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Put down the iPhone for a second, and consider what computing was about when it wasn’t all linked up like it is today. When machines needed to do stuff all by themselves, with no supplemental resources available to them. When local storage was all there was to be had. That is the context of the early machines: computers that blazed a path (which I think was not clear at the time even to their creators) for how people could use small machines, which we ever-so-preciously called microcomputers (compared to minicomputers such as the DEC VAX, which were all the rage in geek circles). These were the experiments that lead to the mainstream forms of personal computing that followed. A look back at programming the Altair 8080 and IMSAI 8080.
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We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data capacity of a single DVD to increase from 4.7 gigabytes up to one petabyte (1,000 terabytes). This is equivalent of 10.6 years of compressed high-definition video or 50,000 full high-definition movies. Removing cat photos and animated GIFs reduces the problem significantly.
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As a strong rule of thumb – show love to the audio folk of the venue you speak at. They know their stuff and it is up to them for you to be audible by the audience. Follow their advice and make their life easier and you’ll give a great talk. Christian Heilmann shares some great tips on successful conference speaking.
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More than passively eavesdropping, we're penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We're creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be "fired" against some piece of another country's electronic infrastructure on a moment's notice.... We're pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren't making the Internet any safer. We're reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We're ignoring resilience in favor of offense. Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century. Bruce Schneier: It's time to stop the madness.
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Quote: They can disrupt communications systems, disable national infrastructure, or, as in the case of Stuxnet, destroy nuclear reactors
It did no such thing...it caused damage to centrifuges used to refine nuclear material, it never did anything to reactors (probably because that could have been far too damaging). Either this person is trying for scare tactics, or they haven't fully researched their topic.
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Microsoft just announced that its much-maligned DRM policies won't look at all like they originally had originally been described. They're going to more relaxed, sort of like the PS3's. Good news, you say? No. Bad news. The Xbox One just got worse. But what? Isn't all DRM bad and anti-consumer? No. Often it is, sure. If applied in the ways that gaming culture has been anxious about for the past few weeks, it would be disastrous. But that's not what was really at stake. I actually agree with this: if you want last year's gaming experience, stick with Xbox 360.
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To play the other side for a moment...
Most developers will not be motivated (or have the resources) to create a used-games 'hub' market for their game. Why would they really want to spend all that R&D money just to allow people to take a slice of their potential revenue stream? I don't see it happening. It's not profitable. It would have to be Microsoft's job to make a loan-and-resell system either way and it didn't look like they were planning to do that. What happens if the developer goes out of business or gets bought and dissolved? Whoops, no more used game trading or loaning? These companies don't usually last forever.
New games could be cheaper? Sure, but why would they actually sell them cheaper when people are already used to paying so much? More speculation about what a kind-hearted CEO might decide to do out of good will and unicorn farts. I can buy a boxed game and a downloadable game for the same price either way from lots of vendors, so I don't see this happening much. In fact, I recently paid $60 for a download-only game that could have included a box and physical media and little fliers and stuff for the same price. What you'll probably see is the A-list games at normal price, and the crappy junk will be cheap, like on all the app stores today. I'd like to see the opposite happen though.
Steam is far from the only way PC gamers want to play games. Reference Minecraft, for one great stand-out example, which is not available through Steam. The article also mentioned Blizzard games, which don't go through Steam. WoW, Starcraft, Diablo, etc. didn't need Steam. Guild Wars 2, another giant example. League of Legends, where the community sucks and your points don't matter, also not through Steam. What we want is a minimum of HASSLE when we want to play, or need help with something that broke in the inevitably buggy DRM gatekeeper software. If I can just install it, or download it from a store, that's just great with me. Who cares what software runs it, as long as it stays out of the way and doesn't do anything untoward? Steam is an additional layer of cruft I have to wade through to get to my game and I really don't care about all the achievements or sales or who-plays-what or the screenshots of look at my horse it's totally amazing. It's not thrilling that random online acquaintances can judge your game playing ability by the achievements or hours-played, but whatever. Let's also remember the horrible thing that was/is Origin: These markets don't always work out.
Definitely would have been cool to have a physical copy basically be a proof-of-purchase that you can add to your account, such that you could login at your friends' house and wait two hours for the game to download and throw an error message about the Microsoft cloud being down again.
/puts on asbestos underwear
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djdanlib wrote: Sure, but why would they actually sell them cheaper when people are already used to paying so much?
Trends in digital marketplaces (especially Steam) have shown that revenue can actually be increased by reducing the price, even temporarily. Unfortunately, no one seems to be taking much notice and applying the same idea to physical media (to be fair, there are additional costs to physical media: manufacturing, transportation, stocking in a store, etc., but you can't tell me it's significantly more than a music CD or DVD movie, which sell for much less).
And, less related to the topic:
djdanlib wrote: Steam is an additional layer of cruft I have to wade through to get to my game
Funny, I always found it to be a faster way, just right click the tray icon and there's the 5 games I've most recently played (which are usually the ones I want to play currently), no need to hunt through the start menu/screen. The community aspects generally don't interest me either, but the messenger in the overlay is useful to talk to friends without having to switch out of the game completely. (But than again, I think all of your counter examples also include similar functionality to the chat.)
