mantrax5

"Does a mom obsessed with candy crush count"

Why wouldn't she count? Cause she's a mom? Cause the game has candy? Or what?

As for female assassins, truth is somewhere in the middle. You don't need to make everything from scratch. Procedural adjustments can be made to the male animations and you can use the same animations for females.

I mean come on, women have a slightly different figure, but they have two legs, two arms, one head and so on. They're humans. It's not like the complaint is that birds and dogs were left out of the game.

That said, I'm fine with women being left out being a business decision. They'll now see what the effects of that business decision is on sales, and have the chance to learn for the next version.

Autism isn't just a "bad brain" condition that needs a "make brain better" game. Unfortunately it's a very specific condition with very specific needs.

Calling Lumosity bullshit due to some expectation towards it that it doesn't make is akin to calling vitamin tablets bullshit because they don't cure diabetes.

http://www.pixeltrek.com/img/crew.png

Jean-Luc, you've really let yourself go, dude.

Does Lumosity make any claims about improving autism conditions? It's a pretty big leap of logic to believe that a generic brain game system should improve autism range conditions.

And yet, I wouldn't have opened yet another article on gamer sexism (I get it, gamer sexism is bad mkay?), but I did find the data point of half the gamers being female very compelling (and useful to mention during meetings).

Sometimes, the guidelines should be broken.

I feel they almost got the reason right, but not quite.

We're used to hearing media stories about other people's success stories coming up with exotic, creative ideas.

If we're hearing someone else's story, therefore, we're biased to assume it's a success story.

Why would we be hearing for some concept that has come from far away, unless it was a success? If it was a pedestrian failure, we wouldn't hear about it.

While when we work with familiar matter, we kick into a different gear, we rely on experience (and experience often goes against innovative ideas) and we rely on our own skills to decide of an idea is a winner or not.

I really wish Lego made the parts, let us order whatever parts we need, and then show our creations on their site.

Not the other way around.

Maybe this is reflecting the state of our society - we just like to see a cool brand, buy pre-made things and follow the instructions.

But I tend to believe there's a master builder in all of us that Lego can unleash, if they have the guts (not so subtle Lego movie reference, check).

It's sharded, dude. You may want (typically) 3, 5 or 7 machines per shard for redundancy and failover, but there's no limit on the number of shards you may want to have.

This thread is 50 shades of gray, damn.

I actually upvoted the post for the comedy value.

For anyone paying attention, the SDK has been specifically modified to allow for:

1) Smaller satellite devices for iPhone (iWatch? I don't know, but something like it. Look for it in the Continuity & notification widget APIs).

2) More varied size devices (higher resolution iPhone? Look for it in the Xcode size "traits" APIs).

3) A hint that Macs may move to ARM in the next couple of years (look for it in the way they're rolling out new graphics APIs like Metal).

4) Apple TV may be getting native apps connected to your iPhone/iPad apps (look for it in the new Extensions APIs).

While none of the above are hard promises about where Apple's going, they pretty much have no choice than spill this out in the open, as they need to release the SDK and prepare devs for the changes at least some time ahead.

It seems their new strategy is to release software/SDK updates in preparation for new hardware in June during WWDC, then we have a few months padding until developers get their air back, and... starting August/September the new hardware starts coming, just in time for school, and just in time for the winter holiday season.

Neat, I think.

Oh look, it's a Daring Fireball post where Gruber is talking at length about how awesome Apple is.

I actually did read it. And I'm responding to the idea that "see, you complained, and Google changed it, so your former complaints are now misunderstandings" is really not a valid thesis.

I understood it won't pick up, and lo and behold, I understood it right.

People were right that an x86 sandbox is a silly idea for a web standard, this is why it's no longer one.

As it is right now, it's ASM.JS, without the .JS (and so, without the backwards compatibility).

Random statements alert:

- "Cool" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.

- "Lose" fuzzy term, no specific definition given.

I'm happy that developers are excited enough about Swift that they can't stop writing about it.

But... this is basically reiterating Apple's keynote and WWDC sessions. We already know about those strengths of Swift.

And people already felt Swift is better than Objective C the very second (literally) it was announced.

Usually when you ask "why" in your blog title, it's not supposed to be a question whose answer we already know, like "Why is water wet".

EDIT: Scratch that, "why is water wet" would make an interesting article.

Kudos for the effort and so on, but the thing I can't understand is, who would use these backgrounds, unless they specifically want their site to look like their grandmother's house.

It's 2014. By now we've realized it's counter-productive to stamp your background with pictures and patterns, because they distract from your site's content, and make it harder to read.

Don't have content? The solution isn't funky backgrounds. It's: have content, or don't have a site.

Who is assuming that "system is against me" victim position you're talking about? I don't see it.

People do what they can in their position. Spontaneous organization leading to system change happens, but it's spontaneous.

Maybe you're imagining some kind of movie montage set to 80s bad disco music, where a guy Decides to Make a Movement, and a movement gets assembled and in the end we get a wide shot with hundreds of thousands of people doing system changy thingies, but reality usually doesn't work this way.

You can't just decide this, especially if you're a ~60 years old network engineer. Deciding to build a life abroad at that age is also quite unlikely.

