Comment Re:Ads (Score 1) 330
Sorry, that should obviously be revenue and not turnover. Swedish financial lingo is easy to mistranslate.
Would have been funny though...
Sorry, that should obviously be revenue and not turnover. Swedish financial lingo is easy to mistranslate.
Would have been funny though...
Mojang had 1.5 billion SEK in cash at the end of 2013, or about 220M USD at 2013 exchange rates. Their turnower for 2013 was 2 billion SEK or about 300 million USD.
Yeah, but how long can they keep growing? How long can they even sustain the revenue that they have now?
Game purchases are one-time payments. I'm not going to buy a second copy of Minecraft for PC, nor am I buying a second copy of Pocked Edition and I'm not in the market for console games.
Long-term revenue has to come from recurring payments (subscriptions), or maybe from selling Creeper plush toys and t-shirts as some have suggested.
It's no secret that Mojang is developing a pay to play kind of add-on called Realms. The idea is that people who want to have a Minecraft server for themselves and their friends can pay Mojang to host the server and take care of the technical details.
There are probably somewhere between 10 and 100 million Minecraft players. Suppose that 1% will subscribe to Realms at $4.99 a month (currently €10). That would yield between 500k and 5M in monthly revenue, or about 6M to 60M in yearly revenue.
Minecraft would probably be worth a few hundred million dollars in a sane market.
Selection does not necessarily select the strong and the intelligent, selection selects the ones that pass on their genes.
For example, there is still considerable selection pressure for any genetic expression that helps us produce plentiful sperm and ova. There is also strong selection pressure for having functioning penises, vaginas, uteruses. These pressures could ease in the future with sufficiently advanced medicine.
Evolutionary selection pressures never stop. Even within a dominant species, if there is any level of genetic difference, there will be both genetic drift and evolution. Other species also apply selection pressures (think of evolving viruses, for instance).
Evolution never stops permanently at least.
It is conceivable that the selection pressure on humans could go away temporarily if we achieve something like perfect medicine, or a world where any person would be equally likely to have biological children and grandchildren. The effect of that would be to radically increase diversity among humans both in terms of genes and in terms of traits. This would then lay the groundwork for potentially rapid evolution once the selection pressure reappears due to some systemic failure, or catastrophe, or what have you. The diversity would give natural selection more options to select from.
All Imperial units are great for real world human-scale measurements. That's what they were designed for. Metric units are obviously much better for scientific use, but the units are mostly too big for day to day stuff.
The metric units were originally based on preexisting units units. If they hadn't been similar to the imperial units they would probably never have caught on.
One meter ~= one yard. One liter ~= 2 pints. One kilogram ~= 2 pounds. A decimeter happens by chance to be about the width of a hand and a centimeter about the width of a finger.
Please.
The intellectually hard work of software isn't the idea. It's almost entirely within the coding.
When it comes to really ground-breaking stuff it is often the idea, but in those cases the idea belongs (and usually comes from) a paper published in a math or computer science journal or a journal from an adjacent field. It would probably not be a good idea to allow people to patents mathematical truths.
Call me a cynic, but wouldn't nature of done this long ago as a primary source of energy for oceanic life? Take Hydrogen and combine with oxygen. Lots-o-energy with a simple path of ingestion. It's like, inhaling food!
First of all hydrogen production does not generate energy, it consumes energy.
Scientists are interested in hydrogen as an energy storage medium. It is unlikely that life forms would use hydrogen as an energy storage medium since hydrogen gas can practically only be stored inside a metal tank, or at least a tank lined with an internal layer of metal. Metal requires smelting which is highly incompatible with how life forms develop, so you're not going to find plants or animals with metal parts.
They're probably hoping that we will finally start using video conversations. And we sort of are.
Once video is the norm they can go on to push for 4k video, then perhaps stereoscopic 4k. This is sure to keep the data flowing and your data plan costs growing or at least remaining stagnant.
The funny part is that video conversations were technically possible in the 1970's, but it didn't catch on for whatever reason. It only really caught on about 5 years ago. I can't think of a consumer product that has taken longer to gain traction.
I believe the pitch goes something like this: In a world populated by very lazy and impatient people, the Apple watch allows you to get much of the functionality of your phone without pulling your phone out of your pocket. It also has an Apple logo on it.
Right. So what was the market the various Android Wear smart watches were going for?
I imagine they went after the same market, minus the Apple logo.
IIRC Toyota's stance is that batteries are never going to get good enough to be the main energy storage in a (premium) car and that all-electric cars will run on hydrogen fuel cells.
What exactly is the reason to have this as well, as opposed to pulling your phone out of your pocket?
Unless some company comes up with a functionally independent wearable device that replaces the need for keeping your phone with you I do not see the appeal. I don't understand what the pitch is supposed to even be.
I believe the pitch goes something like this: In a world populated by very lazy and impatient people, the Apple watch allows you to get much of the functionality of your phone without pulling your phone out of your pocket. It also has an Apple logo on it.
I think they were right to go with a larger phone. Let's face it, times have changed. And a lot of people (myself included) really like the idea of a 5.5" phone. My large fingers make a larger screen a godsend, and it's a lot easier on the eyes.
As someone who has fairly big hands I had a hard time adapting from a 4" Android phone to my current 4.95" Nexus 5. I tried to use the big phone in the same way that I had been using smaller smartphones in the past, by holding the phone firmly in my hand and moving my thumb around the screen. The problem is that my thumb only reaches about 4.2 inches, so I kept trying to reach further than I could by over-reaching with my thumb. It got to the point where I had to switch to using my phone with my left hand out of fear of permanently injuring my right thumb (feel free to joke...).
I eventually learned that you should sort of slide the phone around your palm to align it with your thumb. Now I could probably adapt to a 5.5" phone, but I think I would go for the 4.7" one if I was an Apple user.
It's going to be interesting to hear if iPhone thumb becomes a thing now that there are no longer any "thumb-sized" new iPhones.
The math tends to be simpler in many cases if you start counting at 0. In C's case, a[1] is == a + 1 if a is an array of bytes.
Yeah, it's usually easier to start with 0 in pure math too. Remember that an N:th degree polynomial can be written as:
sum from n=0 to n=N of c_n*x^n, where c_n are constants
Here you avoid having to invent a special case for the constant (zeroth degree) term by exploiting the fact that x^0 = 1.
With your bare hands?!?
