deanstevenson - Slashdot User

Comment Who is surprised? (Score 4, Insightful) 70

by deanstevenson on Saturday February 27, 2021 @07:42AM (#61105274) Attached to: Google's Stadia Problem? A Video Game Unit That's Not Googley Enough

"Google's approach to video games wasn't very Google-like."

Oh bullshit, it was the most Google thing ever.

This was a product that needed focused, sustained investment and Google bailed out before they even got started.

Comment Isn't this a serious threat to Net Neutrality? (Score 1) 47

by deanstevenson on Sunday March 04, 2018 @09:14AM (#56205127) Attached to: Amazon Will Soon Stop Selling Google's 'Nest' Smart Home Products

I think Google and Amazon’s feud could jeopardize Net Neutrality.

While it’s one thing to want to avoid selling one another’s competing products, when you drag access to media content from Amazon Video and Google’s YouTube into the fray isn't that dangerously close to two network providers imposing restrictions over their respective content based on one’s network connection?

Device sales should not impose restrictions on media access any more than your ISP connection should.

Lego 'CubeDudes' By PIXAR Animator 34

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 04, 2010 @11:39PM from the toy-art dept.

An anonymous reader writes "PIXAR Animator Angus MacLane has created an incredible series of LEGO 'CubeDudes' modeled after beloved characters from sci-fi movies and comic books. From Star Wars heroes R2D2 and C-3PO to Toy Story's Buzz Lightyear and Jessie, the pixellated creations bear a remarkable likeness to their forebears. MacLane says, 'When I had a moment here and there I chip away at a few at a time. I'll have the body of one Dude and a head of another that I will be working on at the same time. It takes me about 10-15 minutes to make one CubeDude and I average about two a day.' The hardest part is the color palette — LEGO doesn't make purple bricks, so villains like Lex Luthor, The Joker, and Grimace are a challenge."

The World's Strongest, Most Expensive Beer Served Inside a Squirrel 228

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 22, 2010 @02:48PM from the it-still-beats-toe-drinks dept.

If you have $765 burning a hole in your pocket, and a penchant for drinking alcohol out of a taxidermied animal, the good folks at BrewDog have just the drink for you. Their latest creation, called The End of History, is a 110 proof beer that comes packaged in a variety of small stuffed animals.

Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours 154

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday June 27, 2010 @11:26PM from the first-in-line dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 06, 2010 @05:52AM from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Game Development On Android 211

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @07:14AM from the pong-on-a-positronic-net dept.

Gamasutra is running an article about the state of game development on Android. The author explains some of the strengths and weaknesses of the platform, and makes comparisons to development on the iPhone. Quoting: "While iPhone apps are written in Objective C, the Android SDK uses relatively more programmer-friendly Java. The iPhone store charges developers $99 a year to distribute their apps, while Android has a one-time $25 fee for developers. And the review process for iPhone apps grows increasingly lengthy — sometimes weeks or more — and it's somewhat arcane. Android apps go live as soon as the developer hits the publish button. Google handles the review process post-hoc, and is much more lax in terms of content. ... For now, if a developer decides to implement a game exclusively for a particular smartphone platform, and the choice is between the iPhone and Android, the tradeoff is between trying to get noticed in an incredibly crowded and competitive market where the potential payoff is huge for those at the top, or entering a market with low barriers, little competition, currently low returns, but the possibility of potential growth."

Comment Re:"Branded verticals"? (Score 2, Insightful) 94

by deanstevenson on Friday August 07, 2009 @09:43AM (#28985363) Attached to: AOL Picking Up Journalists Shed By Conventional Media

Do you read much about cars? Turns out that Autoblog is definitely an improving brand amongst auto enthusiasts. Autoblog is one of the most quoted and referenced websites on the numerous (and growing) car forums on the net. This challenges the traditional vehicles of auto journalism such as MotorTrend, Car and Driver, and Road&Track. To claim a niche blog is not a brand ignores the very site you posted the claim on.

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