firehose

DavidHumus writes "A recent study indicates that consuming vegetables from the Solanaceae family, which includes tomatoes and peppers (as well as tobacco), decreases the risk of contracting Parkinson's disease. Earlier studies had shown that smoking tobacco seems to provide protection against the disease and the newer one seems to confirm that the key ingredient is nicotine, which is present in some vegetables like peppers."

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Lex Friedman and Dave Addey both have thoughtful articles about app pricing. Go ahead, you really should go read them if you care about apps or developers.

I can't disagree with their premise. There's a common perception that apps should cost next to nothing.¹ The low cost of software is changing the traditional business model of software.²

While I don't disagree with Lex and Dave's fundamental premise, I think that neither article recognizes a basic sea change taking place in software: The average computer user is losing their fear of software and that means a bigger market for everyone.

If You are Reading this, You are Not "Mainstream"

It's so easy to think that the world I exist in is the same world that the rest of the population experiences. I'm accustomed to paying a lot for software. I'm accustomed to upgrading my computer on a regular basis. I'm accustomed to controlling my computing environment. But I am not part of the mainstream.³

The mainstream user buys a computer and uses the apps already installed. The shared experience with computers has been Crapware, preinstalled software and frustration. Back when Egghead and CompUSA were still in business the aisles were filled with terrified "normal" users trying to figure out how to make their Dell computer print birthday cards for their nieces.

Fast forward to the decade of mobile devices. Apps are cheap and iOS has created a sense of ease with software. In the past 3 years I've seen my non-computer centric friends installing, trying and deleting more apps than ever before. One of the most significant contributing factors is price.

The Problem with Demos

Dave Addey:

Certain kinds of apps just need a fully-featured, time-limited trial in order to prove their worth.

Lower prices create lower risks. Demo software is not a solution because Windows users know all too well that a demo still comes with a price. That price is Crapware installations like browser bar logos and unwanted antivirus software.⁴ With over 1M apps in the App Store, the easiest solution is to just purchase the cheapest app.

The future App Store market is not existing Mac users, it's current Windows users. Those users are going to need some convalescence time and most of them do not trust computers or people that know about computers.

Perhaps a demo is still the only way to express the value of an expensive app.

Death by Dimes

In my experience, most computer users NEVER upgrade their software unless they buy a new computer. This behavior is shared between Windows, Mac and iOS users. They just do not understand the reason for upgrading something that already works. However, we now know that they are willing to buy a shit-ton of Smurf Berries through IAP. Whatever bit of psychology explains this behavior is outside my understanding. Maybe it's just easier to directly measure the value of a Smurf berry than an app upgrade. That does not change reality: IAP is a revenue model that works.

Yes, this is sad news. I hate IAP. I avoid apps with IAP. But this model works and I suspect it will become a key software design principle in the future. I will softly cry as I purchase each new paintbrush and theme pack.

The Magic of a Dollar

Lex Friedman:

Spending money on great apps means not only do you get great apps now, but you’re also essentially investing in great apps later. Let’s fix the App Store economy, and let’s start by paying for apps without shuddering at $4 price tags.

I completely agree with Lex, even though he is wrong. There is something magical about 99 cents. $4 is cheap in the grand scheme of computer pricing and cellular subscriptions but the reality is that many people immediately dismiss apps above $1.

I've experienced this many times. I'll be asked for a recommendation for a specific type of app. If I recommend a $0.99 app they usually buy it on the spot. If I recommend a $1.99 app, they cringe slightly and "think about it". If I recommend a $4.99 app, they go into spasms and grab a free alternative.⁵

We can argue about what people should think. We can try to educate people that do not share our value system. Or we can just accept that our model does not fit the rest of the world.

Conclusion

This conclusion is unsatisfying. The commoditization of apps has already occurred. The genie is out of the bottle. The question is, which market is the right target for a small developer. Not many new developers will move the needle with an app over $10.⁶ Cult favorites like the OmniGroup, Flying Meat and Panic could pull it off because they have a legion of dedicated and experienced fans. But their market will be predictable and small.

