of the box - I remember reading that it used facial recognition to sign you into your account. Did they drop this? And if not, what happens if you're one of identical twins?
Well the ideal distance for the sensors is apparently 6-8 feet. Unless you can get very close to the objects you're mapping, I'm guessing it'd be too lossy to just mount on a car and drive around. Having said that, maybe the data would still be "good enough" to render a very rough 3D landscape (i.e. probably good enough for most people's purposes). I'd definitely be interested to see the results of such a test.
It was particularly telling that they demonstrated this with a single player game. Considering practically every game these days has multiplayer bolted on whether it needs it or not, are people generally going to be happy not only going back to the days of single player only, but then having even that experience watered down with the kind of lag you'd find in multiplayer. I agree with you - if they can make this work with current generation internet infrastructure (or hell, anything within the next decade) without it being a horrible experience, I'll be the first to eat humble pie. I just can't see it happening.
When has one producer's ability to lock out competition and prevent sale of used copies ever led to anything other than a price hike to take advantage of the effective monopoly? Publishers are less afraid of pirates than they are of a completely free market.
Even though it's a joke it's probably not far from the truth. A dry scientific explanation is never going to make front-page on the millions of blogs, while "INVISIBILITY CLOAK NOW MONTHS AWAY!" is a shoe-in (unfortunately). Of course, you also then get a subset of scientists overstating their case to garner exactly this response, which doesn't help matters at all.
Also, I think it's easier to be a convincing generalist than a convincing specialist there's always someone with more experience than you). So don't do just SQL, or just.Net, or just Linux. Show them you know a bit of everything, and can learn new stuff quickly, and tell in your CV what specific kinds of things are still on your to-learn list.
Definitely this. When I'm hiring a contractor/freelancer for a one-off job, I want specialist knowledge. When I'm hiring someone permanent, experience is always great but really what I want to see is that they have some interest beyond just slotting into a specific role for the sake of job security. If nothing else, showing that you have a broader interest than just.NET gives the impression that you're not just in this for the 9-5 but actually have a genuine desire to learn. I would also add that, even while out of work, there are things you can involve yourself in to show potential employers that you weren't just bumming around. Try writing to local business and offer your services cheap or even free, try and get involved with local charities or community events. It might pay little or nothing short term but if it lands you the job you want long term then it's as good as money in the bank. Finally, depending on location, you might consider doing some contracting - the lack of experience is a bit of a draw back but I know plenty of successful contractors who started out with less (just be realistic about earning potential until you get more experience), even during a downturn there's usually plenty of contract work (often more so, because companies look to get people in for short term projects rather than hiring permanent developers).
Slashdot Mirror
Surely load times are the one thing that's got better over time, or maybe I'm just too old that I can remember playing games off cassettes (five minutes to load then the thing would crash and you'd have to rewind and start again). For me the big issue is that I tend towards things like sandbox games/free roaming RPGs. Unless I can finish the game over the course of a few days, going back even a month later can be incredibly frustrating when the game does little to remind me of what I was doing prior to the break, and even worse when it's vague on what I'm meant to be doing next. This seems to be the aspect of these games that's most overlooked. Give me a screen with all of my recent quests/dialogue/sidequests and a summary of where I am in the story, a decent map and clear instructions about where I'm meant to go next and I'll happily go back and finish the game. This goes for DLC, too - if you want me to go back to the game in six months to play an expansion, don't leave me lost with no idea what's meant to be happening.
I'm sure the reporter doesn't even care. He got his "OMG former Apple guy says Android will win" shock headline, he's already forgotten it and moved on to the next sensationalist story. This is only of interest to people who like to hear the facts, and those people doubtless don't buy that guy's newspaper. As for apologising, have you read a newspaper lately? Apologies come if they're forced by court action, and even then they'll be a two line retraction buried somewhere nobody will ever see. I always thought there should be a law that said if newspapers misquoted or outright lied, they should be forced to give the same prominence to the retraction as they did to the original story (i.e. if the original story was on the front-page and spread over three more pages inside, they should be made to lead with a front-page apology and three page retraction). That might get them to care more about the truth!
