I feel like to a large extent this is just techcrunch being techcrunch and writing link-bait articles.
My thoughts on this:
1) Just about everyone is "interested in making money" from their apps. I'm not sure how they're filtering the developers in the survey, but I'm willing to bet the amount of effort put in, and the actual methods used to "make money" differ wildly among those developers. Apples to oranges.
2) 5-10k per app per month for a single developer with a full-time job doing this in his spare time is pretty good. For a 300 employees company, not so much. Similarly, millions a month will sustain a large company and make an individual developer extremely wealthy. What are we comparing?
3) I'll go out on a limb here and say that games make more than any other category on the app store. They also tend to require a higher budget and production value: better graphics, sounds, a storyline, etc... Maybe the 100 flashlight / todolist apps competing for the same spots don't make much money but they also cost nothing besides a weekend of work and the $99 / year ADC membership. I also wouldn't be surprised if most of that "1.6%" were game developers. Lumping every app together and trying to get stats out of it doesn't tell us anything about how much the developers are spending to get those apps out.
4) Obligatory plug: Storm8, the company I work for, is recruiting. We're a mobile games developer (on the App Store we tend to be better known as TeamLava) and have been profitable and fully bootstrapped for over 5 years now through rapid growth. We're all very passionate about creating new games and refining our existing ones and have a lot of interesting projects to work on. We're looking for developers interested in learning more about the mobile games industry, no experience required. Email is in my profile if interested :)
I kind of skimmed the post, so maybe I'm missing something, but what exactly is the "architecture" described here? Dynamically-typed languages will allow the passing around of objects of different types as long as they implement the necessary methods. This is a nice property in some cases, but a lot of times I'd prefer to have static-typing and well defined protocols. It seems like that post ignored the more important parts of the discussion.
He doesn't negate your points because there were none to negate. Well, except for that clearly accurate "90-99%" figure you quoted. Your personal crusade is not a rebellion, and no one is trying to cut off "you're" head.
Sure, we all agree that deceptive advertising is deceptive. That's wrong, but not all advertising is bad. I think you'll be surprised to find out that 95% of people (yay, making up numbers is fun!) actually don't mind that google tracks their activity so they can show more relevant ads. I typically don't click on them, but hey, more relevant ads still makes my overall experience better and I really don't care if we get there because some of my search history was (relatively anonymously) logged on some of google's servers.
Also yes, word of mouth leads a lot of people to discover new products, and may be cheaper than traditional advertising in dollar amounts, but it's likely a much greater time investment that may not even pay off in the end. Likewise, patio11 could pay the hobbyist site, and google, and any other "legitimate" advertising platform directly but I think the time commitment to find those valuable platforms, enter into an agreement with them, and deal with all the associated details may not be worth it for him.
In the end, it's about finding a cost-effective way to get your products in front of its audience. That may be "word of mouth" (and I don't want to get into that debate, but product review sites tend to be more misleading, biased and corrupt than a lot of ads), or it may be ads. To each his own, but you don't need to condemn everyone who doesn't share your overly idealistic views.
IANAL, but I'd be surprised if the police was allowed to raid me, launch tear gas through my window and shoot me in the head. Even with a warrant. I'm not worried about this happening, because it doesn't. If it did, I'm sure it would blow up into a huge scandal.
I am worried about government agencies intercepting my traffic / communications because it does happen, it's really hard to find out unless you know what you're looking for, and they don't have a warrant on every American citizen that happens to get caught.
startpage serves you google results, anonymized. It's sort of like scroogle was, I suppose.
ddg, I think, does their own spidering and also serves bing and other results (but not google), but that's from dusty memory and it could be wrong or changed. ddg will however forward your request to google if you want, and you'll get a results page from google itself. In fact I use ddg as a front end for google when I want to use google.
You'd be surprised by how many people won't do that. In my opinion, it's your job as a designer / developer to make sure your product works for as many people as reasonably possible, and not expect users to jump through hoops (no matter how small) to use it.
I definitely agree (to a point...I don't test with IE6 or IE7 anymore unless budget and time is specifically allocated for them), but "make sure your product works for as many people as reasonably possible" is not to be confused with "make sure your product works the same for as many people as reasonably possible".
I'm happy to serve static images to older browsers with an unintrusive note telling them what they're missing and how they can get it.
"it's your job as a designer / developer to make sure your product works for as many people as reasonably possible, and not expect users to jump through hoops (no matter how small) to use it."
I totally disagree. Why it should be my job? Do you want to use my product? Then use the right environment where my product works as it should, otherwise GTFO.
I don't want my product be used by incompetent users. Its 2012, people ought to be educated about technology.
Non-combattants should be off-limits imo, yes. However war and terrorism are completely different. It's generally accepted that there may be civilian casualties in a war zone, and that is clearly not terrorism (intimidation, maybe).
