Posts by Sean O'Connor 1 133 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2009
This science sounds to me about as rigorous as some of the climate science stuff. Looks to me like they've come up with a theory that that there's a big extinction every 27 million years and then taken a very random looking graph and allowed themselves a lot of leeway to fit their theory onto it. Did they try values other than 27 million years and (with that same flexibility) see if they fitted too? Or produce random computer generated graphs and see if they could squeeze the 27 million year fit to them too.
My money's on that extinction graph being completely random and very noisy so with sufficient fudging you could fit pretty much anything on it.
Stamp duty is a tax that discourages people from moving closer to where they work. I reckon moving house should be made as cheap and easy as possible so when you move job it's easy to move closer and cut down on commuting. Or maybe you should only pay a (higher) rate on the difference in price of the house you are buying compared to the house you're selling so people moving for convenience rather than because they're loaded don't pay tax.
Why tax/penalise people who just want to cut down on their commute?
"And of course you don't get to choose, either as a vendor or a buyer, any other venue"
That's what makes it so great for developers and customers. As a developer you know where to upload your app to, as a customer you know where all the apps you can buy are located.
I sell Pocket PC apps too but I have to upload them to all the different market places and customers probably have never heard of those market places anyway. And to buy anything you have to enter all your credit card details each time - just nasty.
If you don't like it, just go develop for Palm OS, Android or Windows Mobile. And good luck making any money.
I'm an iPhone developer. Thanks for getting all upset on my behalf over Apple's 30% cut. Thing is, as far as I'm concerned 30% is an absolute bargain for exposing my apps to 100 million users with a system so simple that users do nothing more than enter their password to make a purchase, handling all the credit card transactions, handling upgrades, handling refunds, handling credit card fraud etc... Please don't tell Steve Jobs but I would have signed up at 50%.
That's not something I need myself. I work from home and use my car twice a week to drop the kids at school a few miles down the road. I can see why the main market is for phones with masses of functions because people have differing needs, but I've been on the look out for a small, nice looking, easy to use phone with a massive battery life. All I want to do is put it in my pocket and phone people occasionally.
Looks like it's the perfect phone for me! My entire feature list that I look for when buying a new mobile is:
- is it a phone
I don't want to play music, take pictures, blue tooth porn to my mates or play games. I just want a phone. And then my deciding criteria are: is it small enough to fit in my pocket and which one has the longest battery life so I don't have to keep fannying around with chargers. Six weeks? That's the phone for me!
> Sounds like you've chosen a career path which doesn't
> support your family very well.
Yes, maybe I made a mistake in choosing a career in digital media. But I'd see that as the fault of freetards rather than mine.
>Has your stuff ACTUALLY been on TPB? Have you ACTUALLY
> sent an email? Or are you just saying "what if", because you're
> bitching that your stuff doesn't sell very well?
Yes, I have written to torrent sites and they've all been happy to remove the links (but said that the links would probably get re-added soon anyway). At least they made an effort. I went to The Pirate Bay and they have a page saying basically don't bother emailing us to take down your copyrighted material because we don't give a shit. See: http://thepiratebay.org/contact
Oh, and my stuff does sell well BTW, but on the AppStore. My tax bill this year will be more than my salary was when I had a regular programming job the year before. I wonder if that's related to selling games on a platform that's much harder to pirate on?
Thanks Throatwobbler Mangrove, I think you're absolutely right. I give away free "Lite" versions of my games which anyone is allowed to download and share. That's the way I choose to market my games. It's ridiculous to think that it's a better idea to give the full version of your game away for free and then hope people will donate some money to you out of the goodness of their hearts. Us developers/marketers aren't stupid - if that method made us more money, we'd do it.
Why do you think so many independent developers have jumped on the iPhone bandwagon? Apple provide a platform where it's much harder to have your game pirated, so us devs are happy to drop the price right down to $1-$2. I don't plan to do any new games for Windows right now because it's just not worth my while. I'll stick to the AppStore.
> But it’s their work that we're talking about here, isn't it?
>
> No it’s not.
>
> The companies take everything. It's a screwed up movement, they suck them dry.
> You don’t need to get records pressed, or use distribution to shops anymore. The
> technology has been there for 10 years now, it’s made the old model redundant.
I've been selling my computer games independently over the Internet for the last 15 years. There's no record company taking a cut and "sucking me dry" as he says. It's just me, trying to earn a living to feed my family. Does the Pirate Bay draw any distinction between me and his little crusade against record companies? No. It gives all my hard work away for free even if I send a polite email asking them please not to. I'd like to meet him one day and punch him in the face to be honest.
If Adobe can write something that can convert a Flash app to an iPhone app then why don't Palm do that for WebOS? As an iPhone developer I don't have time to learn a whole new OS but if there was a utility that did that for me I'd imagine thousands of iPhone apps would get ported over.
I think this whole discussion can be summed up as:
Non-iPhone developers: "Can't believe Steve Jobs's control freakery, should have got an Android, arbitrarily remove businesses' income streams, constantly shift the goalposts, rant, rant, rant..."
iPhone developers: "They used private frameworks. Wow. Why did they do that?"
> The wifey won't be playing Farmville (or whatever it is that wimmin spend untold
> hours doing on Facebook) due to the lack of Flash.
She doesn't. She just uses it to stay in touch with friends.
> The kid's won't be playing too many games either, for the same reason.
> Apart from the crap available on the Apps Store.
They will .They already love playing games on our iPod Touch.
> And doesn't Spotify use flash too?
No it doesn't.
So it sounds like the perfect device for our family.
Yeah, but by being on this website the odds are you're a bit of a techy and I don't think this device is aimed at us. It's the kind of thing my wife would love to have so she can check her Hotmail and Facebook and do a bit of surfing while she's sitting on the sofa - rather than sit at a desk and wait 5 minutes while Windows boots up. My kids would love it too for the games and Spotify Premium.
Don't forget that there is a world out there away from us geeks!
> Chu said. "How much work does the developer have to do to address the
> fragmentation? If there are a million devices and they're in three fragments,
> they don't care."
Oh yes we do.
There are 50 million iPhones/iPod Touches in just one fragment. You "do the math" Chu. I'll personally be sticking with Apple for now.
I think what some people here don't realise is that if Apple keeps making it tricky to jail break iPhones it'll keep us developers happy. If the developers are happy then we'll keep writing apps for the AppStore. If there are tens of thousands of apps on the AppStore then customers will be happy.
If Apple made it trivial to jail break a phone why would a developer bother writing an app? Why do you think the AppStore is such a success?
As an "artist" writing and selling computer games I can't imagine anything more catastrophic than it becoming legal to copy and distribute freely anything I create. I'd never bother writing anything again. And if record companies are offering artists such a bad deal the artists could always bypass them and use that Internet thing to do their own sales. But they don't because they make more money by using a record company.
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