This same person would, under your terms, not only need to color their hair, but couldn't complain because the majority finds red hair 'morally wrong.'
We've all seen them, on the playground, at the store, walking on the streets. They creep us out and make us feel sick to our stomachs. I'm talking, of course, about Ginger Kids. Ginger kids are born with a disease which causes very light skin, red hair, and freckles. This disease is called 'Gingervitus,' and it occurs because Ginger kids have no souls. Kids who have Gingervitus cannot be cured. Because their skin is so light, Ginger kids must avoid the sun, not unlike Vampires. Some people have red hair but not light skin and freckles. These people are called 'Daywalkers.' Like Vampires, the Ginger gene is a curse, and unless we work to rid the earth of that curse, the Gingers could envelop our lives in blackness for all time. It is time that we all admit to ourselves that Gingers are vile and disgusting. In conclusion, I will leave you with this- if you think that the Ginger problem is not a serious one [Carrot-Top Slide]... think again.
Consider then how you determine what you believe about someone in the real world. I imagine it's a function of many different pieces of information you know about the individual all rolled up via some crazy black box methodology (your brain) into some sort of personal judgement. Psychologists have done quite a bit of work on how people categorize others- esp. with respect to the "In my tribe" vs. "Not in my tribe." The question is not "can we do it," but rather what's the benefit and what's the cost? The more complex the system, theoretically the better, but the more computing power it would require.
Suppose I started with a simple averaged the postive-negative opinions of my friends and my friends-of-friends. I'd guess it would be a great start to meet people with outlooks/objectives similar to mine. Granted, it would be more challenging to label someone as a "ninja-looter" due to lack of interactions and data points, but at least it's a start...
I think the real criticism with any of these systems in the article is that individuals' personas don't necessarily fall into Good-Bad rankings, but rather tend to look like some sort of multi-dimensional combination of axes (Liberal/Conservative, Bookish/Down-to-Earth, Interest-in-Socializing/Interest-in-Achievements). I'm not interested as much in eliminating the jerks as I am in finding mature, clever, laid-back players. Those are MY interests, but they don't align well with a universal GOOD/BAD score. My guild tends to have a lot of married couples in it, because people just happen to migrate towards others with similar personalities. This has happened over a LONG time though. To the extent that this could be accelerated, I'd be exstatic. It's easy to shoot down every idea with a reason why X or Y doesn't work, but if everyone did that, we'd still be throwing rocks at Mastodons and grubbing around in the dirt for tasty roots.
The more appropriate question as to the value of a 'logo' would be to ask questions like "Would you be more likely to buy an iPod that was imprinted with the old Apple logo (multicolors) or the new Apple logo (one color)?" Or "How would you feel about a Ford with a red oval logo as opposed to a Ford with a blue oval logo?"
And anyone is welcome to tell their representative what they think. When was the last time you wrote your representative knew what you think? I doubt you can even name all three of them, much less those for your state gov.
I think the saddest day in my life as a participant in the democratic process was a discussion I had with a friend who was in a US Sentor's staff.
They have a whole group of people whose job is to acknowledge that a comment was received from a contituent. "Thank you for your input" type of thing. So, they have the letter-- now what? It goes in the trash. Where do Senator's actually get their information from? Lobbyists and personal friends. A personal interaction is so much more influential to a decision-maker than a statistic. Humans are fallible- we simply don't respond to one stat that so and so people wrote you about an issue the way we do when our close personal friend who happened to be our roomate in college tells us "this decision is going to hurt me personally." Most Senators/Representatives view their election as a mandate to carry out their predispotions as they wish- after all the educated electorate knew all about their opinions when they were elected, right?
I (US Citizen) live in a Democratic Republic, not a Democracy. The point is- Corporations tend to have easier ways for and individual shareholder to get an issue on a proxy ballot than you or I have of actually affecting the way the US government is run.
I happened to read this article while glancing at the magazine rack in a bookstore, and found it a compelling read. If anything, all this publicity about scams/events in EVE would seem to attract players interested in the commercial aspects of MMORPGs, along with your occasional bad apple.
