To get accurate prices on ebay, check the filtering options in search results for your query and tick "Sold Listings."
It will then show only recently sold listings along with what they sold for. Completed listings that didn't sell because they were listed with unreasonable prices will not show up.
What do people actually use voice for besides playing music, smart home, transcribing and "widget" stuff like timers and weather?
Are there lots of people out there actually using it for productivity like scheduling, communicating, researching, comparing?
To me it seems like until voice AI gets smart enough to respond to a query like "Alexa, how will our Q4 projected net profits change if I switch widget vendors from AlphaCorp to BetaCorp?" an interactive screen will be needed.
Companies see the Cambrian explosions of growth (and equities appreciation) that follow successful UI shifts and want to reproduce that with voice UI.
You could do a hell of a lot by establishing a framework for third parties to use such that they don’t stomp upon each other and the system-reserved words/phrases, as well as homophone rejection/discrimination, then brute-forcing lots of recognized cases. Right now, I’m seeing second-system effects in voice UI efforts by everyone (possibly excepting the dedicated voice recognition outfits like Nuance), by trying to apply a general machine learning approach to all of it and eschewing brute-force as not pure/clean enough.
Well, Alexa seems to be going the brute force route--using third-party skills is just like using a spoken command line utility. The problem is, while this approach is simple and it works, very few skills are useful.
Richard Serra's most controversial piece, Tilted Arc, was removed after 8 years from a plaza in front of a building in Manhattan because "those who worked in the area found the sculpture extremely disruptive to their daily routines, and within months the work had driven over 1300 bureaucratic employees in the greater metro area to sign a petition for its removal."
"Serra states that the case exemplifies the U.S. legal systems preference towards capitalistic property rights over democratic freedom of expression."
The major player currently is Walmart for most Americans. It's investing into online at a rapid pace, they recently added free online pickup for groceries and purchased Jet and Bonobos, so I think the real war will be between Walmart and Amazon/WF.
Value basics and speciality stores like Aldi and Trader Joes (which have very spotty coverage currently in the US) and regional full-inventory stores (Piggly Wiggly, Harris Teeter, Bi-lo etc) will pick up the crumbs.
I will bet against Walmart. They have a high cost structure for their existing stores which makes them vulnerable to hard discounters but they also invest a lot of money into their online ventures to fight Amazon. It's a battle on two fronts and will rip the company apart.
In the past, Walmart failed hard in Europe but ALDI and Lidl even conquered UK and Australia. As you might now, Europe is far away from a single culture and yet both chains were able to win in every country due to adoption and experience. While they are no franchise concept, there strategy reminds me of McDonald's.
I've played Zelda on Switch docked for 10 hours and have not yet once experienced input lag. It occasionally hits seemingly 20-25fps with a lot of enemies and environmental grass and such for a few seconds but that has absolutely not sullied my experience of playing one of the most thoughtful and enjoyable games of all time.
Glad you've had a great experience and I agree it's a great game.
Perhaps input lag is the wrong term or you just aren't looking but even just walking out into the starting area framerates start to drop and the game becomes noticeably slower. Try it in undocked mode and it's very obvious.
If you are used to playing at higher framerates (which isn't uncommon seeing as other big console exclusives are 60fps usually at 1080p) it's a real difference.
But this wasn't an article about Loom pushing storytelling forward. It pushed interaction forward.
Adventure games like Zork wanted a sentence typed. Later, a sentence was constructed using a mouse.
Loom removed the sentence as the player's action upon the game, and realized the player's intent didn't have to be a literal sentence.
It's just as much a breakthrough as Nintendo understanding that "pressing up" on a controller to lift a racket could be replaced by lifting an arm with a controller in it, in the case of the Wii.
That's the thing- it really didn't. Loom was novel for its lack of violence, and lack of a way to lose. But games like Neuromancer predated Loom by years, and were already using (comparatively) complex interfaces, for example.
LucasFilm Games was a noteworthy studio, among many other reasons, because they weren't dedicated to making shooters when that was clearly where the money was going. The shooter that they did produce (Dark Forces) was also better than Hexen. The "lack of a way to lose" was what distinguished them from Sierra Publishing, the only other interesting video game studio of the era.
LOOM™ was novel within the context of the studio, for being radically simplistic with the interface, considering how far they'd already "dumbed down" the interface from spiritual predecessors like Zork.
A side note: If you have not already seen Professor Moriarty's lecture on the actual origins of the CYOA format, this is probably the most interesting thing you will read all year: http://ludix.com/moriarty/electric.html
An interesting read. I was just wondering what Moriarty had done since Loom, something the article doesn't mention (presumably saved for the future article it hints will feature his exit from the industry), so thanks for a peek into his more recent career.
I praised Loom for its inventive simplicity, and how it avoids text towards direct interaction, and you refute that by referencing Neuromancer, a game with, in your words, a "(comparatively) complex interface."
Neuromancer is riddled with complex text interfaces for every interaction. Every choice demands a read through, along with several text selections to decide from. Here's a video of how awful it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tNMdbq_Z7w
Awful? Those few minutes of example show more player agency than the entirety of Loom combined. This is not a novel criticism- it was one of the main complaints levelled against Loom when it first came out.
There's a difference between text you read, and text you have to guess at/type (ie, the find-the-synonym frustrations of Infocom games).
Player agency in a medium without unlimited outcomes is a Choose Your Own Adventure, where the trick is done in plain sight and therefore unconvincing. Loom is just trying to tell a linear story in a convincing manner with the tools it has available, and it elevated the tools available. That's my only point.
Mark Zuckerberg built the worth of Facebook convincing advertisers it can influence people to buy their brand, yet why all the sudden does Facebook's influence not apply to deceptive news?
Remember Upworthy? It had misleading clickbait headlines and within one week it was gone from the Newsfeed. Facebook has the skills to fix this.
It has been said the media has a liberal bias. Conservative media denies that global warming exists. Liberals and the overwhelming majority of scientists accept it does. Can you name one issue where conservatives and scientists refute liberals?
It will then show only recently sold listings along with what they sold for. Completed listings that didn't sell because they were listed with unreasonable prices will not show up.