Any extra money available to a particular market will be absorbed by that market. The question is, what does that market do with the extra money? Are they hiring more professors? Accepting more students? In my particular college town they are rebuilding campus buildings over and over again using the latest it architectural design and "Green" engineering.
It seems the governments purported goals would be served better if they paid the university directly to hire more professors and offer more scholarships on their own. Unfortunately the governments real goal is to engender the good will of the soon-to-be upper class graduates, and continue the idea that they can not live without their benevolent government.
You may disagree with her on a lot of things, but this is worth a read:
Courtney Love does the math:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software.
I’m talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my “funny” math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I’m positive it’s better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there’s $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That’s $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it’s based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band’s royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations — the unified broadcast system — are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals … zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That’s mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn’t have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.
or... we could just make pot legal so people wouldn't be smoking these horrifically dangerous "Bath salts" as a replacement. Pots dangers are well known, and relatively benign in comparison to even most over the counter medications. You're far more likely to become dependent on cold medicine and even be killed by it than you are pot. But we continue to treat pot like it's some kind of hardcore child killer.
They are right, Pot is a gateway drug. But only because they made it so. They tell school children its this horrible thing. Bad kids do it. Then the kids find out just how many of their friends smoke it at parties. Holy crap! and then they try it... and it doesn't make them go insane like they've been lead to believe. If they've lied to me about pot, how bad can cocaine be right?
Make it legal to grow. Legal to smoke. Legal to give away for free to someone over the age of 18. Make it illegal to sell. Problem solved and no more bath salts.
Everyone calm down and don't get mad. The media industry is doing something right for once. How do you get people to pay for a movie rather than getting a bootleg for free? Offer something in the theater that they can't get at home. It's how the free market works and they will have much better luck with this than they will with their "Lets sue everyone" strategy.
Despite what the article leads you to believe most major theaters can do well over 48fps and are installing projectors that are 4000p and above right now. This is the future of theater. It's a good thing.
The last 3D movie I went to was $18 and it was only a 35min long sea documentary. Regular movies are well over $25. Sadly they are so popular here I end up sitting 2 feet from the screen because it's over crowded, completely ruining any 3D effect.
Online Gambling is illegal in the united states, regardless of age:
On April 15, 2011, in U. S. v. Scheinberg et al. (10 Cr. 336), three online poker companies were indicted for violating U.S. laws that prohibit the acceptance of any financial instrument in connection with unlawful Internet gambling,[29][30] that is, Internet gambling that involves a "bet or wager" that is illegal under the laws of the state where the bet is made.[31] The indictment alleges that the companies used fraudulent methods to evade this law, for example, by disguising online gambling payments as purchases of merchandise, and by investing money in a local bank in return for the bank's willingness to process online poker transactions.
The bans are there simply to drive up the value of these fake virtual items. I can understand bans in a competitive MMO like EQ or WOW. But this is not an MMO, no matter how hard they try to pretend it is. How long do they think this idea of virtual goods being worth real money thing is going to slide past political figures before it dawns on everyone what this really is? Poker chips. The house controls the odds, you usually have no idea what they are... you roll the dice, win something... sell it to other people for real money... It's poker chips plain and simple. They are letting little kids gamble with real money online. One day congress will want to distract everyone from the latest war or something and this shit is going to get real, fast.
I hate to do it, but someone has to. How many people have been killed by international terrorists on US soil in all of history? How much have we spend on counter-terrorism efforts in the past 10 years? Do some math... and we're spending billions per civilian life to stop terrorist attacks. Lets just stop for a while and see what happens.
Now you're going to jump up and yell "That's cold! It's horrible! How could you?!?!" Well, yea... fine, I'll accept that. But what if we instead spent all those billions on cancer research? Not only would we save far more lives, over a much longer term, but dieing from cancer is plain and simple a worse way to die that having your plane blown up or crashed. Counter terrorism is an excuse to maintain our cold-war levels of military readiness that simply are not needed any longer. We need to stop, and think before we spend and bomb.
I don't really think it's apathy or lack of intelligence. There are plenty of people that are incredibly intelligent that do not have degrees or high paying salaried jobs. Have you ever operated heavy equipment like an excavator? I know guys that are nearly savants with those things. Not a one of them cares about politics. They chose to apply their wisdom and wits to something tangible, something they can change directly. I can understand that. So much of politics is slight of hand, trickery, lies and deceit that many people just refuse to participate any longer. I can understand that as well.
Not true. Telcos have major problems with core backbone traffic. Services like Netflix jump around from provider to provider to get the cheapest rate. If Netflix has a 10gig trunk to level3, telcos will enter a peering agreement with level3 to get a cheaper rate because such a large amount of traffic comes from Netflix. But when netflix drops that trunk and picks one up somewhere else to save money the telcos are left with way to much bandwidth on one network and not enough on another. Suddenly netflix customers have bandwidth issues where they hadn't before, and blame it on their ISP.