This. I admit I didn't RTFA the first time around, but I never got the impression from the summary or the comments that he was saying anything about the quality of either OS. He was talking purely quantity, and it's fairly obvious that Android's main competition is not iOS (which is locked to a single device) but every other mobile OS that sells over a multitude of handsets. Given the showing from those other operating systems so far, I'd say it's actually pretty clear Android will end up as the dominant OS unless Google makes some serious missteps.
Having experience of both Android market place and the App store, I can say that both suffer from a high rate of dross to a low rate of gems. There are probably more gems on the App store (understandable, it's been around longer and it attracted the first big wave of mobile app developers in this new generation of smart-phones for the masses), but you still have to wade through a lot of rubbish to find them. The one thing that really surprises me about Android is just how difficult it is to find decent apps - not that they aren't there, but simply that the search interface isn't up to the task. I generally really like my Desire, but I would have thought the one thing Google could absolutely nail (and maybe leapfrog ahead of Apple) is the ability to search for apps. At the moment it's much better to use a third party website or a service like Appbrain than it is to look for apps on the phone.
I'm with O2 (if you wanted an example of the "biggest", they're apparently the third largest network, by subscriber numbers, in the whole world) and there is practically zero "controlling what I do" with my Android phone. A splash screen, and the name "O2" at the top of the pull down notification menu seems to be the extent of their control. I've never run into an issue installing or accessing any of the features of my phone. On top of that, I could have bought the exact same contract through a third party handset provider (like these guys) and even the minimal branding wouldn't be on there.
It's incredibly speculative, but I suppose Amazon do have good form - they've already survived one burst dot com bubble, so as far as "risky" ventures go, they're as close as you can get to a safe bet (even if they failed someone would buy them out just for the name). They also arguably have a lot more revenue channels they can explore, meaning it's easier for them to respond to their customers than Apple, who rely on a set of core (sorry, pun not intended) products today that themselves rely on holding people's interests tomorrow. To a certain degree the same goes for Google (they have diversity but their revenue is all ad-based so it's all based around getting more eyes on their customer's ads than anyone else).
I guess it just goes to show that certain newspapers can get greater marketshare and still be crappy.
Even HTC have some gems - I love my HTC Desire, it doesn't feel like a "cheapie version" of iPhone 4, it feels like a quality handset that's got its own individual style rather than copying someone else (I really like the brushed-metal button placement, a big omission for iPhone IMHO and evidence that you can have buttons on a touch screen device and still have it feel classy and minimalist).
I suspect such a limitation would be an incentive to carriers not to update more than once. Much better for them if you have to buy a new phone to access the marketplace and they get to lock you in for another 18 months.
If you want true freedom with the iPhone, you have to jailbreak it. If you want true freedom with an Android phone, you sometimes have to root it, depending on carrier. I fail to see how the former is a better choice simply because you know from the outset that you're not getting freedom.
It seems like a pretty flaky way to ruin the guy, considering how much difficulty victims have in securing a conviction where there has been a rape (either because it's difficult to collect evidence or because a lot of the time it comes down to one person's word against another). If there were shady government-funded agencies at work here, couldn't they have come up with something that left no shadow of doubt as to guilt to ensure a conviction, an acquaintance stabbed and a bloody knife found in his car, or indecent images planted on his computer or something? It seems like subjecting him to a craps shoot where there's a reasonable chance he'll come out of it looking better than he went in isn't the best way to ruin him (of course, it could be a double bluff because they know they'll get a conviction, but it's a lot riskier rigging a trial than planting some evidence).
[...] (as opposed to lawful coercion?)
I think that's usually referred to as "dating".
What it got him? According to the Wikipedia article, he did hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage yet was fined only $10,000 and escaped jail time and instead was given community service. Since then it looks like he's had a pretty full and rewarding career in the industry. I agree what he unleashed was bad for the world (although if not him, someone else would have done it soon), but from a personal perspective it doesn't seem to have done him too much harm - he was even awarded tenure at MIT, the very university he released the worm from to disguise the fact that it actually came from a grad student at Cornell!
It's Microsoft's legendary marketing department in action. "A story's about to break about some innovative use of clever technology that's only just been released? That might cause people to look on MS products, and by extraction the company itself, favourably! Quick, let's put out a press release about how Kinect watches you channel surfing in your underwear."