Someone put scans up, and the site seems to have exceeded bandwidth. Hopefully this Google cache works for you:
So called Earnings. They can claim, as a company, to have sold x dollars of merchandise, which is the price of the goods going out the door. They look better on paper even though they have the oncoming cost of rebates.
So IANACPA, but I do know a tiny bit of accounting. Claiming this revenue while sweeping the rebate money under the rug would probably be considered fraudulent. Based on historical numbers, firms are required to estimate returns, accounts receivable they will never receive, etc. Once you have a track record, it's pretty easy to figure out the percentage of rebates that will be submitted, and you're required to use this to determine net sales.
WRT oversupply, I believe you're thinking about dumping, which is a situation in which a company will flood the market with product at a price below production cost in order to drive competitors from the market.
"Dumping" refers to selling product in an international market at an unfair rate. In most cases, "unfair" means selling at a lower price abroad than domestically. It does not require that the company is selling below costs. When the US complains that foreign competitors are dumping steel, they are not implying that the competitors are selling below costs, but rather improperly subsidizing the sale to create jobs at home.
Predatory pricing is the more specific case where a company in a domestic or international market sells below production costs to drive competitors from the market.
I agree that the $400 version has a VERY fair cost compared to the $300 version (considering all it includes). But my complaint is the $300 version is overpriced, and thus the $400 version is overpriced.
I'm curious as to what you mean by overpriced? Do you think the machine is overspec'ed or do you think that Microsoft/Sony should be taking smaller (or more negative) margins on the sale? Not everyone can afford a Lexus, but that doesn't mean it's overpriced. At this point in their lifecycles, these consoles are pretty much luxury items.
I have a feeling a lot of this has to do with the changing demographics of console buyers. When I was a kid in the 80's, there weren't that many adults playing NES. Now, a huge number of adults with plenty of discretionary income are buying consoles.
Paying $400 for a Xbox 360 isn't going to put a dent in my household financially. Paying $200 a couple years ago for a Playstation when I was in college was a huge burden. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's in this boat.
Another typical trick is to move people towards middle choices when the customer doesn't have a strict feeling of what they want to do. For example, when Non-Profits send out a card asking people to donate money to their organization, they typically have 4 choices, a low, mid, high, and write-in. For example, $5, $45, $100, and _______. Most respondents will choose the middle value.
If the middle value is moved up to $50, the respondents tend to still mark the middle value, resulting in a greater average donation. The perfectly rational person would write in the exact value they feel comfortable donating, but we actually tend to be guided by the reference points that are set by the suggested values.
There's a famous study where people are asked to tell what amount consumers would pay for various products. Before responding, they're asked to think about the last four digits of their Social Security number. What's interesting is that people with higher last-four Social Security numbers are willing to pay more for the products than those with lower last-four SS numbers. The study is stasticically significant at pretty high levels (in the 90's IIRC).
It makes you realize that the prices we're willing to accept are somewhat arbitrary. A $50 tie doesn't seem as expensive if you've just bought a $400 suit. On the other hand, if a salesperson had tried to sell you the tie first and then the suit, you might balk at both prices. Pretty much everyone in marketing is aware of the principles involved, so they probably didn't have psychologists working on the pricing. But, I do completely agree with you that the $399 model seems much more reasonable when compared to the $299 model.
Is to be able to play XBox Live with people who have been verified as: - older than 18, 21, 25, etc... - graduated from college - Graduate Students - Ivy League Grads - whatever...
I don't care what the criteria is, but I don't socialize with high schoolers in real life. Why should I be forced to in XBox Live?
EU anti-trust regulators have developed the reputation of being much stricter than US regulators towards ALL parties, not simply in the Microsoft cases. Quite a few people feel that the EU office is used to generate revenue rather than to actually enforce fair markets. I'd love to find an article, so I admit I can't back up my assertion...
Someone else may feel free to chime in, but it does seem suspicious or, at the least, a conflict of interest that the fines go to the authorities in Europe, while they go to the competitors (treble damages) in the US?
