This is an inflammatory headline that does justice neither to the NGOs nor to the people commenting about the NGOs.
A better headline would be "Health experts believe Bill and Melinda Gates could save more lives by modifying resource allocation" or something like that.
I'm not a writer so it could probably be stated better but you get the idea. The guy isn't saying what they are doing is bad, which the headline implies, but rather that resource spending could be further optimized.
You're basically asserting a hardline-principle ethic for them. However, as someone once said, "principles are what people die for," so you might agree that the relationship between IAP and desirability of play is a little more nuanced than, "well why don't you murder it out of your life, then?"
But that's the whole point of IAPs; it's exactly what JonFish85's top-level comment says: this is an abusive relationship. It hurts you, but you keep coming back for more.
No. I'm fully capable of ignoring games based on my principles. He chooses to be in that "relationship" despite not liking it. It's his own problem, his own responsibility. He supports it despite his own reasoning, which is stupid, but it's his choice.
Which is exactly why I've said it should be regulated like gambling; You hear the exact same dysfunctional, illogical reasoning from compulsive gamblers.
We have regulation to protect children from this with old-fashioned gambling, but none for F2P/IAP.
I've absolutely no problem with adults letting themselves in for it, but there needs to be more effort to reduce the harm to children - and ultimately their parents wallets!
So you disagree with laws banning children from casinos and other gambling venues? That's all I'm proposing the equivalent of. Not new regulation, but placing certain categories of F2P/IAP games within the existing gambling laws.
PS: Please don't use a thread quote mark for something I didn't say.
You are using "think of the children" argument were you not.
Parents are the ones who should keep kids out of casinos not the state. There are parents who buy their kids scratch tickets. Even with the laws, you can't stop bad parenting, and when you start to legislate things to save the children you ruin things for everyone. Right now the new South Park game is less available in Australia and Germany because they think of the children so much, they want to censor and protect so much, that adults can't have what they want. What effect does this have? Kids want what they can't have more. In states where alcohol is more restricted kids try to get it more, because it's cool. In states where alcohol is less of a big deal instead of idealizing getting drunk people apologize for their friends who do drink too much. Better parenting, better families is the solution not more laws!!!!!
>F2P/IAP games within the existing gambling laws
No. If there is no monetary gain possible then it's not gambling (pretend things are not real, things owned by other people are not your property). If you care then spend your own time and money to help to get parents to understand that it's their job to protect and educate their own children and not any problem of the rest of us. Don't try to give states more power to steal more liberties just so you can build up another fantasy of doing something.
You don't see this from the right perspective. You might be the special snowflake that is invulnerable to manipulation and has the ability to always choose rationally. But many people don't. It's abusive by definition, because the game makers are deliberately using proven methods of tricking people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do.
You wouldn't call something a manipulation method if it was effective only if the target wanted it to be. Brains are imperfect machines, and people making those games are malicious hackers exploiting cognitive bugs for profit.
>tricking people into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do
Look at all of these people getting tricked into playing stupid match three games! Stupid sheep liking trash - that's a bug! They should like what I like! I have actual taste and plays real games and not this shit no one would play. They would pay for power? Bah! No one pays to have advantages. Sports competitors don't spend thousands of dollars to give themselves slight advantages in physical events. Why would anyone do that. Speaking of which, why would anyone support Duck Dynasty??? It must be a glitch in those human brains again.. so easily manipulated! They are obviously being tricked into liking that stupid show.
I'm not so arrogant that I think I'm smarter than everyone else. I think it's the simple case of me liking what I like and them liking what they like. If they like to spend their money on things I see as wasteful that's their choice. They probably feel the same way with how I spend my money.
They didn't announce Windows 9. Those were tech sites just reporting on rumours. And considering that the last couple OSes have been released on 3 year cycles, mid-2015 is exactly when you would expect Windows 9 to come out.
They have explicitly said that it can be anyone. It can be a friend across the country. It can be your cousin. It could be a sibling. You could even add your enemies and limit the sharing folder to only include awful games.
Only one person of the 10 with whom you share can play at a time. This will not restrict you from playing though. It's not clear whether you can play a co-op game together on a single copy. To me this seems better than actually lending a disk to someone since you can still play your game while you lend it out.
I have no idea why Microsoft are saying outright you can't lend games, since you can share them. I think their messaging has been absolutely awful.
So how does that work, your mate turns his PC on, and it kicks you out as you are fighting a boss? I assume not, but it does make you wonder.
This basically means that Microsoft will know exactly what you are playing, which machine you are playing it on, and when you are playing it. That combined with the connects camera is quite frightening.
It strikes me as intellectual laziness to dismiss a story out of hand because someone you don't know (Betteridge) has pontificated about headlines at some point.
Look at microsoft's massive track record for doing this, Google the keywords "evangelism is war" and form your own opinion.
