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Comment This shouldn't have failed (Score 1) 366

Everything about this phone was great, and it shouldn't have died in the tree like it did. I was really excited to get one and even had a "free upgrade" through tmobile.

The reason it died is not because people didn't want to buy it online. Did you see how they were selling it online? It was just too damn confusing and this is coming from someone who has been developing confusing sites for 13 years. I couldn't understand if I was going to be buying the phone or signing up for new service. I couldn't tell exactly how much I was going to spend. I also couldn't tell if I would keep my old service. Finally after a few days I spoke with Tmobile, and it was going to cost me roughly $400 with my "free upgrade" plus my monthly bill would increase over $40.00 a month because of th service you had to get.

So no it wasn't any of their silly excuees as to why it didn't sell. Bad and confusing site design, price and forced "upgrades" were the reason. This and the fact that there were several other phones almost as good that were free (no upgrade, no out of pocket) compared to spending over 1200 freaking dollars over a 2 year period extra just to have a new fancy phone.

Comment Allow bids from open source supporters/companies (Score 1) 332

From what I know from firends who have worked with state/federal agencies most work done out of the agency requires them to accept bids for work. Meaning a number of companies or people bid on the projects to get this work. Its done this way so there can (nor should there be) any endorcement.

When projects come up conact known open source groups, companies etc that there are bids for the available work. Yes you wont be contributing directly to the projects, but you could get the developers making cash with allows them to offer more to the projects they are working on.

Comment Re:One problem killing the iPhone... (Score 3, Interesting) 347

"Apple keeps those measures of control because they help to protect their platform's image from incompetent or unscrupulous coders, and their negative impact on most users is relatively minor. If that balance ever shifts, either due to more competent coders (supposedly Flash 10.1 is heavily optimized) or more demanding users (with friends whose phones do some or all of the above), the rules can change in an instant"

Ok thats a downirght B.S. excuese right there. The majority of the flash files people would be going after/ watching/using would be from youtube.com or google.com or myspace.com for video which last time I checked had some of the top people in the world dealing with compression, codexes and flash players in the world. Saying Apple is trying to keep bad ugly un-useful flash apps from their users is like saying Apple isn't trying to not lose money from forcing people to only buy videos from their itunes store.

It has nothing to do with scary bad coders, it has everything to do with them keeping people from getting videos outside of what they control (itunes).

Comment Re:Horrible Article (Score 1) 347

Or offer your software to every other company that makes phones on every carrier other then and including AT&T.

Offer an open platform for development (free open source development that is not restricted to a MAC, pripriority lagnuage that costs money to develop in, and THEN have apple say its ok to sell your software if they WANT you to be able to).

Create software that dosen't limit you and force you to upgrade to a new phone

Buy a phone that lets you buy and replace your battery (Really? You can't replace the battery in your PHONE?)

And much much more. From what I have seen from Android alone I see promise. Iphone killer? No not at all. Does this phone have the ability to take away interest from the Iphone from the general non fanboy public? Yes very much so. Better phones, more phone features, faster hardware, better software thats more open and free which means more software available. Yeah I can see public interst shifting.

Iphone killer? No not at all. Why kill something when it will die off on its own.

Comment Simple Iphone Killer (Score 1) 347

Its very simple to come up with a Iphone killer.

Open developemet platform that costs nothing to develope in (IE dosen't require a Apple computer or money to get development liceneses) and a open application store that is available across carriers and phones.

Both of thse are available through the Android and will kill off the Iphone. Not this year, or next year but as the platform for the OS and development takes off the Iphones controled app store that is only available on the Iphone will get killed off, and the Android will take over in popularity. Apple had their chance and they dropped the ball, and Google wont make the same mistakes.

Comment A better study would be (Score 1) 590

How many games are created outside of the base gamer market stactics that succeed. I'm gussing very few. This isn't a racial issue or hardely even something that sould use any type of social science since its all based on what market will make the most money. Young white males are the largest group that buy games in the US. If you made games that had an ugly and smart woman with half naked guys everywhere trying to solve quests the game would fail. But if you change the character into a monkey boom! No racial/social/cultural comparisioin. Same goes for a game made in Japan. If a game was released in Japan where the main character was Latino or Native American doing something relating to their culture it would most likely in every case fail.

If you are a game company and can make a game for 10 million white kids or 1 million black kids which one do you think is going to be made? Its not social/racial/culteral/etc its about money.

Comment Kind of pointless (Score 0) 615

I am a content provider myself and run roughly 100 different sites. And I can tell you from my experience that sites that use pop ups these days are not ligament websites you would want too allow popups from.