Let me tell you what Sony meant a couple of years back.
Let's try to go back a bit further than MP3 players and TFTs. After all, they're more an example of the company's current state of crappiness than anything else. You're only going back, say 3-5 years?
Through the 70's, 80's and 90's Sony was a great brand known for innovation and quality. We're talking the guys who launched the portable television when market research and wisdom of the time stated there was no market for it. The problem happenened in around 1990 when the company acquired CBS movies and Columbia pictures and began focusing on entertainment. The electronics business has been going downhill ever since.
I'm not a big fan of Sony anymore... I've gotten burned a couple times recently, but it's really not fair to say that Sony was NEVER known for quality.
Even so, the issue is that it was still improperly retained - and that corporate America isn't giving a damn about security for the average joe's accounts and such.
Damn Corporate America! And the Bush Administration and the Republicans too! Oh yes, and I'm sure Microsoft has some hand in this too.
Because we know that any time a DBA at a credit card processing company (not even a major player like Visa or Mastercard) screws up, it thereby indicts the entire capitalist system.
Don't you love it when an interview conducted by a first-tier site is rewritten by a second-tier website a week later, then posted to Slashdot? I know I do.
Unfortunately for Three Rings, the best part about Puzzle Pirates is the fact that it is a gem in the rough. It would not be the game that it is without the clever, mature community. The folks who play PP do so to avoid the mainstream MMOG audience. I'm thinking it could and will never be more than a niche game...
NASA has definitely gotten their money's worth out of these two golf carts. These missions have exceded their design specifications by like 500% or something.
So doesn't that mean the rover was massively over-engineered?
Or did they really expect the rover to last this long and simply said it was a 90 day mission in order to cover their tails?
Combine marketing's runaway imagination with the fact that devs always:
- underestimate the time required to complete each component of a project - don't factor unexpected problems into the timeline - never allocate enough time for QA
Yeah, right. Tell me another. Do you know how far the tax rate of the wealthiest has fallen since 1950? Not to mention offshore tax shelters, loopholes and associated bullshit.
You're missing the point. The OP was talking about the balance between corporate taxes and income taxes, NOT the fraction of the burden paid by wealthy individuals.
If you want to make wealthy individuals pay more of the burden of taxes than they already are, I agree. But changing the corporate tax code is an incredibly costly and ineffective way to get there.
And, you're grossly misinformed about the burden of taxes paid by wealthy individuals if you're implying they don't pay taxes. According to IRS statistics, the top 1% of individuals make about 16% of income, but pay about 33% of taxes. The top 1% pays more in taxes than the bottom 50%. Whether that's the way we want to run our nation is debatable...
Re:commercial use of government software
on
NASA Goes SourceForge
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Before you say "corporations pay taxes too", let me remind you that corporate tax share has gone from about 50% in the 1950's, to about 2% today. Yep- the individual foots 98% of the government budget, but corporations get all the laws.
Those damn corporations! Stealing all our money and hiding it away in their secret corporation vaults deep under the surface of the earth!
I'm not sure what you think a corporation is other than a piece of paper and a bunch of people working together. Someone owns that corporation's debt and equity, either directly through stock or indirectly through some sort of account (savings, IRA, 401(k), whatever), and that person is paying taxes on the income they receive from that ownership.
Point being, these data need to be approached with some caution. It could be that any given search engine has a huge chance of being statistically significantly different from every other engine.
I agree with this...
I was merely pointing out that the results aren't due to chance-- the means are different with high statistical significance.
At an experimental level, all it proves is something that we already know, that there are two different methods producing the two sets of results, no more.
It definitely doesn't imply causality. In fact, I'd wager the difference is due to some other driving factor thats correlated with the server type than some sort of 'if server is apache, then reduce score by 5.'
So you're arguing that MSN has 2% share of the market based on your website's results?
More likely, your site has a higher rank on Google than MSN, leading people to click through more often. Or, MSN users have less interest in your site than Google users (if it's open source related, i'd wager you wouldn't get too many clicks via MSN for obvious reasons).