Some of us will pay obscene amounts of money for good apps from good companies. Then there's the majority. For the majority, applications have never been a joy and buying apps has been a novelty brought on by Apple's App Store and the $0.99 app. I say embrace that market and understand it. Roll the dice and hope for the next Camera+ or Doodle Jump. But understand that the $0.99 market is also fickle. You will rarely make a fan of those customers.

There is a market for apps over $5. That market is extremely small when compared to the the rest of the app store customer base. We will not change that reality through rational arguments. We can not hold back the ocean with blogs.

It hurts to sell something good for cheap. While the App Store creates uncomfortable limitations and price pressures it's also opened an unprecedented market opportunity for small developer shops. The novice market is the really big market. That's the rich vein waiting to be tapped...$0.99 at a time.

The Street

le Bat

Timegate, the studio behind Section 8 and Aliens: Colonial Marines, laid off its entire staff today, Kotaku reports.

On May 2, Timegate filed for bankruptcy protection, citing a debt of up to $50 million. The filing revealed that Timegate owed large sums to 50 companies, including Epic Games, Agora Games and DJ2 Entertainment. In April, Timegate lost an appeal against publisher SouthPeak Interactive, potentially losing the Section 8 license and adding $7.35 million to its debt. SouthPeak fought for Timegate's closure in arbitration and won, leading to today's layoffs, the report says.

Timegate let go 25 employees in March, citing a rough transition to next-gen consoles and a publishing deal that fell through. The studio's most recent project is Minimum, a free-to-play shooter for PC that was supposed to launch on Steam Early Access on April 16. Minimum is currently not listed anywhere on Steam.

Report: Timegate closes its doors originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 09 May 2013 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For his 2012 kinetic sculpture “The Music Box,” artist Dave Cole converted a 22,000 pound soil compactor machine into a massive music box that plays the “Star Spangled Banner.” Though Cole stripped most of the weight out of the compactor to make the sculpture more manageable, it still weighs in at 2,000 pounds. The sculpture was commissioned by the Cleveland Institute of Art.

photos by Carly Gaebe

via designboom

A reader draws the thread to a dissenting close:

It seems to me that Tamerlan is the Lee Harvey Oswald of our time. Was Oswald motivated by communism? Maybe. But more likely he was motivated by a sense of restlessness, a feeling that he was a great man who couldn’t quite get his shit together. Both he and Tamerlan were frustrated by professional failure. Both went overseas looking for something. Both had strikingly similar domestic situations. Is it a coincidence that Tamerlan, Oswald, Czolgosz and Booth — and even Timothy McVeigh — were all about the same age?

Never mind the conspiracy theories, Oswald was a lone wolf. And so was Tamerlan (plus his kid brother). Had he been a secret agent, an al Qaeda plant and part of a larger terror network like the 9/11 terrorists, that would be something. But the actions of men like this don’t really deserve political or ideological scrutiny. Their actions are just sad, all-too-familiar human tragedies.

Is radical Islam more violent than communism or anarchism or white racism? Hardly. For guys like Tamerlan, ideology is just something to wear in a cold world.

So is theology.

(Photo: Getty Images.)

As our sun heads to its 11 year solar maximum, NASA has captured, during a solar flare, this amazing picture of a giant “solar whip” last week.

A burst of solar material leaps off the left side of the sun in what’s known as a prominence eruption. This image combines three images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured on May 3, 2013, at 1:45 pm EDT, just as an M5.7 class solar flare from the same region was subsiding. The images include light from the 131-, 171- and 304-angstrom wavelengths. Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA

[Source: dailymail.co.uk | Picture: NASA]

President Obama came into office 2009 with a promise to make his administration the most "open" in history in terms of revealing information to the public about the inner-workings of government, a claim that has been challenged vociferously. But to further advance his open government ambitions, the President today issued an executive order requiring all major federal agencies under the executive branch to make their data "easy to find, accessible, and usable," with an important caveat: " wherever possible and legally permissible." The White House also released a new set of open source software tools on Github that federal agencies can use to get more of their data out onto the web in software developer and user-friendly formats,...