Sure there are plenty of websites that use popups correctly and are useful but the majority of these are popups that the user initialize by clicking on a link, not random popups that are not user controled meaning ads.

There are plenty of technologies that people can utalize to make useful and helpful "popup" windows like litebox/thickbox that still allow publishers and content providers the ability to show content in a new window while not losing focus on the main page.

Popup blockers are a good thing, and adding an incontinence popup warning defaeats the purpose of blocking popup windows. If a user didn't click on something to initialize a popup window then they shouldn't be seeing popups.

   

Comment Re:Can we stop enabling these people? (Score 1) 1134

I think people are misunderstanding the level of work many of these people do and are assuming these people might be doing simple work that they themselves could do but without the attitude.

I have known many developers though the years but have only known 2 who fit into the category of absurdly good developers. These guys were not just very good developers who could just be replaced with ok or good developers with no attitude. These were guys who made the companies. The ones who did make millions for the business and were capable of doing work that no one else was capable of doing. Were not talking about fancy or creative coding; were talking about coding that only a few people in the world can do.

Comment Re:Lack of Documentation == dangerous (Score 1) 1134

"f there is no documentation, the answer to the question, "Is it ready?" is "No."

You seriously believe this? Management or marketing could care less about documentation. To them documentation is something that might make your job easier or faster or make you more productive but has no value on the release of a product.

Management: So is the project done?

Developer: No, everything is done besides documentation.

Management: So its done? We can use the product?

Developer: No, like I said we still need to add documentation...

Management: So it done then.

I am not saying that documentation is not important; its as important as the code you write. But when it comes to a missing a deadline for a product release simply because your documentation management will not care (or understand) why they can't release a product because of the need of documentation.

Comment The internet is full of these places. (Score 1) 369

There are entire websites (which are very big and popular) that focus on misleading information like this. Everything from product reviews, to blog post reviews, creating fake user accounts, selling traffic and so on.

Sites like digital point have thousands of people just waiting too help you scam people into buying your products, sites or services. It makes trying too do online business a pain.

Comment Re:You can't knock Kalypso Media (Score 1) 68

You have no idea what you are talking about.

I am running the latest version of Sins, have all updates up to the latest version, plus a couple of mod and maps and I have yet to pay for it, all their updates are located on all the gaming file sites.

Saying their download system is like DRM is just plain silly. If anything its more of a great convience to have all your needed downloads in one place. Also to play online against other players requires you to have a paid for version.

Encryption

Submission + - Legal Battle For AACS Begins

henrypijames writes: As widely expected, the MPAA has learned nothing from the debacle of its failed prosecution against DVD Jon (of DeCSS) and is now releasing its army of lawyers to fight against the circumvention of AACS (the successor of CSS): Upon the reception of a DMCA takedown notice, SourceForge has immediately terminated its hosting of BackupHDDVD (a tool to backup HD DVD movies, as its suggestes). The project leader is seeking advice on how to proceed.
Music

Submission + - Maldroid and YouTube redefine paying your dues

Nate Seltenrich writes: "http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-02-14/news/vide o-made-the-radio-star

This is the story of perhaps the first ever indie band to be launched on music videos and to parlay that attention into mainstream success. Bands like Maldroid and OK Go have sparked a renaissance in music videos whereby, thanks to technological advances and user-generated sites like YouTube, an indie band can get its big break through music videos. But unlike OK Go, who were already signed to a major label by the time they acheived mainstream success through their two DIY videos, Maldroid had yet to play a single live show or release a single song for sale when it won YouTube's first-ever music video contest last November. As a result, the band was featured on Good Morning America and met with major labels, still before it had played a show. Another twist is that founder and lead singer Ryan Divine started working on his zero-budget winning video before Maldroid became a band and before YouTube even existed. The group continues to be successful, with their second video earning 700,000 views in less than five days of being featured at YouTube (it's now nearing 1 million). Last night they played only their fifth show at one of San Francisco's most well known venues. Theirs is an utterly unique and fascinating story with widespread appeal, all facilitated by a little creativity, lots of time (the first video took a year to hand-animate), powerful Mac software (Divine spoke at the MacWorld conference about using Apple Motion to make music videos), and the magic of YouTube. It's a technology story, a music story, and a culture story all rolled into one. Please consider posting it. Watch the video linked below or read the first section of the story if you're unsure. Check out the visuals for the story too; they're excellent.

Here's the link again:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/2007-02-14/news/vide o-made-the-radio-star

And here's Maldroid's incredible Lite Brite video on YouTube, now with almost 1 million views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxZJYbVd1hE

Check out the newspaper cover too. It's a pretty cool image:
http://www.nate-selt.com/cover.jpg

Many thanks for your consideration.
Nate"

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