The last mile is a bigger problem, but it's not the only problem. As long as services like netflix entice people to all peg their connections at the same time of day, we're going to have this net neutrality problem issue. I think the ISPs would be much more likely to support net neutrality if these types of services had some sort of incentive to consider their affect on the network as a whole. Unfortunately every suggestion I've heard so far pretty much breaks net neutrality or involves taxing the internet. All of which are bad.
Um... most plankton get eaten. Then those that eat it get eaten and so on up the food chain. Those that do die uneaten, along with their predators that die, sink to the bottom of the ARCTIC. Stuff doesn't rot down there. It just piles up frozen.
Why on earth are you buying anything at BestBuy? They charge $30 for an HDMI cable. The only stuff that makes sense to buy locally are things that are so cheap that it doesn't make sense to pay the shipping on them. But BestBuy price gouges on the very things that might get me into the store so heavily that it's usually cheaper for me to buy the cable from newegg and get next day air shipping. A few weeks ago my wife lost the cable for her iPod, so I stopped by Bestbuy... they wanted $20. So I went to walmart: $5 (almost paid that) then I checked amazon and got it for 50 cents, free shippnig.
Now, when I walked out of BestBuy, angrily I might add, I had to drop a mouse pad, some speaker wire, and a book light that I had almost impulse bought. Way to go Bestbuy. I could have spent about $20 at your store, but because you decided you wanted to make 1000% profit on a 2 foot cable you're going to go out of business instead. Congrats.
I'm going to make the assumption that most of these trade shows in the US are held in Vegas:
As of April 30, 2012 (End of Q1), the average wage for regular, full-time hourly associates in Nevada is $13.12 per hour (Walmart Discount Stores, Supercenters, and Neighborhood Markets). Additionally, eligible associates receive an annual incentive based on the company performance. Associates that contribute to the 401(k) Plan will receive a dollar for dollar match from Walmart of up to 6 percent of pay.
Oracle isn't competing with Salesforce.com. They have NO sales offering what-so-ever. They just bought RightNow which has a mediocre sales offering, but Oracles specifically told its customers it doesn't plan to invest any time into it, and Rightnow certainly hasn't over the past 10 years. So they basically have a bunch of SAAS ticketing systems, which are nice and work well, but they do not have anything that can even remotely touch salesforce.
This isn't a job. It's a way to make a few bucks while a trade show is in town. When your job is "Stand there and look hot", complaining about the fact that people stare at you, when the entire point of you being there is to have people stare at you with the small hope that they might glance at whatever nonsense you're holding in your hands for a second, seems rather silly. Walmart, McDonalds, Department stores, all pay more than $100/day. The only difference is they'd have to WORK while there and they couldn't claim to be a "model"
I have no pity for people that base their entire carer on their looks and then complain that it's not lucrative enough. It's not lucrative enough because you're not all that good looking. If you were hotter you'd have better options than booth babe. Sorry, but it's a shallow business you got into there.
Seriously? Are you guys nuts? Contract Contract Contract You get mixed up with the wrong customer with a bad contract and you could be out of business before you can blink. You should have very specific, MEASURABLE deliverables. Things like "Make the interface faster" are not going to fly. What does "faster" really mean? Your support structure should be very specific. They should be signing off on every single thing in the deliverables. After that your contract should specifically state what's considered a bug and what's considered a scope enhancement. I guarantee you that every single thing they find that isn't exactly what they imagined in their many managerial meetings they are going to consider a "Bug".
"You designed this forum for us, but when we try to attach this 4 Gigabyte file to the post, internet explorer crashes before it can even upload. Clearly this is a bug!"
My company has many types of support contracts and it all depends on the project and who we're working with. The company that built and maintains our website has been supporting it for over 10 years. We have an on-going contract with them, and they basically build or change anything we want, whenever we want. That contract is VERY lucrative for them however. We actually have offices for a few of their employees in our building. I don't even have an office!
Other contracts we have basically state that bugs found that are IN SCOPE are handled, for free, by the vendor for a certain period after we've accepted the product. 2 weeks seem awfully short to me. I doubt we'd ever except that. Usually it's more like 90 days. We're a relatively big vendor and pay a premium for what we want though... so we get what we want or don't do business with you. After that 90 days we have a set hourly rate that the vendor will charge us, for another set period of time. Say 1 to 2 years. Usually that hourly rate is somewhere in the $100-$200/hr range.
If you don't have good, solid contracts to base your work on, you are either going to get screwed, or get a name for yourself for screwing your customers. Or worse, sued into oblivion when you have a disagreement with the wrong customer that just happened to a have a whole floor full of bored lawyers just waiting for you to screw up.
This is the same nonsense that goes on in every media industry. There are artists that produce what's really changing the industry, that are creating the real art.... Then there are giant media houses that do nothing more than buy up the content those artists made, promote and capitalize on it. Music is a perfect example. Really great bands often don't make much money... soon after they make their debuet, revolutionary album, all of the hack bands that have their music written for them are doing the same thing, but have huge publishers behind them paying radio stations to play their songs and getting them spots on Jay Lenno.
