I do find it ironic though how valve noticed a 3000% increase in game sales when they cut the price in half, but now most B&M stores are selling the game for 30$ or less... while Valve, a distributor who also made the game and has less cost in distributing the game... sells it for $40.
I believe that there was a "study" by Valve recently commenting on how when they sell games at 50% off or such, it largely increases the volume of games that are sold. Some people, like me, just simply don't find the value in paying full price for games. We usually at the same people that won't buy DVDs at $20 a pop, will buy things because its on sale, and will put price at a very high consideration.
I no longer have the time that I once had to game either, but I found that because of that, I have a backlog of games that I want to play. Hence I buy all of the games I want to play when they are on sale, and when one game is finished, I reach over and grab the next from the pile. I agree that "halfers" can take it too far, but I think that there is a very valid point that the reason the used game industry does so well is because games are overpriced for their value.
Something like this will cause problems just like it does with the train lines. A "power" user will be worth more to an ISP, as they pay a lot more and thus help either maintain the infastructure to a greater degree or make the company more profit.
The problem with this is of course grandma is less important than our bittorrent power user, and when she wants to check her email, its more important for that power user to get his bandwidth than grandma.
This relates to trains as passenger trains, at least in west michigan, are given less priority than cargo trains, and thus will be told to wait for cargo trains to pass (which has created hours worth of delays). I really don't want to see this done with ISPs as well.
Or they are thinking about the financial crisis and the fact that they would have to change textbooks and the education curriculum to remove all references of 9 planets in the solar system and the planet pluto.
People don't raise their children, why would they be expected to pay for them? That 5000 TV is for them and so the media can raise their brats for them.
Type B (try before you buy) can do nothing but increase sales...
Not necessarily true. This assumes that a) you wouldn't have gone out and bought the CD until you tried it and b) you would buy the same number of CDs.
Try-to-buy means that people make educated choices about what they buy, and that almost always means decreased sales because less people are buying bad product. If Band X releases a new album and you've always liked it, without try-to-buy you would most likely just buy the CD (or so the RIAA would like to believe). With try-to-buy, you may find that the new drummer is really bad and thus not like the CD and thus not buy, hence a lost sale.
What it does is not decrease the sales of quality product, but the sales of sub-par product will go down
Only reason I have vista is because I got it for free through the Computer Science Program (MS Academic Alliance). Otherwise my box would be running just Linux, or XP/Linux.
The amount of wealth that the Big 3s executives have and throw around is astounding. No matter how much money they made, they would have never put away enough to sustain a slump. Too many corporate bonuses to be paid out.
This doesn't mean the unions aren't a problem, but the problem isn't going to fix itself. These companies should fail
As for the corporate tax, it may be high, but that doesn't look into the number of loopholes either
The largest military budget isn't a way to determine the best military power. Money is not power.
The Chinese PLA has 2.3 million people in it. If they paid their soilders like the US does, then their military budget would rise accordingly. They don't have to though. If you want a history lesson about China vs the US, look at the Korean war. Military budget and hardware isn't everything, sheer numbers count as well.
The US needs a large military budget because it relies on volunteer forces, and because its spending is influenced by a civilian government who is biased and corrupted by lobbyists. The government approves the spending of money to keep jobs in certain areas, not because its the best place or even needed.
Thats how the government works. People vote for politicians who say that they'll either improve the lives of their constituents or maintain the status quo. Of course no one asks where all of this money to maintain the lives of certain constituents comes from.
Maybe this won't always be the way...
I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I have a dream that one day on the white halls of Washington that those who represent the people and the people, will sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even in the state of fear, a state focused on terrorism, a state where the common citizen is afraid of the government, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the objects they possess, but by their moral standing and merits.
I have a dream today.
Corney I know, but government doesn't change unless the people change the government.
I'll definitely agree with the comparison between JS and C.
It is probably why I dislike both of them too. Yes I'm about to slander the world of programming by saying that C/C++ isn't the best tool for everything under the heavens. I use C/C++ when I want to do programming that depends on speed, running algorithms via CUDA for example, but I'd easily argue that it isn't the best tool for many other things. For those I fall back onto C# and Java.
How long are we going to have to wait until someone builds a better "javascript". JS served its use, but more and more it is becoming a pile of hacks ontop of hacks to make it work as people want it to. What I wouldn't give to have an open, portable, type strong language built for web browsers that is based upon Client/Server interface instead of having to hack it all to work properly.
Would it? Would it really?