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I'm wondering why MS decided it had to be all one or the other. Offer disc based games that work just like they do on current platforms; and also offer downloadable games that work the way they originally announced. It'd take several years; but I suspect the latter would end up gradually eating the disc based market just like Steam/etc have done on the PC.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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No, it is the game developers' fault.
They should charge their new games based on the crappiness of the games, not based on the development costs, or they simply shouldn't develop crappy games if the crappiness based price won't make the game profitable.
I have stopped preordering games on Steam after getting screwed up so many times by the games I thought would rock and preordered, but turned out to be a complete crap. To name a few:
Rage:
stupid game world design: Large clans of angry English men and angry Russian men in the middle of North America, with no explanation how they managed to get there after a global near extinction level event. (also, how do they reproduce since they are ALL male?)
crappy no multiplayer: who'd have thought that iD would make a game without proper deatchmatch/team deathmatch?
Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
Uninteresting and repetitive gameplay
Absurd boss fights: you could make your character get Phd on CS and master stealth, but can't use any of these but your weapons in a boss fight
Jagged Alliace: Back in Action:
Plain bad AI that has to blatantly cheat because, it is so bad
Less depth from the previous game in the series
Aliens: Colonial Marines:
Just wrong on so many levels
Dead Island:
FPS Diablo clone with zombies and bad character models.
The first hour of gameplay summarizes pretty much everything.
Stupid leveling system & game design:
You are level 1, in a luxurious holiday resort: zombies (turned rich tourists) drop $1
You are level 50, in the ghettos: zombies (turned ghetto folk) drop $100
If I had bought these games on physical media, I wouldn't hesitate to return/sell/give away them after 1 or 2 hours into the game, but now they are just polluting my Steam game library for no reason other than I payed for them.
modified 24-Jun-13 9:06am.
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Microsoft has offered its basic Office Web Apps free to Outlook.com and Office 365 customers for over three years now, but one of the big drawbacks for students and businesses has been the lack of true real-time co-authoring. Google Docs has long supported real-time editing with multiple users, but the Office Web Apps have been fairly basic when it comes to editing documents alongside other users. Microsoft is planning to change this over the next few months, and the company is demonstrating the changes this week. Now friends and colleagues can mock your prose as you type.
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Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert. An interview with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google.
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I'm totally geeked out about Smart Watches. I always have been, from the original Microsoft SPOT watch (from 10 years ago!) to the Pebble, and now the AGENT Smart Watch from Secret Labs. Secret Labs are the folks that brought us the Netduino open source electronics platform that uses the .NET Micro Framework. It's pretty awesome that you can write C# and run it in 64k or in 64gigs, from the wrist to the cloud. It's a .NET Microframework Device and you can start writing apps now.
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Looks pretty neat. I'm curious what the resolution is.
Regardless, I think I'll wait for a smart watch with color and a touch screen. 
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The smart watch is exciting! people will not need adjust the watch date at the end of month.
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+1
Finally, a watch that's not real-time!
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Microsoft will release a test version of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD developers conference next week, but there's a chance that Windows update could go a long way towards hurting those developers, and slowing app growth in the Windows Store. Is there anything Microsoft can do to combat that? Reports say that among Windows 8.1's changes will be a boot-to-the-desktop option that allows people bypass the Start screen. Many users have been clamoring for it, because they find little use for the touch-oriented Start screen. That will certainly please users. But it may also hurt those, like many at the BUILD conference, who are writing so-called "Modern" apps for Windows 8. Metro, Modern... I guess we can call it "Postmodern" now.
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Many, many thousands of years ago I used an O/S called "GEM" (Graphical Environment Manager)[^] which used a "tile" style to lay out the "apps" on the screen - no overlapping windows here! It became a huge commercial success and is used by everyone on all the computers in the world today, not!
Finally MS is learning that "Windows" is perhaps a little more modern than "Modern".
By the way, DR was sued by Apple because GEM had the equivalent of the trash can - nothing changes.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Unlike other game making systems that focus on an engine/editor that happens to be able to call out to a scripting language, Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers. It's also meant to be portable (mostly courtesy of OpenGL/SDL/Freetype), allowing your games to be run on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android (in that order of maturity, currently). What did the lobster say to the mermaid? Nothing, lobsters can’t talk.
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is it free to programmer? how to download it?
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Did you read the article? The link to get it is there.
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Wow, haven't heard of anybody using SDL in a while. I used that to make Tunnels of Terror.
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If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running.... After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up. Learning to use the little nginx that could.
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We're talking a lot about "Mobile" solutions in the industry, but the umbrella that this moniker casts has become far too big to be useful and doesn't represent any particular scenario subset that's useful for planning services for "mobile" devices. Nearly every personal computing scenario that consumers encounter today is "mobile". This post is a personal perspective on "mobile" applications and how applications that run on devices labeled under this umbrella really enable a range of very different scenarios, and do require a different set of backend services, depending on the core scenario. Momma, momma! I went to town: inside, outside, batteries worn down.
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