Similarly, I learnt PTC Pro/ENGINEER (now Creo) in university and have tried to learn SolidWorks, Tinkercad, Onshape and FreeCAD but never found them as usable or powerful as ProE. The constraint system, 2D sketch tool and assemblies were hard to map into these other systems.
I feel it’s similar to having learnt Photoshop (7) and then struggle to use GIMP. I keep looking for tools that aren’t there, expect panels to show certain details and they come up short.
It reinforces for me how valuable usability and interface design is for power user tools. But also, how important training materials are, and how loyal a user will be once they are accustomed to completing a workflow with their tool of choice.
I disagree.
You can teach a 4-year-old the moves each chess piece can make, but expecting them to absorb strategy, or to visualise 2+ moves into the future is an unfair burden.
The following are much better perfect information games for kids. I play each with my kids and have listed the age when they were able to strategise 2+ moves ahead:
Perhaps its where I live, or the people I know, but at my kids pre-school, I suspect that few 4 year olds could play naughts and crosses to a draw. I think that sort of awareness started around 5.5-6, where it became more normal.
Gobblet Gobblers -- on a cursory look -- seems to me like a complication on top of naughts and crosses. Namely, adding the ability to mask opponent pieces, and replace existing pieces.
As a side note it seems to me that one could replicate Gobblet Gobblers by using coloured coins of 3 sizes, with the smaller coins trumping the bigger ones thereby implying stacks.
Hive is more complex and less constrained than Onitama (bigger decision space).
We tried Hive when my eldest was 6 and it was beyond them. We tried it again a few years later at 8 and it clicked, has been part of our regular rotation of games since.
That box on your TV would have been a Nielsen box which sat on your TV and was connected to your landline. It didn’t collect anything automatically: every time you turned the TV on you were contractually obligated to press a button every 20 minutes to have the box call Nielsen and log a datapoint.
Those boxes have been phased out in favour of “Personal People Meters”[0], which are basically a pager with a SIM card that you wear which has a microphone listening 24/7 for TV broadcasts. You must keep it on you, listening at all times.
Nielsen will pay you $250/year (less than a dollar a day) for the data you provide.
Had them here in the UK, used to get a free TV license for the inconvenience. My mate always pressed the same button despite what channel we were watching though, so there is that...
KPH receiving station is 45 miles north of San Francisco, without bridge traffic you can make it in a little over an hour.
My father-in-law was an engineer in the navy and loved seeing the morse & radio equipment.
But the trip was fun for all the family; the driveway up to the reviving station building is lined with Monterey cypress trees, which have grown into a tunnel. [0] It’s a beautiful scene, my wife and mother-in-law were really taken aback.
Upper Story’s Turing Tumble and Spintronics are solid favourites in our house too. Weaving a graphic novel into the instruction / tutorial book is a brilliant tactic which really helped my eldest grasp the concepts covered.
Spintronics also helped give me a new perspective on electrical current, current division and capacitance. Seeing and feeling resistance in the chain, how little/no load results in high current (chain link throughput) was more valuable than the “water in a hosepipe” analogies I learnt in my University EE classes. Really looking forward to induction in the expansion set.
I was curious about the company, and discovered that the co-founders are a husband and wife couple who were in engineering and education respectively before starting the company. I’m glad to see they are able to operate profitably without listing on Amazon, and hope they continue to release more excellent educational engineering toys that I can explore with my kids.
Deep Throat had at least a 600x multiple (a budget of $47,000 and a box office somewhere between 30 million and 50 million). Blair witch had over a 1000x multiple, with the same 200k budget as mad Max and a box office around 200 million. Paranormal Activity also seems to be close to the 1000x mark.
Sure, but let's not fool ourselves. It isn't exactly a cost center for Apple to run the service nor would it be to scale up usage to include Android users. The cost would be a rounding error to Apple.
From a business perspective, I'm much more sympathetic to arguments that iMessage is a perk Apple wants to keep as incentive for more users to switch to Apple's ecosystem and, likely more important, lack of cross-platform interoperability raises the cost for existing Apple users to transition to Android.
Another way to look at it is that there would always be a fixed cost to operating any global messaging network that would probably be at least a million dollars a year. Piggybacking on Apple's already-built network and focusing only on marginal cost sidesteps the reality that standing up a service that big from scratch is very expensive. Even if iMessage were a decentralized network like email that allows federation, Beeper Mini would be on the hook for a much bigger bill.
I feel it’s similar to having learnt Photoshop (7) and then struggle to use GIMP. I keep looking for tools that aren’t there, expect panels to show certain details and they come up short.
It reinforces for me how valuable usability and interface design is for power user tools. But also, how important training materials are, and how loyal a user will be once they are accustomed to completing a workflow with their tool of choice.