aeberbach

It's telling that Google still pretends to be a company where technology and geek cred matters. Despite being in reality a fast follower whose revenues come almost entirely from selling the details of those who fall for what they offer, they hold onto the least-cautious "hackers" (term used very loosely) with references to text adventures and towels. Oh well.

I was a backer on that one, it's a great documentary.

If you like this kind of thing, try to find copies of books by Dave Ahl - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

I like this kind of thing and I have both books. A family friend CP/M system was by first gaming experience and I played all of them. The Star Trek here exists in a sort of copyright limbo, CBS obviously didn't license it but it was too popular to squash. I remember seeing ports of this to Amiga, Palm Pilot and Windows CE over the years.

Colossal Cave is a contemporary - it wasn't distributed as source (to my recollection... compiled OBASIC.COM IIRC?) so it isn't in the books but it was my favourite.

"Agent 13, is that you?"

Sure - what I mean is had Japan been the only place not to have GSM they may well have been forced to adopt it. GSM was around in the USA at that time (Moto Timeport "Worldphone" etc.) but was nothing like a standard, everywhere I looked I saw CDMA.

If you look just at the handsets available in 2000 or so it would have been very easy for Japanese telcos to look at what the world had to offer and conclude it was not much. Compare turn of the century Japanese devices* next to four-color phones like the Siemens S25 and Motorola's monochrome handsets.

If you want to blame anyone for not pushing adoption of GSM GPRS and beyond it shouldn't be Japan. There's one country that could have made it the obvious choice for everyone, but thanks to "competition" it never happened...

*i.e. J-Phone Sharp J-SH04 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-SH04

I'd say there are certain programmers, who after reaching a certain financial security threshold, would do exactly that. Just as there are people who would happily sail a yacht around the world indefinitely, though it would bore me silly. Is Carmack one of those? Who can say. This kind of programmer can be disguised by the fact that code hermits often make money by accident! When you love what you do, what you do tends to be good.

I expect Carmack is the sort of guy to say "fuck your golden handcuffs, I'd rather work on interesting problems". If it turns bad he'd go.

Have you no IMAGINATION!? Can't you picture a Farmville where you can actually see the teats on the cow right in front of you? See the corn waving in a virtual breeze? Best of all, see a beautifully rendered image of your money go up in flames each time you make an in-game purchase!

Congratulations on the most ridiculous comment on HN today. How many apps on the app store was that now, 1,000,000+ according to the admittedly non-authoritative Wikipedia. And all of them created with hex editors, you would have us believe. Not the completely unusable Xcode.

Oh, did your banana have "CAT III Max 600V" stencilled on it? The $15 multimeter does. I suspect the cheap meter has about the same right to wear that label as the banana.

In Gibson's books the zaibatsu are huge corporations where the top employees are not free to leave. Switching jobs involves your new employer hiring a team of mercenary specialists to extract the new hire. Often the principal does not survive. See "Neuromancer"and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and they should be enough to get you hooked!

William Gibson's zaibatsu come to mind. When they stop people getting off the bus rather than on it will be complete.

I feel like a sucker for responding to such obvious self-serving link bait, but full of gratitude to the very human staff at the hospital where I had a minor procedure last week I will anyway. Here's the simplistic refutation that is all the simplistic premise deserves:

Until you pass a Turing AND a Voight-Kampff test, stay the fuck out of my health system.

What? This is an insane idea to begin with. It's right up there with Compaq buying Digital and HP buying Compaq. Companies with too much money and no clue do things like this. Apple has too much money but absolutely no lack of critical thinkers who would realise this is a dumb idea.

Right now Apple makes platforms. Developers develop for those platforms and make lots of money. No shortage of good games on iOS, in case you haven't looked. And while I haven't seen anyone playing a Nintendo portable in a year or so, I see Android/iOS games everywhere. Nintendo haven't even got a worthy console in this generation. What does Nintendo even have that Apple would want?

Should Apple want Nintendo's IP (characters etc. - and I don't think that is Apple's style at all, just the only vaguely valuable thing there) they just have to wait a bit longer. If they did want Nintendo, the only risk to waiting would be that some other company would snap them up first. Nintendo certainly isn't going to worth _more_ in a year.

I'm sorry to see any store there go. I used to spend at least a full day walking around Akihabara every time I went to Tokyo for work and always came home with plenty of stuff I didn't even know I wanted. I still have various "Engineer" brand tools, while not the absolute best they were relatively cheap and well made. I was mainly into building home audio here then and found aluminium cases that were good enough to put next to commercial equipment, a long way from the angular steel stuff I could find online. There were machined knobs, actual ALPS potentiometers, and in the audiophile stores crazy stuff like $1000 binding posts and tantalum resistors with gold-plated leads, nice to look at but I wasn't crazy. What made it great was not the amazing range of stuff or expert advice (language barrier...) but the Japan-ness of it all - maybe tiny, maybe outdated, but everything presented with pride. Of course you can get it all and more online but it isn't the same. Online you don't see lovingly restored TEAC reel-to-reel systems next to Kenwood FM tuners and SGI Indy boxes, all perfectly clean and ready to go. If I was in Tokyo today I'd head right for Akihabara, and maybe buy an extra suitcase to get it all home.

Dr. Raymond M. Soneira badly needs an Editor. His use of Winnie-The-Pooh Punctuation makes his Article far too hard to Read.

The Apple statement is dated. Why must the "warrant canary" be removed if there should be a warrant in the future, when the statement is correct at the time of publication?

"I should learn how to do it myself."

That's an excellent idea. You'll still hire a developer next time of course, but you'll know exactly why you are doing it and you'll appreciate the result a little bit more.

Sure the demand for a 5-star review was a little underhanded but what do you expect when you are bottom feeding like that? $800 for any app is way below bargain basement.

Chances are it includes a large proportion of 30-day trial users - who have to go through the same painful process of registering for the "creative cloud" and installing all the same "added features" as the paying customers. Adobe is not one of those companies that just lets you drag a binary into the right place and get on with the job, then dump it in the trash when you don't want it any more.

Misleading title. Nobody did the impossible on iOS, just did clever things within the available frameworks. Well done author, it works. But did you ask yourself "should I really do this?"

What I hope is going to prove truly impossible is doing anything like this without requiring the user to explicitly accept the configuration profile. Even so I expect they will trick many into allowing "enhancement" of their email.

LinkedIn has a history of abusing email. From the early days* where they would email all of the contacts on your machine if you didn't read carefully enough to today where you can click unsubscribe many, many times and still get "important updates". It's a wretched hive of scum and recruiters, and they will never get between me and my email.

*spoke too soon! looks like they still do it: http://community.linkedin.com/questions/10106/i-want-linkedi...