There are entire countries where the modus operandi is finding a position of some power, then finding a way to cheat there so you can get something for yourself. Corruption is a measure of success.

Knowing the loopholes and exploiting them means you're the smart one among a sea of clueless idiots. People get "secret" respect for being corrupted. Former Soviet block countries are one example of this mentality.

There's a reason certain countries can't make quick progress, while others can. Culture is the operating system of the mind, it affects how we perceive the world, how we make decisions, and ultimately where we're dragging the entire society with us.

Missing features weren't Microsoft's problem with Windows Phone. You can't ship from day one with all the features whether you lead or follow.

Waiting until everything is there is a recipe for burning out your team and shipping 4 years later, with zero apps in your app store.

No, the problem is there's simply no compelling reason to own a Windows Phone.

iPhone integrates with Windows just fine. It's popular and feels "safe" because there's safety in numbers, and it has all the apps.

Android is doing well, too.

Microsoft had the chance to ship a phone that integrates better with Windows than any third party phone OS could, but they didn't figure out anything interesting to do with, and just shipped a normal smartphone with a trendy UI on it.

Look at Apple and "Coherence" now. This is the kind of shit Windows Phone should've provided for Windows computers. Instead their roadmap speaks about unifying kernels and what not. Nobody cares about your unified kernels, Microsoft. Ship features that bring visible value to users.

We're carrying cultural inertia from simpler times when people didn't have easy access to the entire world to air their feelings.

It's culturally accepted to share your pain with people you know, and it's culturally accepted not to question or tell people they should keep it to themselves.

The problem is that with the Internet and social media the circle of "people you know" may easily turn out "the entire world".

Quite obviously, our minds are not equipped with the capacity of feeling for everyone's tragedy. If we could truly comprehend the tragedy behind a simple statistic like "thousands die in car accidents every month" it would render us depressed and unable to function.

As we feel more and more like a small village online (with a few billion people in it), the currently established "normal" cultural behavior in case of death will eventually start breaking down.

You are detecting the anomaly of following cultural patterns in a global online community where those patterns are ill-fitting. But most people don't detect it, they just follow the patterns.

Your thinking is not unique, but it's rare. Not many people stop to think and analyze why they're reacting the way they're reacting to your statements. Don't feel bad about the downvotes. We're merely machines running the program (culture) we've been loaded with. We do what the program says is right.

Well I'm saying it tongue in cheek. For a long time I and many others have stuffed JSON in SQL table columns, and I will continue to do so (heck, databases have started supporting JSON as a result).

But every time a developer sees an interesting twist on a piece of technology and goes for it, peers call it a bad practice.

I've been through many cycles like this, and inevitably some time passes, and one day you wake up to see yesterday's bad practices have turned into exciting advancements.

Moral of the story is, ignore the wisdom of the day and go for it, tiger. Stuff that JSON in an SQL table.

I'm sure the last thing on Eric's mind right now is CSS and especially the implication of a RFC putting the name of his daughter in a technical specification.

It's one of those nerdy endearing gestures that, while made with good intent, only end up causing more pain while simultaneously opening all kinds of strange questions (such as should we build memorials in our technical specifications every time a tragedy hits someone in the community).

Now's a moment to grief, but after long time, a moment comes to move on. Specifications can't "move on". We shouldn't turn them into graveyards where we bury our feelings.

It's always interesting to observe my bad developer practices (such as stuffing JSON in SQL table columns) become flexible "architectural patterns" for building "schema-free, scalable data storage".

Some nice finds here, but there's an issue. The conclusions are served completely isolated from the kind of people the research was done with.

We're not all the same, we don't all react the same to the same traits of your marketing efforts.

Certain kind of people will become convinced your product is good if you make them watch a 30 minute marketing video without a way to control or skip the video. While others will quickly roll their eyes and close the page.

Certain kinds of people like discounts and coupons (irrationally, as the site says). Others despise them (maybe also irrationally) and would never shop from a place whose message is "barrel bottom bargain products".

First rule of marketing - identify your target. Get to know them. Research what those people like and don't like. It can get very specific, and it's just as much cultural (if not more) as it is psychological.

If you follow a list of generic tips, you'll end up targeting an artificial construct, a Frankenstein monster whose sum of traits are supposed to represent "the average man". However, targeting the average man can only achieve average results.

There are 7 billion of us, so we can take a hit of 50 million. Gimme a shot.

Reminds me of Forstall who dumped all his Apple stock months before being fired.

Why should they dump their stock before being fired? Is there a reason not to wait a little bit? It just looks plenty passive-aggressive.

Unless, of course they believe the stock will take a nosedive shortly after (which never happens).

They wanted to study more people, but got distracted.

After all the indiscriminate B.S. published in the media for this software "passing the Turing test", kudos to Ray Kurzweil for calling it like it is, despite he of all people has very serious reasons to be in the "I want to believe" team. Respect.

Wow. FYI racket is defined as offering to solve a problem that does not exist, or that would not exist if the offerer wouldn't force it upon you.

Unless you're claiming the blackmail group is made up of Cloudflare employees, you should choose your words more wisely.