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No fullscreen for tablets? That extra 1/2" would be super nice on my N7…

2 days ago on Google bringing its own voice search to Chrome for iOS, adds fullscreen mode to Android phones 3 replies

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Price relative to a tangible good, whether measured by its material value, or the effort necessary in its production SHOULD be the only measure of consumer fairness, in my opinion at least. If price were consistently based on the intended end use of a product, as you and others have indirectly argued, you would see 2 hammers at Home Depot, both made of the same wood and metal, maybe even coming off the same production line, but one is labeled “Hobbyist” and costs $7 and the other is labeled “Professional” and costs $150. That’s the anarchy you’re endorsing.

To put it in perspective, a big budget Hollywood movie can cost upwards of $250 million and two years to produce, but then a ticket at the box office costs $9.50 and the brand new Blu-ray costs $25-$30. Meanwhile Photoshop MIGHT cost $1-2 million and 6 months of coding (from a significantly smaller number of personnel) to go from one version to the next, but you can expect to pay close to $1000 for it (at least historically). And if you want to argue semantics of your interaction with a product (i.e. you spend 2 hours watching a movie vs. hundreds of hours using Photoshop), a video game can cost 10s or 100s of millions of dollars and upwards of 3-4 years to produce, retails for $10-$60 and, in the case of multiplayer games at least, can have an enduring hundreds-of-hours experience.

For me, it’s less a matter of who/what is the intent of the product and more how much time/money did this product consume and at what ratio am I reimbursing that?

18 days ago on Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only products 1 reply

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It’s also people that enjoy advocating for fair market practices. I used to bootleg it, but stopped and now own Elements, but I still think their pricing is bullshit, which is where my anger stems from. I don’t buy ebooks either, but I’m also pissed at Apple and Friends for skyjacking prices on those (several dollars MORE for a digital copy than a hardcover? are you kidding me?).

As a consumer, when a business takes advantage of their market position, it should annoy you. And not to sound like an MS fanboy, but Office is much more widely accepted as the industry standard for what it does, but they still only charge $150-$199 for the whole package. How do you justify $600/year x infinity for your product?

18 days ago on Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only products 3 replies

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Agreed. I used Elements back around version 7 and it was totally hamstrung at that point. On top of the interface being unnecessarily different from full PS. I finally gave up on bootlegs of PS after their copy protection thing got super annoying and I couldn’t find a functioning version and as a result purchased PS/Premiere Elements 11. It’s SIGNIFICANTLY better than it used to be.

With the exception of a few things (like the text tool being completely dumb and not allowing for things like Letting control) and a couple of interface differences, it does literally everything I was doing with full PS. Granted, I’m not a professional graphic designer, but I’m not a PS noob either (I’ve been using it heavily since PS7). On top of that, I greatly prefer it’s media catalog tool to Bridge. At least for my purposes.

18 days ago on Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only products 1 reply 1 recommend

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Good point, though I’m pretty sure they don’t release yearly upgrades for Elements.

18 days ago on Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only products 1 reply

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It’s less of a feat, considering Google’s recent search censorship. I’m at work, or I would test to see if “sex porn porn sex” still comes up with Funny or Die as the top result.

23 days ago on How Funny Or Die got to be Google's top search result for 'sex' 2 replies 1 recommend

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You can still swipe left and right. It just brings in the side menus now. Which honestly I prefer to having to hit the buttons. I might actually use those menus now.

24 days ago on Facebook for Windows Phone 8 gets major redesign and new features in beta app

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Social NV is pretty awesome on Windows 8. Not perfect, but WAY better than the people hub.

I honestly just use the website though. It’s Windows after all.

24 days ago on Facebook for Windows Phone 8 gets major redesign and new features in beta app 1 reply 1 recommend

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I’m honestly kinda surprised they thought it couldn’t.

25 days ago on Severe earthquakes can permanently deform the earth's crust, new findings suggest 10 recommends

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Yeah, I love how they juiced the color in that one shot. Clearly intentional, but effective. As shallow as it sounds, color/design was actually a big factor in getting me to ditch Android for WP8. Aside from my realization that there’s nearly an equal number of quality apps on both platforms regardless of the obvious holes in WP’s ecosystem and all the fluff in Android’s.

25 days ago on Microsoft creates an Apple vs. Samsung wedding fight for its new Windows Phone ad 12 recommends

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Except that you can tap to send on WP8 also (including between android and WP8).

And also that wasn’t the point of the ad.

25 days ago on Microsoft creates an Apple vs. Samsung wedding fight for its new Windows Phone ad 3 recommends

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To their credit, I didn’t even notice until you mentioned it. Which I’m sure, considering their current relationship, was intentional.

25 days ago on Microsoft creates an Apple vs. Samsung wedding fight for its new Windows Phone ad 1 reply

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Because having a third family in this wedding scenario makes total sense.

25 days ago on Microsoft creates an Apple vs. Samsung wedding fight for its new Windows Phone ad 5 recommends

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Try more like 5-10 years.

25 days ago on Microsoft creates an Apple vs. Samsung wedding fight for its new Windows Phone ad 1 reply 2 recommends