Think about how much it takes to manufacture all of the electronic parts for the Kindle. How many of those parts (plastic, certain chemicals) are actually worse for the environment than biodegradable books. The kindle also requires constant energy to read the materials on it, while a book is energy free if you use the sun (minus the cost of turning pages).
This is the kind of study I'd really like to see. How many books do you have to have on the kindle to equal the amount of energy spent on normal books. Manufacturing, Shipping, Downloading should all be factors in this.
Most companies probably have a 200-250 GB limit on broadband. Each DVD would be 4.7 GB to 9.4 GB. That means that most likely you could download at least 20 movies that would fit onto a dual layer DVD. The streaming movies are no where near this quality, and thus you'd be able to download more.
20 movies at 10-20 bucks per DVD.... so 200-400 dollars per month. I'll stick with my cable bill.
I agree with this. The only D-link router I have had on me die was because someone plugged the wrong power jack into it and fried it.
The numerous LinkSys routers that I've had and supported over time, have all died or required so much babysitting that I just ended up replacing them.
In what way? The authentication option in steam can be bypassed. The content? If Steam truely went away, I would put money on "PirateSteam" being created, where you could have Steam connect to a pirate server and download games via Bittorrent or some other method.
Honestly, it really doesn't matter. By the time Valve went under and Steam disappeared, we'd have an operating system that wasn't able to play the games anymore. How many Win95/98 games don't work on XP, how many XP games have serious issues on Vista? This trend will only continue. Plus how many of us pull out our old copy of TIE Fighter to play on our 1600x1280 resolution screens. I doubt very many. I will admit, that I do keep an old laptop around just because it as Win2k on it and thus my XCom installs work perfectly, but few gamers would do that
I know you made your post to be funny... but this still isn't plagiarism as you are still linking to the original source. It doesn't matter if you post a link saying "here" or the entire contents of the article. As long as the source is listed and you aren't taking credit for the information, it isn't plagiarism.
That is the reasoning that they tended to use. They said that dorms helped to create a community environment and foster some sort of academic experience. I don't know what sort of experience they were hoping to create, but I can guarantee you it was different than what they expected.
You can commute, but even then I believe there are strict guide lines to it. It is a private college, which means they tend to get the freedom to do what they want.
The good comes from the fact that once you buy the game, it automatically installs and updates the game for you. There has never been any work required for any steam game I have ever played. It warns me if it believes my computer isn't good enough (good and bad, a quad core 2.6 Ghz apparently throws a warning for a game requiring 2.7 Ghz). Steam makes PC gaming easy
The other side of the good debate comes from how the company is viewed. Look at Microsoft vs Google. One is viewed as trustworthy for the most part, as their slogan is "do no evil" while the other is seen as the evil empire. We both give up personal information to their vast data mining, but we don't mind it as much when it goes to google.
DRM is the same way. I don't mind Valve/Steam doing what it does, because I've transferred games between computers, I almost always have an internet connection, and I enjoy the features it offers. SecureROM and EAs Download manager make me cringe, especially at the fact that it acts like spyware on your computer (doesn't uninstall when its supposed to). For most people, it is a matter of trust. I trust Valve's steam to work correctly and do what it is supposed to, I trust EA to be the Evil Empire of gaming.
The bad parts of steam have only come from the fact that it is hard for me to share a game with friends. I'm not talking about illegally sharing, but where I would hand them my CDs and CD key's before, I'd have to now allow them to login as me
Not all colleges allow students to live off of campus until they fulfilled a certain credit requirement. At my college, you had to basically be of senior standing to move out of the college owned apartments and find your own place.
Ideas like that would really screw students over who are stuck.
I have a rig with 4 HDDs. 2x Raptors and two larger drives for just mass media.
One Raptor is used for gaming files (faster hard drive, faster loading of games and maps) and the other raptor is split for Vista and Ubuntu
The question is what drive should I be putting the swap on, especially if I am going to attempt to get games to work on linux
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Its not the fault of the web developer. If everyone used Firefox and/or Safari, pages would be made for it. Most web pages will have 50+% of their traffic be from IE users. If the majority of the people you are trying to sell to, advertise to or promote yourself to are using IE, then you make your web page look best in IE.
Businesses don't care about standards, it cares about what sells.
I'd rather have a javascript extension that will detect if you are using IE or a non-standards complaint browser and punch that user in the face.
Its the users that need to learn, not the web developers.
Slashdot Mirror
I do find it ironic though how valve noticed a 3000% increase in game sales when they cut the price in half, but now most B&M stores are selling the game for 30$ or less... while Valve, a distributor who also made the game and has less cost in distributing the game... sells it for $40.
