I've wondered, when articles write "teens aren't using Facebook" -- are they referring to young college students (17-19) or are they referring to middle/high schoolers?
Facebook was originally college-only, and high schoolers tend to emulate college students more than the other way around (in fact, I doubt any college student follows high school trends), therefore my guess is what Facebook is actually losing is young college students..? If they're losing high school students.. who cares.
I think 4K will be the minimum necessary to have a real VR experience. I mentioned it in another comment: suspension of disbelief is everything, but currently my eyes focus too keenly on the scanlines and my immersion is ruined. It doesn't help that all my consumer devices have retina-like quality, so I'm used to nearly flawless clarity in my displays. When I'm using the 720p Oculus Rift it just bugs me too much. 1080p will be better, but still not great.
I've tried the Oculus for a weekend. I'm relatively unimpressed until 1080p or higher becomes available. It's currently too low resolution. Blurring and scanlines interfere too significantly with the suspension of disbelief.
> This all based on a tiny amount of anecdotal evidence: one post and a reply by his friend.
Maybe, but the reaction on Twitter and in this thread is proof that a lot of techies have this puritan attitude toward homeless. The blog was being sensational to expose this.
I would like say guaranteed income law (similar to basic income of Alaska) would solve homelessness, but only in cities and towns that are affordable to rent and live in. Even with a guaranteed income the homeless of San Francisco would not be able to afford rent.
Assuming worst-case NSA scenario, even if the images weren't hosted by Google, the NSA would just pull the external images anyway for facial recognition/what not.
Is there a possibility for major titles becoming "asm.js ports"? Games like World of Warcraft, League of Legends, Battlefield series, Starcraft 2, Minecraft, etc.
Major desktop titles probably not but major mobile titles definitely yes [1].
WebGL + asm.js on desktop computers should be roughly equivalent to native iOS / Android applications on top-of-the-line mobile devices (with possibility to get better effects on desktop GPUs).
This is btw what's going on with these very fast Emscripten ports - they can be done so quickly because the bulk of the hardest work was already done before, when engine and game developers made their code and maybe even more importantly their assets work well on mobile devices.
If you noticed many of these fast Emscripten ports were not desktop ports but had already existing mobile versions before - Unreal Engine Citadel demo, Unigine Crypt demo, and now Monster Madness.
Nevertheless it's still very impressive, big kudos to Mozilla folks.
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[1] For example these iOS 3d games should be feasible on the web (runtime performance wise, big asset downloads may be pain): The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, Grand Theft Auto 3 / Vice City, Infinity Blade series, Max Payne 1, Mirror's Edge, XCom: Enemy Unknown, Real Racing, Asphalt series, mobile Need for Speed series, etc.
Plus of course anything 2D - Angry Birds, World of Goo, Plants vs Zombies, Osmos, Limbo, etc.
Minecraft in the browser has been done already, hasn't it? It'd be pretty trivial, as it's been ported to java / c# / objective c already, and has low system requirements.
Given that asm.js games tend to run at something like 15-30% of the speed of native code, I doubt we'll see Battlefield 4 or Starcraft 2 anytime soon.
Additionally, given that the WoW game client is many gigabytes in size, I doubt we'll see that either, even if it could run.
Citation on the 15-30% claim? We see more like 50%, including compilation time. Sometimes much faster on certain benchmarks (Bullet IIRC?) now that float32 support has landed.
This is from a link in the article for more information. These Monster Madness fellows found Firefox gave them 33% of native performance, and Chrome 20%. Presumably IE would give you fractions of these figures.
I figured that, rather than citing figures from benchmarks, I'd go for the real world scenario that this release has given us.
Minecraft is FAR bigger and more complicated than people give it credit for. Getting a terrain generation demo running in a browser is not even remotely the same thing.
Well, no, they're not as rich as the desktop versions.
But as they've had a team port (a trimmed version of) Minecraft to xbox live arcade, and the iPad, it would surprise me if they're not already working on a *.js version.
The WoW client already supports streaming, you can play the game after downloading only the core content. Even that is pretty large though, but it could be optimized for the web.
The original article explains it well. It's okay to own a car, maybe even one per adult in the household (though I would advocate greater car sharing). The original article's point is using the right tool for the job. In your cases the car was the right tool. For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home and ride a bicycle for your daily city commutes. If everyone physically able followed this rule.. We'll, we'd probably look a lot like Sweden or those other uber bike friendly European places.
> For many people, especially city dwellers, you can leave your car at home
I do one better: I work from home now. When I had an outside office it was less than five miles away. Now I try to concatenate as many trips as possible into a single loop. Works out well most of the time.
If Tesla hadn't screwed-up the electric SUV design I would have bought in. I'll have to wait for another company to get it right. That's what's missing in my life right now, an honest electric powered SUV. Short of doing a conversion on something like a Suburban I'll have to wait for something like that to become commercially available. Shame that Tesla decided to go for a Gucci-bat-mobile instead of building a true sports-utility vehicle. I have a horrible feeling their SUV is going to be a failure. I hope I am wrong.
I like the iOS ecosystem, as well the OS X ecosystem. I like Mac products. I have a Macbook Pro. I do all sorts of hacks on it, because OS X is not locked down. I don't see why I can't do the same on iOS. I don't want to use Android or others.
Facebook was originally college-only, and high schoolers tend to emulate college students more than the other way around (in fact, I doubt any college student follows high school trends), therefore my guess is what Facebook is actually losing is young college students..? If they're losing high school students.. who cares.