"reduces non-linear time delays to a minimum"
Non-linear time delays? You mean cheap ethernet cables have TIME TRAVEL capability and these guys are charging us $10K to get RID of that?!
40 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2011
But will we ever need a petabyte of personal storage?
Depends on how high-resolution pr0n gets.
Or, barring that, storage will grow with perceived need as well. Eventually media enthusiasts will insist on nothing less than seven-point-one channel lossless audio and 8-to-16k video, or biometric systems will want even higher-resolution thumb- and eye-prints, or who knows what. A lot of this stuff will depend on throughput as well, but that will evolve alongside the average required capacity. Remember when 640k should have been enough for anyone? You're basically suggesting the same thing there, 30 years on.
Consider the precedent this sets, and you'll understand why people care. People forked over anywhere from $5-$10--genuine currency--for the game, plus extra money if they wanted more songs. This is a game with--aside from the ability to purchase more songs--no need for a centralized server, and with multiplayer options restricted to local play (via Bluetooth).
By pulling something like this, they're telling us that we don't OWN any of our iOS purchases, we simply LEASE them, and they get to decide when to pull the plug. Furthermore, even after the app declared an expiry date of one month, the app was still available for sale with no caveat emptor from EA. Now if that isn't an assy move, nothing is an assy move.
Yes--when you enable restrictions, you need to set a four-digit passcode to be used when you make changes later.
The other thing that should be done, I believe, is to never give a credit card number to any services which provide their own "wallet." Purchasing gift cards and redeem codes means a much more limited amount of cash that can be spent. Someone cracked my account last year but only spent the $20 I had in it on random in-game currencies instead of however much they could have milked from my credit card; the same thing can be done for kids by giving them one gift card (with maybe $10) and creating an iTunes account with that.
This also has the added bonus of teaching kids the (very) basic concepts of financial responsibility by limiting their purchase choices. To be sure, it's not budget balancing, but at least they'll get the idea that sometimes you have to evaluate what you want more because you can't have it all, even if the money doesn't exist in "real life."
While this is great for ridding the world of spambots, the next issue then becomes paid shills/astroturfers. Those will probably be much more difficult to suss out. On the plus side, paid shills are a lot more expensive and as such won't be nearly as frequent.
"Crucially, though, UV makes it possible to add higher resolutions or simply better copies - there's an audio drop-out in the current version, say - of existing files, easily and without troubling the customer."
...which also means they can seamlessly edit the movie and not notify the consumer. Unlikely to happen to anything but soundtrack replacements (music licenses, for example), but still, ultimately pretty not-nice.
I liked the idea of UV at the start, because I thought there would be a permanent repository of digital movies online. Now that I'm hearing more about things like "available online for a limited time," it's sounding less shiny. I could get paying minor increments to upgrade to a higher-resolution version of the video, but beyond that, Ultraviolet needs to work like a cloud-based locker to be something worth investing in, not a year-long rental service.
Stephen Hawking also made a "surprise" phone call to Jim Carrey during an interview on Conan O'Brien, too. I remember that because awesome.
Knowing his sense of humor (from lectures and his appearances in media), I'm not surprised at this in the least, and am happy for TBBT fans. (I watch and occasionally enjoy, and I think I'll enjoy this.)
I'm fairly certain Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, which used a precursor version of this engine, also had sloping walls and floors. It was certainly fully 3D and allowed for non-rectilinear walls.
This game was the bee's knees back in the day. For some reason I remember some of the robots towards the end indicating their presence by uttering robotic garbage that sounded like "the world is a big headband" to me.
On the other hand, Steam in the gaming industry is proof positive that DRM, when applied in the right manner, can be something people will turn out strongly in favor of. I understand the concept of DRM-free, but sometimes people don't care that there are fences if the field is large enough. That's what UV is shooting for, and we'll see if it hits its target.
It probably needs more advertising if it's going to survive, though. As is, if it crashes and fails, I can't imagine Hollywood trying again anytime soon. Which may be the point.
If Apple consumers were never supposed to be satisfied with Apple products, Apple would never be as successful as it is today.
No, you should be telling this to the companies manufacturing the devices. As consumers, our end of the deal is to purchase products and enjoy them. It's up to the companies to innovate and not be happy with their current lineup.
The problem with this then becomes its unattractiveness to legitimate independent novelists who would then have to resort to raising funds (like with Kickstarter), and only if they think they're actually going to make that money back. £10,000 is a lot. I'd think £50 would be enough to throw off the bottom line for spamovelists and make it unprofitable.