First off, I looked at the difference in means for Apache rankings in MSN and Google. 61.5% (MSN) vs. 64.3% (Google) for 970 observations Right there, you ought to be able to eyeball it and see significance. But, to make sure, here are the results of a t-test which checks the likelihood that two matched sets have different means (forgive the crappy formatting):
M G Mean 0.615061856 0.642948454 Variance 0.01100624 0.008740111 Observations 970 970 Hypothesized Mean Difference 0 df 969 t Stat -10.51551356 P(one-tail) 7.26569E-25 t Critical one-tail 1.646427658 P(two-tail) 1.45314E-24 t Critical two-tail 1.962415113
As you can see, the P is 1.45 x 10^-24, which at least makes us think the results are not pure coincidence. I don't intend on speculating on the causality, though...
Basic psychological principles: addiction can best be sustained if the game gives out rewards unpredictably. Game items are valued more because it was hard to know when they'd appear. Putting a blatant dollar-sign on the items is the ultimate form of predictabilty. The virtual Skinner box falls apart. When the mystique is gone, the players will be too.
Clearly, then, the obvious way to make money off players is for the MMOG operator to sell them opportunities to win rare items... for example, selling them a "sword shaped item wrapped in brown paper."
This is the primary reason card games like Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, etc. are so profitable. The more packs you buy, the more likely you are to assemble a powerful deck to play with. You put your finger on it-- people get addicted to unpredictable rewards (gambling) or rewards given at random times (fishing). I don't think it's going to ruin MMOGs outright unless executed poorly. It doesn't bother me that some rich guy who buys a $150 putter might be marginally improving his golf game because a player's skill is more important than equipment. As long as game designers make MMOGs that follow this philosophy, they'll be able to make real dollars selling equipment & currency.
Slashdot Mirror
This same person would, under your terms, not only need to color their hair, but couldn't complain because the majority finds red hair 'morally wrong.'
... think again.
We've all seen them, on the playground, at the store, walking on the streets. They creep us out and make us feel sick to our stomachs. I'm talking, of course, about Ginger Kids. Ginger kids are born with a disease which causes very light skin, red hair, and freckles. This disease is called 'Gingervitus,' and it occurs because Ginger kids have no souls. Kids who have Gingervitus cannot be cured. Because their skin is so light, Ginger kids must avoid the sun, not unlike Vampires. Some people have red hair but not light skin and freckles. These people are called 'Daywalkers.' Like Vampires, the Ginger gene is a curse, and unless we work to rid the earth of that curse, the Gingers could envelop our lives in blackness for all time. It is time that we all admit to ourselves that Gingers are vile and disgusting. In conclusion, I will leave you with this- if you think that the Ginger problem is not a serious one [Carrot-Top Slide]
Consider then how you determine what you believe about someone in the real world. I imagine it's a function of many different pieces of information you know about the individual all rolled up via some crazy black box methodology (your brain) into some sort of personal judgement. Psychologists have done quite a bit of work on how people categorize others- esp. with respect to the "In my tribe" vs. "Not in my tribe." The question is not "can we do it," but rather what's the benefit and what's the cost? The more complex the system, theoretically the better, but the more computing power it would require.
. I'm not interested as much in eliminating the jerks as I am in finding mature, clever, laid-back players. Those are MY interests, but they don't align well with a universal GOOD/BAD score. My guild tends to have a lot of married couples in it, because people just happen to migrate towards others with similar personalities. This has happened over a LONG time though. To the extent that this could be accelerated, I'd be exstatic. It's easy to shoot down every idea with a reason why X or Y doesn't work, but if everyone did that, we'd still be throwing rocks at Mastodons and grubbing around in the dirt for tasty roots.
Suppose I started with a simple averaged the postive-negative opinions of my friends and my friends-of-friends. I'd guess it would be a great start to meet people with outlooks/objectives similar to mine. Granted, it would be more challenging to label someone as a "ninja-looter" due to lack of interactions and data points, but at least it's a start...