I believe that there was a "study" by Valve recently commenting on how when they sell games at 50% off or such, it largely increases the volume of games that are sold. Some people, like me, just simply don't find the value in paying full price for games. We usually at the same people that won't buy DVDs at $20 a pop, will buy things because its on sale, and will put price at a very high consideration.
I no longer have the time that I once had to game either, but I found that because of that, I have a backlog of games that I want to play. Hence I buy all of the games I want to play when they are on sale, and when one game is finished, I reach over and grab the next from the pile. I agree that "halfers" can take it too far, but I think that there is a very valid point that the reason the used game industry does so well is because games are overpriced for their value.
Don't you mean "iD10T"?
*ducks*
Here, let me correct that for you
Something like this will cause problems just like it does with the train lines. A "power" user will be worth more to an ISP, as they pay a lot more and thus help either maintain the infastructure to a greater degree or make the company more profit.
The problem with this is of course grandma is less important than our bittorrent power user, and when she wants to check her email, its more important for that power user to get his bandwidth than grandma.
This relates to trains as passenger trains, at least in west michigan, are given less priority than cargo trains, and thus will be told to wait for cargo trains to pass (which has created hours worth of delays). I really don't want to see this done with ISPs as well.
Or they are thinking about the financial crisis and the fact that they would have to change textbooks and the education curriculum to remove all references of 9 planets in the solar system and the planet pluto.
People don't raise their children, why would they be expected to pay for them? That 5000 TV is for them and so the media can raise their brats for them.
Type B (try before you buy) can do nothing but increase sales...
Not necessarily true. This assumes that a) you wouldn't have gone out and bought the CD until you tried it and b) you would buy the same number of CDs.
Try-to-buy means that people make educated choices about what they buy, and that almost always means decreased sales because less people are buying bad product. If Band X releases a new album and you've always liked it, without try-to-buy you would most likely just buy the CD (or so the RIAA would like to believe). With try-to-buy, you may find that the new drummer is really bad and thus not like the CD and thus not buy, hence a lost sale.
What it does is not decrease the sales of quality product, but the sales of sub-par product will go down
I thought they already had a type for "longer ints", aren't they called "long"? Maybe its time for them to actually be used.
Only reason I have vista is because I got it for free through the Computer Science Program (MS Academic Alliance). Otherwise my box would be running just Linux, or XP/Linux.
The amount of wealth that the Big 3s executives have and throw around is astounding. No matter how much money they made, they would have never put away enough to sustain a slump. Too many corporate bonuses to be paid out.
This doesn't mean the unions aren't a problem, but the problem isn't going to fix itself. These companies should fail
As for the corporate tax, it may be high, but that doesn't look into the number of loopholes either
The largest military budget isn't a way to determine the best military power. Money is not power.
The Chinese PLA has 2.3 million people in it. If they paid their soilders like the US does, then their military budget would rise accordingly. They don't have to though. If you want a history lesson about China vs the US, look at the Korean war. Military budget and hardware isn't everything, sheer numbers count as well.
The US needs a large military budget because it relies on volunteer forces, and because its spending is influenced by a civilian government who is biased and corrupted by lobbyists. The government approves the spending of money to keep jobs in certain areas, not because its the best place or even needed.
Thats how the government works. People vote for politicians who say that they'll either improve the lives of their constituents or maintain the status quo. Of course no one asks where all of this money to maintain the lives of certain constituents comes from.
Maybe this won't always be the way...
I have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I have a dream that one day on the white halls of Washington that those who represent the people and the people, will sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even in the state of fear, a state focused on terrorism, a state where the common citizen is afraid of the government, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the objects they possess, but by their moral standing and merits.
I have a dream today.
Corney I know, but government doesn't change unless the people change the government.
I'll definitely agree with the comparison between JS and C.
It is probably why I dislike both of them too. Yes I'm about to slander the world of programming by saying that C/C++ isn't the best tool for everything under the heavens. I use C/C++ when I want to do programming that depends on speed, running algorithms via CUDA for example, but I'd easily argue that it isn't the best tool for many other things. For those I fall back onto C# and Java.
How long are we going to have to wait until someone builds a better "javascript". JS served its use, but more and more it is becoming a pile of hacks ontop of hacks to make it work as people want it to. What I wouldn't give to have an open, portable, type strong language built for web browsers that is based upon Client/Server interface instead of having to hack it all to work properly.
Does this mean that we'll have a successful launch of a Kangaroo into space? Maybe a Drop Bear?
