The problem with that line of argument, which I'm sympathetic to personally, is that the rough numbers I'm describing are (give or take 5%) reflected across every major FPS/action title in the past several years.

Quality and engaging stories are critical to good base sales and customer satisfaction, but you'd be surprised by how little impact they have on player completion rates.

The solution taken by the better studios in the industry, and I apologize as judging from the responses I seem to have poorly presented my point - is not to phone in the ending, but rather to shorten the experience while maintaining consistent quality throughout.

I think a lot of people don't realize that the levels you see in, say, Modern Warfare 2 cost literally millions of dollars to make, and the debate regarding optimal running time is still very much in progress.

--Ryv

(All opinions expressed herein may not reflect the views of my employer, and in fact we try to avoid falling into this trap but it's a pretty prevalent attitude in the industry right now):

I work as a game designer on big-budget shooters for a living, so here's my take:

Game companies are consciously making the decision to do this for two reasons:
1) Easier games have broader markets, by increasing the likelihood and rate at which the user receives validation we increase sales, and much more importantly:

2) It's unusual for more than 50% of the people who beat the first level of your game to beat the last level. Money spent on later levels is generally money wasted, and shortening the experience altogether is a function of the increasing development cost per hour of gameplay and ROI of even having more than 10 hours of content at all. If 95% of the people who bought the game complete the first level (as tracked by developers through achievement systems) but only, say, 35-40% finish the game, that necessarily influences how you invest your limited development funds.

--Ryv

Speaking as someone who builds his own machines and rolls his own BSD kernels... the Macbook Air is pretty awesome for certain uses. Specifically: it is, by far, the best subway commute laptop I've ever had. Perfect balance of screen/keyboard size, extremely low weight, and it runs Minecraft wonderfully smoothly (especially if you install a 3rd party SSD in lieu of Apple's traditionally slow ones). Even after two years of extremely heavy usage, it has more than enough battery life for max screen brightness Minecraft or just coding in Eclipse for the 45 minute commute and return trip.

That having been said, the latest upgrade is a disappointment due to the identical processor. I would easily pay the full price for a new one, right now, if they'd tolerate .15" greater thickness and .2 pounds greater weight to give the thing a *real* heatsink and fan. The cooling issues mean you get about 15-30 seconds of 720P Youtube videos before the stuttering kicks in - obviously that's not going to be an issue on the limited connectivity of a subway commute, but it's unacceptable at home.

It's not perfect, and it's not for everyone, but within certain niches it really shines. It's also probably the closest you can get to an iPad that you can code on without rolling your own iOS IDE.

--Ryv

You say you want to save massive amounts of energy, and then you show me a design that is not a flying wing. Slashdot, you have some aerospace engineers lying around, so help me out: what gives?

I've already conducted this test twice unintentionally with the new iPhone, sans bumper (I generally use one, so during two separate incidents I butterfingered on the new glass). Two six foot falls onto marble with zero protection, both times landing flatly face down, not on an edge. Not so much as a scratch either time.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but after my experiences I'm somewhat skeptical of any claims about reduced fracture strength with the new glass. It's difficult to imagine a worse scenario that still falls within the confines of everyday wear-and-tear.

--Ryvar

It's *possible* that the very slight short circuit of a user's palm is playing havoc with the frequency calibration system. This would also neatly explain why people are more often reporting that the signal gradually falls off over several seconds rather than instantly.

If that's the case, then Apple *might* be able to retool the frequency calibration code to ignore the mild short circuit.

In all likelihood, the answer is probably to ship all future iPhone 4s with a very thin layer of clear resin (nail polish works wonders on the existing ones)over the external metallic surfaces.

--Ryvar

Honestly what Apple have done isn't so much listening to developer's requests as it is fulfilling those requests to the greatest extent possible *without compromising user experience*.