Unprovoked, unilateral attacks seem to be the more traditional form of terrorism (basically using fear to try and influence behavior), in particular when performed by groups not (officially) affiliated with a specific government.
Let's take an example from history. You have a country like Britain during WWII. It is a democracy, it has elected a government which has chosen to make war against Germany. There is widespread public support for the government and for the choice of making war against Germany. More so, the civilian economy is in high gear supporting the war effort (supplying food, clothing, arms, ammunition, vehicles, etc.)
I can understand being apprehensive about violence against non-combatants, but in the above situation what exactly is the justification for excluding attacking civilians?
Well, that's a bad example because there've been dozens of papers regarding strategic bombing in WWII, and almost all of them concluded it was a failure as far as affecting production capability of the bombee, and a worse failure as far as morale.
So on the efficacy front, it didn't make sense, and on the honor front it's on some pretty shaky ground. Of course, it happened, so there's that.
It's one thing to say that it's ineffective to bomb residential neighborhoods. It's another thing to say that it's always illegitimate. Also, what about factories staffed by civilians producing ball bearings or tires?
Or, in more recent conflicts, attacking truck drivers, weapons system maintainers, UAV operators, base entry point security guards, drivers/security for intelligence agencies, etc. At the very least, this forces the military to devote more resources to force protection for these contractors; it also limits operations out with the populace, and drives a wedge between the occupying military and the civilians in which the insurgents can survive.
And also there was a lot of resistance to targeting purely civilian areas especially early on. Later on Germany did specifically terror raids Coventry for example.
But even hamburg was a major center for the support of U boats so you can see why the threat of the later Elektroboote Tpe XXI boats would put them on the target list.
Oh and my Fathers house was hit by a bomb - but they where going for the Largest Spitfire factory in the UK so it wasn't his house they were trying to hit.
IANAL and I hate to sound like a fanboy, but can't Apple claim that the 2007 iPod touch is prior art, since it's basically a small black tablet with rounded corners and a single button at the bottom? It looks much more similar to an iPad than the 2008 crunchpad.
Surely there must be more to it. Clearly all of us who've played a flight simulator know that going up too fast will cause you to lose speed and eventually stall and fall until you regain enough speed to stabilize.
Sadly in this case it sounds like a mix of overconfidence (not avoiding the storm, trusting the plane more than the stall warnings, not waking up the captain until it was too late) and a lack of training for unexpected situations were the major factors in the crash.
I was thinking about that after reading the report. From our perspective it might be obvious, but we can't put ourselves into that situation.
I wonder if civillian pilots can be trained in the same way as military pilots to handle stresses in emergencies and to think clearly. Or to at least learn something from military techniques
It seems that in the very rare cases where a commercial plane goes down spectacularly, the ones that make it alive were flown by formerly non-commercial pilots (military or otherwise), who've flown planes that give them much less assistance and in much more stressful situations and so "doing the right thing" has almost become second nature to them.
The problem with people is that even if you know what you should be doing in theory, when you're put in an extremely stressful situation you're unlikely to be able to come up with a creative solution... and few situations are more stressful than the moment you realize that something completely unexpected is happening, at night, in a thunderstorm, over the ocean, with 200+ lives depending 100% on your actions.
Interestingly I have not played flight simulators since the 1980's, but I know of overspeed stalls (usually mach tucks) in part from being fascinated about historical engineering, and ran into the issue when looking at WWII aircraft (interestingly the first confirmed incidents of overspeed stalls were with the propeller-driven Lightening aircraft in WWII).
My thoughts on this:
1) Just about everyone is "interested in making money" from their apps. I'm not sure how they're filtering the developers in the survey, but I'm willing to bet the amount of effort put in, and the actual methods used to "make money" differ wildly among those developers. Apples to oranges.
2) 5-10k per app per month for a single developer with a full-time job doing this in his spare time is pretty good. For a 300 employees company, not so much. Similarly, millions a month will sustain a large company and make an individual developer extremely wealthy. What are we comparing?
3) I'll go out on a limb here and say that games make more than any other category on the app store. They also tend to require a higher budget and production value: better graphics, sounds, a storyline, etc... Maybe the 100 flashlight / todolist apps competing for the same spots don't make much money but they also cost nothing besides a weekend of work and the $99 / year ADC membership. I also wouldn't be surprised if most of that "1.6%" were game developers. Lumping every app together and trying to get stats out of it doesn't tell us anything about how much the developers are spending to get those apps out.
4) Obligatory plug: Storm8, the company I work for, is recruiting. We're a mobile games developer (on the App Store we tend to be better known as TeamLava) and have been profitable and fully bootstrapped for over 5 years now through rapid growth. We're all very passionate about creating new games and refining our existing ones and have a lot of interesting projects to work on. We're looking for developers interested in learning more about the mobile games industry, no experience required. Email is in my profile if interested :)