It has about the same battery life as an 11" MacBook Air. If you add a keyboard, then it is about the same price as an 11" MacBook Air but the MacBook Air only has 1366x768 resolution vs. 1920x1080 for the Surface Pro.
It's nearly impossible to use in your lap, so it's not a LAPtop, and as a tablet it's just weird. Uncomfortable to type on when on a flat surface, and in portrait mode it's a joke.
Oh sure it is. I use a Dell laptop with 4GB of ram running visual studios (sometimes two instances), full blown SQL Server, SQL Server management studio (graphical database client), Chrome with a bajillion tabs and a handful of corporate-required background applications. I still don't get any noticable lag due to paging.
That's fine if the projects you are loading in Visual Studio are reasonably sized. If you load a single monolithic legacy solution, the Intellisense database is huge, and you run into cases where you have to close every single thing other than Visual Studio just to have enough memory to load all the debugging symbols when debugging the application. Life got so much better when we switched to 64 bit Windows 7.
I strongly disagree. As someone that has done quite a bit of development work on a laptop with only 4GB of memory, I can tell you right now that life was significantly better after I upgraded to 8GB.
If the built-in disk has low enough latency, your memory needs go way down as giant predictive disk caches become unnecessary and swapping is less of a performance killer.
Moving to SSD let me put a VM on my 8GB laptop that stole half the RAM without destroying my ability to run a couple of visual studios, office and a pile of chrome tabs. Under 4GB and spinning disk that was unworkable.
RAM needs might be stagnating for a few years as high-performance flash becomes commonplace and applications don't have to be as aggressive about keeping everything in memory.
You're suggesting that dramatically shortening the lifetime of my SSD through needless writes is better than simply adding more memory?
And what if my working set is incapable of fitting into that measly 4G of memory (which likely will only be 3GB at most once the OS and Visual Studio is loaded) even with swapping? I can tell you right now that's easy to do with Visual Studio with even "relatively" small applications once you start loading debug symbols.
Unfortunately very few people will be comparing it against a MBA and other 'ultra'books as MS seems intent on positioning it as a tablet that you can do work on. And compared to other tablets in the market, it seems a bit absurd. They're going to have to do an amazing marketing job to separate the two products into their proper categories, but considering they look the same, and sport the same features I imagine they're not going to succeed.
The 3rd party app criticism is in my view an outdated one. One year ago would have been premature to make a declaration on the availability of 3rd party apps for the Windows platform since it was still relatively new.
Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence
"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."
That's not evidence, that's just a claim from Microsoft's marketing. The code-sharing doesn't apply to any current desktop applications - it only applies to the hypothetical future Metro-based desktop apps. And it's irrelevant anyways.
You can't expect a user to stick with an incomplete platform when there is viable competition, based solely on promises that the situation will improve. In fact, since Microsoft has announced that current Windows Phone 7 hardware will not run Windows Phone 8, anybody who was counting on their phone getting more useful over time has been proven to be a sucker.
I wouldn't call engineering your entire OS to be able to share code between devices as irrelevant, nor would I characterize it as something that is done for a quick marketing line.
Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?
This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.
You're still missing the point that it's never premature to complain that a shipping mobile platform has too few third-party apps. It doesn't matter whether a platform is brand-new or two years old, having no apps is a real competitive disadvantage that will have the real-world effect of warding off potential customers, and no forward-looking statements about what will happen next year can make the problem go away. The only solution to the problem is to build a large app library. Microsoft may be well-poised to make the problem go away within the next two years, but in the meantime, their mobile offering will be lackluster.
I'm not missing the point. I just disagree that for the next two years their app offerings will be lackluster. And my reason for that disagreement is the fact that they are converging their platform to run on all systems (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and console).
Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.
I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.
Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.
No matter how many different platforms developers can target with a Win8 Metro app, the starting number of third-party apps for that platform is zero. There are no current Windows 7 desktop or phone apps or XBLA apps that will run on a Win8 phone. In some cases, porting will probably be easier than it otherwise would be, but it's still going to take some work.
Any game that already runs on smartphones will need to replace OpenGL ES with DirectX, and any app that currently runs on a Microsoft platform will need to be re-designed to work on a touchscreen, and still probably also re-write the whole GUI to use Metro.
The best that Microsoft can expect with Win8 as they are currently planning is for the first several months of app releases to be hasty ports that get their platform some credibility but don't actually make it look better than the alternatives, with good apps starting to show up by the end of the first year. But there's no way they'll close the gap quickly with anything other than badly-ported apps.
And in the meantime, barring massive bribery/subsidies from Microsoft, the only people who will be buying Windows phones are "early adopters" who just want to play with something different. That crowd isn't big enough to fund direct competition with Android and iOS.
A better headline would be "Health experts believe Bill and Melinda Gates could save more lives by modifying resource allocation" or something like that.
I'm not a writer so it could probably be stated better but you get the idea. The guy isn't saying what they are doing is bad, which the headline implies, but rather that resource spending could be further optimized.