Continue reading…

By Adam Smith on April 11th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

Another World’s re-release allows players to turn off the new graphics and play with the game as it was originally designed instead and I am very pleased about that. Less pleasing is the trailer for the remake of Delphine stablemate Flashback, the story of a man with no memory rolling through a jungle and appearing in a deadly gameshow. As with Another World, it’s difficult to detach memories of playing Flashback from memories of how the game looked – it had a varied palette and tremendously expressive animations, all of which fed into a clarity of control. The trailer for the remake, which is being developed by Vector Cell and five members of the original team, strongly suggests that everybody involved has forgotten many of the things that made Flashback worth experiencing.

Now, try to forget all about that. It’s probably for the best.

Mike Kelton and a live band serenade random women on the streets of New York City in “Wooing Women in Public” by experimental music video group cdza.

Jeff Bliss, a High School student gives a lesson to his teacher at Duncanville [Original] (by James Smith)

MiamiHerald.com

Minnesota House OKs same-sex marriage; Senate expected to concur Los Angeles Times Minnesota is poised to become the second Midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage after the state House of Representatives approved a bill Thursday that would allow the practice. The House had been considered the measure's toughest hurdle. Celebration at State Capitol After Gay Marriage VoteKSTP.com MN Same-Sex Marriage Bill: Laine Offers GLBT Community Gift of Word 'Marriage'Patch.com all 245 news articles »

brigwife:

Nerval's Lobster writes "For comedy publication The Onion, a recent cyber-attack by the Syrian Electronic Army was no laughing matter. The SEA managed to compromise The Onion's Twitter account, plastering it with insults aimed at the United Nations, Israel, and Syrian rebels. 'UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: "Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor,"' read a typical (and perhaps one of the more printable) ones. When the Tweets appeared, some Onion Twitter-followers questioned whether the newspaper was playing some sort of elaborate meta-joke, perhaps riffing on a recent series of high-profile cyber attacks. But the SEA was serious, and so was The Onion about flushing the attackers from its systems. In a new posting on theonion.github.io, the publication's IT crew details exactly what happened. On May 3, attackers from the SEA fired off phishing emails to Onion employees, at least one of whom clicked on a malicious link. From there, the attackers compromised a handful of systems. 'In total, the attacker compromised at least 5 accounts,' the account concluded. 'The attacker logged in to compromised accounts from 46.17.103.125 which is also where the SEA hosts a website.' But following the crisis, The Onion couldn't resist swiping at its attackers. 'Syrian Electronic Army Has a Little Fun Before Inevitable Upcoming Deaths at Hands of Rebels,' read the headline for a May 6 article that described a fictional massacre of the SEA in gruesome detail."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Valve's continued Linux conquest, their latest titles they have ported natively to the penguin platform is Half-Life 2 and many of the add-ons...

fffffffffff

Yep, I am totally ordering one of these customizable Hashtag Banners. Perfect for our #Tattly birthday bash in July!

Original Source

What if our worst fears about the coming wave of video game hardware come true? What if it means the death of gaming as we know it?!

Never fear, this newest strip by artist Zac Gorman delivers unto us a hero—nay, a savior—who will warn us of the fearful future that’s around the corner. Don’t worry, everyone. He’s on it.