I think the real criticism with any of these systems in the article is that individuals' personas don't necessarily fall into Good-Bad rankings, but rather tend to look like some sort of multi-dimensional combination of axes (Liberal/Conservative, Bookish/Down-to-Earth, Interest-in-Socializing/Interest-in-Achievements)
A brand is not a logo and a logo is not a brand.
The more appropriate question as to the value of a 'logo' would be to ask questions like "Would you be more likely to buy an iPod that was imprinted with the old Apple logo (multicolors) or the new Apple logo (one color)?" Or "How would you feel about a Ford with a red oval logo as opposed to a Ford with a blue oval logo?"
And anyone is welcome to tell their representative what they think. When was the last time you wrote your representative knew what you think? I doubt you can even name all three of them, much less those for your state gov.
I think the saddest day in my life as a participant in the democratic process was a discussion I had with a friend who was in a US Sentor's staff.
They have a whole group of people whose job is to acknowledge that a comment was received from a contituent. "Thank you for your input" type of thing. So, they have the letter-- now what? It goes in the trash. Where do Senator's actually get their information from? Lobbyists and personal friends. A personal interaction is so much more influential to a decision-maker than a statistic. Humans are fallible- we simply don't respond to one stat that so and so people wrote you about an issue the way we do when our close personal friend who happened to be our roomate in college tells us "this decision is going to hurt me personally." Most Senators/Representatives view their election as a mandate to carry out their predispotions as they wish- after all the educated electorate knew all about their opinions when they were elected, right?
I (US Citizen) live in a Democratic Republic, not a Democracy. The point is- Corporations tend to have easier ways for and individual shareholder to get an issue on a proxy ballot than you or I have of actually affecting the way the US government is run.
I happened to read this article while glancing at the magazine rack in a bookstore, and found it a compelling read. If anything, all this publicity about scams/events in EVE would seem to attract players interested in the commercial aspects of MMORPGs, along with your occasional bad apple.
: www.mmodig.com/%3Fp%3D155&hl=en
Someone put scans up, and the site seems to have exceeded bandwidth. Hopefully this Google cache works for you:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ng1TNWjULLsJ
Enjoy!
So called Earnings. They can claim, as a company, to have sold x dollars of merchandise, which is the price of the goods going out the door. They look better on paper even though they have the oncoming cost of rebates.
So IANACPA, but I do know a tiny bit of accounting. Claiming this revenue while sweeping the rebate money under the rug would probably be considered fraudulent. Based on historical numbers, firms are required to estimate returns, accounts receivable they will never receive, etc. Once you have a track record, it's pretty easy to figure out the percentage of rebates that will be submitted, and you're required to use this to determine net sales.
WRT oversupply, I believe you're thinking about dumping, which is a situation in which a company will flood the market with product at a price below production cost in order to drive competitors from the market.
"Dumping" refers to selling product in an international market at an unfair rate. In most cases, "unfair" means selling at a lower price abroad than domestically. It does not require that the company is selling below costs. When the US complains that foreign competitors are dumping steel, they are not implying that the competitors are selling below costs, but rather improperly subsidizing the sale to create jobs at home.
Predatory pricing is the more specific case where a company in a domestic or international market sells below production costs to drive competitors from the market.
I agree that the $400 version has a VERY fair cost compared to the $300 version (considering all it includes). But my complaint is the $300 version is overpriced, and thus the $400 version is overpriced.
I'm curious as to what you mean by overpriced? Do you think the machine is overspec'ed or do you think that Microsoft/Sony should be taking smaller (or more negative) margins on the sale? Not everyone can afford a Lexus, but that doesn't mean it's overpriced. At this point in their lifecycles, these consoles are pretty much luxury items.
I have a feeling a lot of this has to do with the changing demographics of console buyers. When I was a kid in the 80's, there weren't that many adults playing NES. Now, a huge number of adults with plenty of discretionary income are buying consoles.
Paying $400 for a Xbox 360 isn't going to put a dent in my household financially. Paying $200 a couple years ago for a Playstation when I was in college was a huge burden. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's in this boat.