Would it? Would it really? Think about how much it takes to manufacture all of the electronic parts for the Kindle. How many of those parts (plastic, certain chemicals) are actually worse for the environment than biodegradable books. The kindle also requires constant energy to read the materials on it, while a book is energy free if you use the sun (minus the cost of turning pages). This is the kind of study I'd really like to see. How many books do you have to have on the kindle to equal the amount of energy spent on normal books. Manufacturing, Shipping, Downloading should all be factors in this.
Most companies probably have a 200-250 GB limit on broadband. Each DVD would be 4.7 GB to 9.4 GB. That means that most likely you could download at least 20 movies that would fit onto a dual layer DVD. The streaming movies are no where near this quality, and thus you'd be able to download more. 20 movies at 10-20 bucks per DVD.... so 200-400 dollars per month. I'll stick with my cable bill.
$4000 for 100 hours? $40 an hour? Really? Seems a bit high to me, but maybe that is the only way they can get people to participate.
I agree with this. The only D-link router I have had on me die was because someone plugged the wrong power jack into it and fried it. The numerous LinkSys routers that I've had and supported over time, have all died or required so much babysitting that I just ended up replacing them.
In what way? The authentication option in steam can be bypassed. The content? If Steam truely went away, I would put money on "PirateSteam" being created, where you could have Steam connect to a pirate server and download games via Bittorrent or some other method.
Honestly, it really doesn't matter. By the time Valve went under and Steam disappeared, we'd have an operating system that wasn't able to play the games anymore. How many Win95/98 games don't work on XP, how many XP games have serious issues on Vista? This trend will only continue. Plus how many of us pull out our old copy of TIE Fighter to play on our 1600x1280 resolution screens. I doubt very many. I will admit, that I do keep an old laptop around just because it as Win2k on it and thus my XCom installs work perfectly, but few gamers would do that
I know you made your post to be funny... but this still isn't plagiarism as you are still linking to the original source. It doesn't matter if you post a link saying "here" or the entire contents of the article. As long as the source is listed and you aren't taking credit for the information, it isn't plagiarism.
That is the reasoning that they tended to use. They said that dorms helped to create a community environment and foster some sort of academic experience. I don't know what sort of experience they were hoping to create, but I can guarantee you it was different than what they expected.
You can commute, but even then I believe there are strict guide lines to it. It is a private college, which means they tend to get the freedom to do what they want.
Steam has its good and bad points.
The good comes from the fact that once you buy the game, it automatically installs and updates the game for you. There has never been any work required for any steam game I have ever played. It warns me if it believes my computer isn't good enough (good and bad, a quad core 2.6 Ghz apparently throws a warning for a game requiring 2.7 Ghz). Steam makes PC gaming easy
The other side of the good debate comes from how the company is viewed. Look at Microsoft vs Google. One is viewed as trustworthy for the most part, as their slogan is "do no evil" while the other is seen as the evil empire. We both give up personal information to their vast data mining, but we don't mind it as much when it goes to google.
DRM is the same way. I don't mind Valve/Steam doing what it does, because I've transferred games between computers, I almost always have an internet connection, and I enjoy the features it offers. SecureROM and EAs Download manager make me cringe, especially at the fact that it acts like spyware on your computer (doesn't uninstall when its supposed to). For most people, it is a matter of trust. I trust Valve's steam to work correctly and do what it is supposed to, I trust EA to be the Evil Empire of gaming.
The bad parts of steam have only come from the fact that it is hard for me to share a game with friends. I'm not talking about illegally sharing, but where I would hand them my CDs and CD key's before, I'd have to now allow them to login as me
Not all colleges allow students to live off of campus until they fulfilled a certain credit requirement. At my college, you had to basically be of senior standing to move out of the college owned apartments and find your own place.
Ideas like that would really screw students over who are stuck.
I have a rig with 4 HDDs. 2x Raptors and two larger drives for just mass media.
One Raptor is used for gaming files (faster hard drive, faster loading of games and maps) and the other raptor is split for Vista and Ubuntu
The question is what drive should I be putting the swap on, especially if I am going to attempt to get games to work on linux
Its not the fault of the web developer. If everyone used Firefox and/or Safari, pages would be made for it. Most web pages will have 50+% of their traffic be from IE users. If the majority of the people you are trying to sell to, advertise to or promote yourself to are using IE, then you make your web page look best in IE.
Businesses don't care about standards, it cares about what sells.
I'd rather have a javascript extension that will detect if you are using IE or a non-standards complaint browser and punch that user in the face.
Its the users that need to learn, not the web developers.