Want to see more of Zac's work? Head over to his personal blog and game-themed siteMagical Game Time. If you're feeling commercial, you can buy prints and shirts here. He'll be back on Kotaku with a new comic same time next month!

photo via Princess Monster Truck

Princess Monster Truck is a Persian cat with an unusually fierce underbite found by New York City-based artists Joseph Bryce and Tracy Timmins. According to Buzzfeed, they found Monster while walking home from dinner one night and took her in because she was thin, hungry, and “she didn’t look like a survivor.” After taking her to a veterinarian, Joseph and Tracy learned that Monster’s extreme underbite was probably a birth defect rather than an injury or illness. You can see more photos of the glorious Princess Monster Truck on Instagram.

photo via Tracy Timmins

photo via Tracy Timmins

photo via Princess Monster Truck

photo via Princess Monster Truck

photo via Princess Monster Truck

via Buzzfeed

recoiledsnake writes "The first real world stats for Chromebooks show that they're struggling to have any traction in the marketplace. In its first week of monitoring worldwide usage of Google's Chrome OS, NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly 2/100 of 1 percent, a figure too small to earn a place on its reports. The first Chromebooks went on sale in June 2011, nearly two years ago, with Acer reportedly selling fewer than 5000 units in the first six months and Samsung selling even fewer. In the past three years, Chromebook sales have been worse than even three months worth of WindowsRT sales. Perhaps users are heeding Stallman's warning on Chromebooks. We previously discussed reports of Chromebook topping Amazon sales, selling to 2000 schools and wondered whether QuickOffice on ChromeOS can topple Microsoft Office." I find ChromeOS good in some contexts (any place that a browser and a thin layer of Linux is all you need), but the limitations are frustrating — especially on hardware that can run a conventional Linux as well as Google's specialized one. We'll watch for developments in the Google hardware world at next week's I/O conference.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philly.com

Feds: University of Montana to change sex-assault policies after review CNN International (CNN) -- The University of Montana will overhaul its handling of sexual harassment and assault complaints after a federal probe found "real and significant" problems, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Justice and the Department of Education ... Feds, University of Montana reach deal to reform handling of rape casesChicago Tribune Settlements in sexual assault and harassment cases a heads-up for Texas ...Dallas Morning News (blog) DOJ concludes UM investigationMissoula Independent (blog) San Bernardino Sun all 25 news articles »

9 Film Frames

First time accepted submitter He Who Has No Name writes "While the ATF appears to have no open objection to 3D printed firearms at this time, the Department of Defense apparently does. A short while ago, '#DEFCAD has gone dark at the request of the Department of Defense Trade Controls. Take it up with the Secretary of State' appeared on the group's site, and download links for files hosted there began to give users popups warning of the DoD takeover." Well, that didn't take long. Note: As of this writing, the site is returning an error, rather than the message above, but founder Cody Wilson has posted a similar message to twitter. At least the Commander in Chief is in town to deliver the message personally. Update: 05/09 21:17 GMT by T : Tweet aside, that should be Department of State, rather than Department of Defense, as many readers have pointed out. (Thanks!)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Ben Yeh] wrote in to tell us about this voice-controlled chess robot he built along with three others as a final project for their Georgia Tech ECE 4180 Embedded Systems Design class.

To handle the speech recognition they grabbed an EasyVR board. This is a fine solution because it prevents the need for a computer to process voice commands (remember, it’s an embedded systems class). This concept breaks down when you find out that the desktop computer next to the robot is where the chess game is running. Perhaps that can be moved to a microcontroller by the next set of 4180 students.

The robot arm portion of the project is shown off well in the clip after the break. Normally we’d expect to see stepper motors driving the axes of a CNC machine but in this case they’re using servo motors with built-in encoders. The encoders are i2c devices which feed info back to the main controller. There was a parts ordering snafu and the z axis motor doesn’t have an encoder. No problem, they just added a distance sensor and a reflector to measure the up and down movement of the claw.

Filed under: cnc hacks, robots hacks

The angelic warrior of the '90s makes her Marvel debut in a few short weeks, and today the publisher revealed CCO Joe Quesada's redesign for Angela's arrival in "Age of Ultron."

So, here's Nathan Fillion stabbing Link and stealing Zelda away. Because he is Nerd King.

Read more...

dearrintheheadlights:

this

Marketing v. Reality