Another typical trick is to move people towards middle choices when the customer doesn't have a strict feeling of what they want to do. For example, when Non-Profits send out a card asking people to donate money to their organization, they typically have 4 choices, a low, mid, high, and write-in. For example, $5, $45, $100, and _______. Most respondents will choose the middle value.
If the middle value is moved up to $50, the respondents tend to still mark the middle value, resulting in a greater average donation. The perfectly rational person would write in the exact value they feel comfortable donating, but we actually tend to be guided by the reference points that are set by the suggested values.
There's a famous study where people are asked to tell what amount consumers would pay for various products. Before responding, they're asked to think about the last four digits of their Social Security number. What's interesting is that people with higher last-four Social Security numbers are willing to pay more for the products than those with lower last-four SS numbers. The study is stasticically significant at pretty high levels (in the 90's IIRC).
It makes you realize that the prices we're willing to accept are somewhat arbitrary. A $50 tie doesn't seem as expensive if you've just bought a $400 suit. On the other hand, if a salesperson had tried to sell you the tie first and then the suit, you might balk at both prices. Pretty much everyone in marketing is aware of the principles involved, so they probably didn't have psychologists working on the pricing. But, I do completely agree with you that the $399 model seems much more reasonable when compared to the $299 model.
Is to be able to play XBox Live with people who have been verified as:
- older than 18, 21, 25, etc...
- graduated from college
- Graduate Students
- Ivy League Grads
- whatever...
I don't care what the criteria is, but I don't socialize with high schoolers in real life. Why should I be forced to in XBox Live?
EU anti-trust regulators have developed the reputation of being much stricter than US regulators towards ALL parties, not simply in the Microsoft cases. Quite a few people feel that the EU office is used to generate revenue rather than to actually enforce fair markets. I'd love to find an article, so I admit I can't back up my assertion...
Someone else may feel free to chime in, but it does seem suspicious or, at the least, a conflict of interest that the fines go to the authorities in Europe, while they go to the competitors (treble damages) in the US?
Agreed on all points...
Let me tell you what Sony meant a couple of years back.
Let's try to go back a bit further than MP3 players and TFTs. After all, they're more an example of the company's current state of crappiness than anything else. You're only going back, say 3-5 years?
Through the 70's, 80's and 90's Sony was a great brand known for innovation and quality. We're talking the guys who launched the portable television when market research and wisdom of the time stated there was no market for it. The problem happenened in around 1990 when the company acquired CBS movies and Columbia pictures and began focusing on entertainment. The electronics business has been going downhill ever since.
I'm not a big fan of Sony anymore... I've gotten burned a couple times recently, but it's really not fair to say that Sony was NEVER known for quality.
Even so, the issue is that it was still improperly retained - and that corporate America isn't giving a damn about security for the average joe's accounts and such.
Damn Corporate America! And the Bush Administration and the Republicans too! Oh yes, and I'm sure Microsoft has some hand in this too.
Because we know that any time a DBA at a credit card processing company (not even a major player like Visa or Mastercard) screws up, it thereby indicts the entire capitalist system.
Here at Gamespot
Don't you love it when an interview conducted by a first-tier site is rewritten by a second-tier website a week later, then posted to Slashdot? I know I do.
Mount Diablo Buckwheat One, why can't you be more like Mount Diablo Buckwheat Two?
Cheers to an excellent post...
Unfortunately for Three Rings, the best part about Puzzle Pirates is the fact that it is a gem in the rough. It would not be the game that it is without the clever, mature community. The folks who play PP do so to avoid the mainstream MMOG audience. I'm thinking it could and will never be more than a niche game...
NASA has definitely gotten their money's worth out of these two golf carts. These missions have exceded their design specifications by like 500% or something.
So doesn't that mean the rover was massively over-engineered?
Or did they really expect the rover to last this long and simply said it was a 90 day mission in order to cover their tails?