True, but a remote control mechanism that you have to go cover up/uncover every time you need to use it doesn't seem very effective. Unfortunately I suspect most people would just take the privacy hit and leave it uncovered. It raises a LOT of tricky issues though. What are they capturing precisely and where does it go (if they're capturing video for instance, is all the analytics done locally and the video discarded, or does the stream get sent back to MS or even out to third parties - considering these are going to get a lot of use from kids that sounds like an instant recipe for a PR disaster).
Simpler and more effective to have the drone remotely controlled by a human. It might seem cheaper to have them autonomous, but they'd be too easily fooled - for instance, put a pistol inside a doll, the robot thinks you're innocently carrying a child, bang - one dead lump of expensive hardware, how do you react to that, shoot on sight anyone carrying a baby?
Indeed. I used to leave the ads on because they didn't bother me and occasionally you'd see a funny one that everyone would be talking about the next day. However, I have pretty sensitive hearing and if I have the TV at a volume that is right for the programs, I physically can't stand to sit through ads any more, I have no choice but to instantly change channel (or just DVR everything and fast forward the ads). I guess there must be enough people for who this isn't an issue to make it worth their annoying a few potential customers, but I honestly can't see how anyone can willingly sit through ads anymore.
I thought Kinect did that out of the box - I remember reading that it used facial recognition to sign you into your account. Did they drop this? And if not, what happens if you're one of identical twins?
Well the ideal distance for the sensors is apparently 6-8 feet. Unless you can get very close to the objects you're mapping, I'm guessing it'd be too lossy to just mount on a car and drive around. Having said that, maybe the data would still be "good enough" to render a very rough 3D landscape (i.e. probably good enough for most people's purposes). I'd definitely be interested to see the results of such a test.
It was particularly telling that they demonstrated this with a single player game. Considering practically every game these days has multiplayer bolted on whether it needs it or not, are people generally going to be happy not only going back to the days of single player only, but then having even that experience watered down with the kind of lag you'd find in multiplayer. I agree with you - if they can make this work with current generation internet infrastructure (or hell, anything within the next decade) without it being a horrible experience, I'll be the first to eat humble pie. I just can't see it happening.
When has one producer's ability to lock out competition and prevent sale of used copies ever led to anything other than a price hike to take advantage of the effective monopoly? Publishers are less afraid of pirates than they are of a completely free market.
Even though it's a joke it's probably not far from the truth. A dry scientific explanation is never going to make front-page on the millions of blogs, while "INVISIBILITY CLOAK NOW MONTHS AWAY!" is a shoe-in (unfortunately). Of course, you also then get a subset of scientists overstating their case to garner exactly this response, which doesn't help matters at all.
Surely suggesting that your hosting service is cloud based when it's not is fraud, or am I missing something?
Also, I think it's easier to be a convincing generalist than a convincing specialist there's always someone with more experience than you). So don't do just SQL, or just .Net, or just Linux. Show them you know a bit of everything, and can learn new stuff quickly, and tell in your CV what specific kinds of things are still on your to-learn list.
Definitely this. When I'm hiring a contractor/freelancer for a one-off job, I want specialist knowledge. When I'm hiring someone permanent, experience is always great but really what I want to see is that they have some interest beyond just slotting into a specific role for the sake of job security. If nothing else, showing that you have a broader interest than just .NET gives the impression that you're not just in this for the 9-5 but actually have a genuine desire to learn. I would also add that, even while out of work, there are things you can involve yourself in to show potential employers that you weren't just bumming around. Try writing to local business and offer your services cheap or even free, try and get involved with local charities or community events. It might pay little or nothing short term but if it lands you the job you want long term then it's as good as money in the bank. Finally, depending on location, you might consider doing some contracting - the lack of experience is a bit of a draw back but I know plenty of successful contractors who started out with less (just be realistic about earning potential until you get more experience), even during a downturn there's usually plenty of contract work (often more so, because companies look to get people in for short term projects rather than hiring permanent developers).
Actually bacteria are generally considered to be the first things ever to crack the game of life.