Not compromising user experience, even potentially, appears to be their guiding principle and it's served them well. Slashdot will never love Apple because they aren't the target market. I, like a lot of people who swear by the iPhone - actively want appliance computing when it comes to a smart phone. I actively want the walled gardens of the XBox 360, PS3, Appstore, Wii, and even Steam, because these things substantially reduce malware and/or cheaters. I understand that it is fundamental to the basic principals of a Turing machine that they can never eliminate these things (ie virtual machines, etc.), merely reduce to a level unlikely to affect me. But in practice that's all I need, much like how in practice I only *need* 256-bit TLS for securing online purchases.

The antagonism seen towards Apple on Slashdot is due to the fact that it's an explosively growing market segment that isn't targeted for the core Slashdot demographic. It implies that the world is moving on from them, and nobody likes to hear that.

--Ryv

Smallish set = 100 devices. Cost for doing so is one $100 iPhone developer license.

It's a good phone, but it's not made for tinkering with, which is going to prompt a lot of hate on a site whose primary demographic is people who love to tinker with things.

As an iPhone developer I'm very happy with Apple's walled garden, but maybe this is because my 9-5 is game development, where all the biggest platforms are walled gardens. I get an industry standard cut of the profits, there's a minimum of casual piracy of my work, the development environment is first rate and extremely cheap ($100! Mind-bogglingly cheap to someone who comes from an industry where engine licenses run in the low millions, and the standard 3D modeling package is $3500), and the hardware platform is standardized enough to make it easy to work with.

I can't imagine trying to develop for Android, where the hardware is going to be all over the place. That's all well and good for beefy PCs, but for an embedded system? How could you possibly optimize sufficiently for a multi-target mobile platform and still turn software around quickly enough to be profitable?

Ultimately people's preferences are going to reflect how and why they use their phones, and for developers it will reflect their target demographic. Slashdot will never love the iPhone because it isn't *for* them, which suggests that they aren't the most important people out there - and that's a message nobody likes to receive.

--Ryvar

instead, imagine you were a government official with no interest in civil rights and could quietly "persuade" one company and have access to the Root Certificate Authority...

The truth is that there is little to nothing society can do against lone individuals or extremely small groups bent on damaging it. Better technology and increasing reliance upon technology necessarily create more opportunities for disruption. Dependency chains for the features in our lives are growing longer, and it's increasingly easy to find weak links.

As a society we can't bear to face the truth of this, so we use lies to pretend the problem doesn't exist. You can't change people at the level necessary to prevent this, so you have to make sure that the lies you do tell them are less damaging to personal freedom ...and where possible more damaging to corporate freedom.

--Ryv

I don't honestly care whether there's a real medical issue here. I don't care if it takes Fox News-style "gotcha" tactics to make the hysterical cries of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" echo up and down the corridors of the powerful.

Anything that kills this program needs to be seized upon, hyped, spun into something it's probably truthfully not - the lies and paranoia that have been eating away at us like a cancer need to be repurposed toward actually helping us.

--Ryv

iPhone battery life is, I've found, *entirely* dependent upon your location.

Placing an average of 10 5-15 minute calls a day, my iPhone 3G which is coming up on 2 years old lasts 2.5-3 days in the Boston metro area.

Back when it was 6 months old, placing 5 15-20 minute calls in the heart of San Francisco plus a little Google maps had the battery go from a full charge to completely drained in 6 hours. Similar results in the 7-8 hour range occurred on my next two visits.

Contrast to the Sprint Mogul, which consistently had a 36-hour battery life no matter where I was.

Presumably number of towers, number of competing phones, ambient radio noise and building/terrain geometry, etc. are the primary factors. Either way, my point is that this is a very relative thing: the iPhone is simultaneously the best and worst smartphone I've ever had in terms of battery life, depending on which city I'm in.

--Ryv

I'm a bit worried about workers in China regardless of who they work for.

--Ryvar

He throws out some tentative numbers at the end of the abstract on the requirements for using this principle to manipulate satellites. Anyone here with a solid understanding of physics want to take a stab at working out what the energy input->force output is like assuming a magneto-electric constant of 10^-4 and the particles comprising 50% of the total object mass?