It's long been known that the price of a game is fixed - that is, that the amount you can charge for a boxed game on a shelf has a very definite (and mostly arbitrary) price point.

What we're starting to see is publishers trying to sneak past that price point with tricks like this. And we'll see it more and more. Single-player games don't generate a revenue stream, so you've been forced to hit the customer all up front for whatever you hope to recoup from your new game. It's just too tempting to try and spread that cost out a bit and grab some more money.

Thank god for the indie scene. I can't imagine paying $80, $90 dollars for a game.

Or it could be that having more CPU/GPU power allows for more AI, animation, etc and thus more teammates. Ditto for co-op play - we finally have networking that doesn't suck. It's more a simple technology question than something cultural or political, IMHO.

What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?

Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.

I'll add another big one - on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*. Unlike Apple's recent filing about "altering the core experience" re: Google Voice. Apple could create an iPhone-themed app suite for the G1 tomorrow, host it on their own servers, and no one could say otherwise. That's a pretty fundamental difference.

Say what you will about the iPhone as a sexy beast, etc, but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.

Here are the languages I program in during a given week:

Ruby
PHP
Javascript
Java
Shell

And the frameworks/libraries I use:

Rails
jQuery
Regexen
Android SDK

And then there's the tools whose scripts and configurations I'm modifying:

Exim
Bind
Apache
Svn
IPTables
Postgres
MySQL ... plus about a hundred Linux commands and their arcane syntaxes

What kind of insane evil genius could keep all that straight without constantly checking the docs?

Overall, was tremendously impressed with the look, feel, cinematography, etc. Documentary style absolutely made the movie. And I generally loath shaky-cam. Thing is, shaky-cam has generally been used to imply that you *are* someone, so you never see what the hell is happening, whereas in District 9, it makes you feel like you're *watching* something, so you follow the action but feel the peril. Very effective.

There were some *amazing* scenes - I can't go into it due to spoilers, but really, unbelievably cringe-inducing moments of humanist horror. There is a richness to the interaction of the main character with his world that I just haven't seen elsewhere.

My friends and I kept looking over at each other with wild grins on our faces, unable to believe how intense, crazy, and just totally new the whole thing was. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

I see a lot of tags/comments asking what this is useful for. There are a few uber-nerd things like recording your life and whatnot that I'm not going to get into, but the big one is determining location.

There are a TON of sweet things you can do with accurate location information, but the one that I'm most yearning for is to control my bluetooth, wifi, ringer volume, etc based on where I am during the day.

I'm an Android user, and there's a very nice applet called Locale that attempts to do this, but it proves to be pretty useless. The reason is that you're either using GPS (drains battery, doesn't work indoors) or wifi (drains lots of battery, and is the primary thing you want to control) to figure out where you are. If using the microphone and cpu is cheaper in energy, then this will be a big win.

Beyond the energy use argument, one of the main things you want to control is bluetooth - again, it drains batteries when on, and is not generally useful. But it's EXTRAORDINARILY useful in the car if you have a hands-free setup. Again, figuring out when you're in a car is hard via GPS or wifi, but this technique would seem to knock that one out of the park.

So, in summary, having your phone know where you are in your daily routine allows it to be more intelligent about what services and functionality it enables, and thus makes your cell phone that much smarter and more valuable.

Just wanted to put a plug in for the HTC-built G1 phone, which has had built-in OGG support from day one.

Very nice toy, am loving being able to SSH into my servers anywhere there's cell service.

Well, that's the thing. Not the subject matter, but the quality of the writing itself. A good writer can keep your interest in a story about mowing the lawn, while a bad writer can make a murder boring.

Ah, but the worst writer in the world? He can make your own murder boring.

That's a fine generalization, and may or may not be generally true, but my folks and I attended a presbyterian church for 4 years. We stopped when we were told not to return until we wanted to tithe appropriately.

It's a tax, enforced by social ostracism and in our case at least, direct pronouncements from the pastor. Calling it anything else is disingenuous.

That being said, the Xenu guys are way more obvious about it.

It's much worse than that. Put up a porn site. Use free content. Have a "Solve captcha to get free pics!" blocker.

Now, grab a captcha you want to break, show to pornaholics, get solution, pass it back to the original site.

Perfectly unbeatable captcha solving, for virtually free, and totally automated.

Feh.

Let me just start this discussion off with a great big "Attaboy!" to our top-notch Slashdot editors.

For those of you not intimately related with all of Google's many acquisitions, etc. Jaiku is a microblogging and social-networking site. JaikuEngine is the underlying tech that makes it work. Seems to be written in Python. Designed to run on Google Apps.

There, was that so hard?

in this modern day-and-age, most stuff is just data anyways, and that is all database. Moving to a true client architecture, oh wait, all the data is still stored centrally, and most reports are all done via stored procedures.

I'm not sure what kind of work you do, but as someone who is developing a lot of web apps right now, I'll say straight up that the data is the easy part. The internals of any system are well understood and the border cases are easy to handle.

What takes time, and what breaks, and what drives me nuts, is the UI - validation, layout, rendering quirks, etc., etc., etc.

I've recently started playing around with Adobe's Webkit-based AIR framework for this reason. It lets me interact with the local file-system, have a data store that's not reliant on a network, and above all, has a consistent UI environment.

"It's just data" is a data-centric way of looking at things, and is true in a sense. But the argument being made here is about the interface between the client and the data - not the data itself.

I dont want to kill anyone, but I am a big supporter of public humiliation. part of his sentence needs to be 5 days in public stockades where people can throw non sharp objects at his face. and or take a few whacks with a switch to his body.

What is reminding him of high-school supposed to achieve?

I think pressing the quicksave button is itself part of the challenge. Do you want to overwrite your last save with this new one? What if one of the choices you made between it and where you are now was what determined your game ending?

That's the rationalization I used to use, to make the endless save/restore cycle seem tolerable. But I'll venture a guess here - you've never regretted hitting save, but you HAVE regretted getting into the game, really enjoying things, and FORGETTING to save. You get hit hardest for being the most immersed. Saving is an unnatural act in gaming - it breaks the metaphor.

Oh, and that rationalization? About constantly choosing to save/not save? That's a variation on the too many choices fallacy. I don't really need more anxiety in my life. Save/Restore should die. I applaud games such as BioShock that are moving towards its abolishment.

I haven't played PoP yet, but from this discussion, I'm going to be doing so soonest. Here's to letting go of mechanisms that hinder our immersion in the game.

We have no TV. Our son had a nanny (no daycare, very very few playdates). We read stories about bunnies.

His third word was "truck".

We gave him dolls.

He ran them over with his trucks.