Combine marketing's runaway imagination with the fact that devs always:
- underestimate the time required to complete each component of a project
- don't factor unexpected problems into the timeline
- never allocate enough time for QA
Now we've got a problem...
Yeah, right. Tell me another. Do you know how far the tax rate of the wealthiest has fallen since 1950? Not to mention offshore tax shelters, loopholes and associated bullshit.
You're missing the point. The OP was talking about the balance between corporate taxes and income taxes, NOT the fraction of the burden paid by wealthy individuals.
If you want to make wealthy individuals pay more of the burden of taxes than they already are, I agree. But changing the corporate tax code is an incredibly costly and ineffective way to get there.
And, you're grossly misinformed about the burden of taxes paid by wealthy individuals if you're implying they don't pay taxes. According to IRS statistics, the top 1% of individuals make about 16% of income, but pay about 33% of taxes. The top 1% pays more in taxes than the bottom 50%. Whether that's the way we want to run our nation is debatable...
Before you say "corporations pay taxes too", let me remind you that corporate tax share has gone from about 50% in the 1950's, to about 2% today. Yep- the individual foots 98% of the government budget, but corporations get all the laws.
Those damn corporations! Stealing all our money and hiding it away in their secret corporation vaults deep under the surface of the earth!
I'm not sure what you think a corporation is other than a piece of paper and a bunch of people working together. Someone owns that corporation's debt and equity, either directly through stock or indirectly through some sort of account (savings, IRA, 401(k), whatever), and that person is paying taxes on the income they receive from that ownership.
Point being, these data need to be approached with some caution. It could be that any given search engine has a huge chance of being statistically significantly different from every other engine.
I agree with this...
I was merely pointing out that the results aren't due to chance-- the means are different with high statistical significance.
At an experimental level, all it proves is something that we already know, that there are two different methods producing the two sets of results, no more.
It definitely doesn't imply causality. In fact, I'd wager the difference is due to some other driving factor thats correlated with the server type than some sort of 'if server is apache, then reduce score by 5.'
So you're arguing that MSN has 2% share of the market based on your website's results?
More likely, your site has a higher rank on Google than MSN, leading people to click through more often. Or, MSN users have less interest in your site than Google users (if it's open source related, i'd wager you wouldn't get too many clicks via MSN for obvious reasons).
Believe it...
First off, I looked at the difference in means for Apache rankings in MSN and Google. 61.5% (MSN) vs. 64.3% (Google) for 970 observations Right there, you ought to be able to eyeball it and see significance. But, to make sure, here are the results of a t-test which checks the likelihood that two matched sets have different means (forgive the crappy formatting):
M G
Mean 0.615061856 0.642948454
Variance 0.01100624 0.008740111
Observations 970 970
Hypothesized Mean Difference 0
df 969
t Stat -10.51551356
P(one-tail) 7.26569E-25
t Critical one-tail 1.646427658
P(two-tail) 1.45314E-24
t Critical two-tail 1.962415113
As you can see, the P is 1.45 x 10^-24, which at least makes us think the results are not pure coincidence. I don't intend on speculating on the causality, though...
Basic psychological principles: addiction can best be sustained if the game gives out rewards unpredictably. Game items are valued more because it was hard to know when they'd appear. Putting a blatant dollar-sign on the items is the ultimate form of predictabilty. The virtual Skinner box falls apart. When the mystique is gone, the players will be too.
Clearly, then, the obvious way to make money off players is for the MMOG operator to sell them opportunities to win rare items... for example, selling them a "sword shaped item wrapped in brown paper."
This is the primary reason card games like Magic the Gathering, Pokemon, etc. are so profitable. The more packs you buy, the more likely you are to assemble a powerful deck to play with. You put your finger on it-- people get addicted to unpredictable rewards (gambling) or rewards given at random times (fishing). I don't think it's going to ruin MMOGs outright unless executed poorly. It doesn't bother me that some rich guy who buys a $150 putter might be marginally improving his golf game because a player's skill is more important than equipment. As long as game designers make MMOGs that follow this philosophy, they'll be able to make real dollars selling equipment & currency.