Did you notice that every single title in that list is a sequel? And none of them are even based on a game that wasn't half assed copy of something some smaller studio designed first. The difference is marketing dollars.
I don't understand why they are doing this at all. It seems to me that this will just lead to people faking websites for malware purposes. Like: www.Microsoft.update etc... Since I could just have www.any_god_damned_thing_I_Want_I_dont_see_the_reason_for_this_at_All.com
No... the stars in a galaxy are orbiting their own collective center of gravity, not the blackhole. It just so happens that this collective center of gravity often attracts enough stars that it collapses into a super massive black hole. The most likely scenario for the blackhole to lose it's galaxy is in a collision with another galaxy (although "Collision" is a bad word since nothing actually hits anything else) The center of mass of the 2 combined galaxies would radically change rather suddenly (in galactic terms) and the Super massive blackhole would begin orbiting the new center of gravity. If it's orbit is too far out, it would get flung off. In most situations stars would get flung out with it. But rarely it could shoot off on it's own.
Agreed. I don't pirate games now... solely because of steam. Steam makes paying for the game easier than pirating it. Steam also solves all sorts of general issues that have plauged gaming for decades. Centralized billing... losing CD keys, storage of media, losing your saved games, centralized password, REAL bans for hackers (their account is linked to their steam account) I wish Valve would issue an IPO so that I could invest.
What the fuck are you talking about? It's insane what people think war is today. War is horrible, awful, terrible. All assets of a country you are at war at are legitimate targets. Babies, puppies, little old ladies. Anything that would stop the German people from trying to rule the world was a legitimate target. Imagine if the Nazis had won the war... Whole races of people could have been wiped off the face of the earth. Imagine if we had taken another 6 months to a year to defeat them and they had come up with their own atomic weapon and dropped it on London...
The very idea that there are "rules of war" is just stupid. War crimes are what the winners of a war charge the leadership of the losers so they can execute them in some semi-legal way.
The rules of engagement that the US military exercises are a token effort made by our leadership because our military is so ridiculously over equipped and the enemy is usually so completely out-classed that it costs us relatively little to avoid some of the more publicly distasteful practices. I promise you, if we ever got into a war with an enemy that was even remotely evenly matched to our military our rules of engagement would be out the window in a heartbeat. Would you shoot some strangers baby in the face if the alternative was that he would shoot your baby in the face? Of course you would. Now shut the fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
Any extra money available to a particular market will be absorbed by that market. The question is, what does that market do with the extra money? Are they hiring more professors? Accepting more students? In my particular college town they are rebuilding campus buildings over and over again using the latest it architectural design and "Green" engineering.
It seems the governments purported goals would be served better if they paid the university directly to hire more professors and offer more scholarships on their own. Unfortunately the governments real goal is to engender the good will of the soon-to-be upper class graduates, and continue the idea that they can not live without their benevolent government.
You may disagree with her on a lot of things, but this is worth a read:
Courtney Love does the math:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software.
I’m talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my “funny” math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I’m positive it’s better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there’s $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That’s $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it’s based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band’s royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations — the unified broadcast system — are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals … zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That’s mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn’t have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.
Wo
or... we could just make pot legal so people wouldn't be smoking these horrifically dangerous "Bath salts" as a replacement. Pots dangers are well known, and relatively benign in comparison to even most over the counter medications. You're far more likely to become dependent on cold medicine and even be killed by it than you are pot. But we continue to treat pot like it's some kind of hardcore child killer.
They are right, Pot is a gateway drug. But only because they made it so. They tell school children its this horrible thing. Bad kids do it. Then the kids find out just how many of their friends smoke it at parties. Holy crap! and then they try it... and it doesn't make them go insane like they've been lead to believe. If they've lied to me about pot, how bad can cocaine be right?
Make it legal to grow. Legal to smoke. Legal to give away for free to someone over the age of 18. Make it illegal to sell. Problem solved and no more bath salts.
Everyone calm down and don't get mad. The media industry is doing something right for once. How do you get people to pay for a movie rather than getting a bootleg for free? Offer something in the theater that they can't get at home. It's how the free market works and they will have much better luck with this than they will with their "Lets sue everyone" strategy.
Despite what the article leads you to believe most major theaters can do well over 48fps and are installing projectors that are 4000p and above right now. This is the future of theater. It's a good thing.
The last 3D movie I went to was $18 and it was only a 35min long sea documentary. Regular movies are well over $25. Sadly they are so popular here I end up sitting 2 feet from the screen because it's over crowded, completely ruining any 3D effect.
I must be getting old... I fucking hate pre-teen sudo-insults. Especially poorly thought out ones like yours.
This is definitely not capitalism.
Driving up the price right before someone wants to buy a stock is basically highly sophisticated price gouging.
Online Gambling is illegal in the united states, regardless of age:
On April 15, 2011, in U. S. v. Scheinberg et al. (10 Cr. 336), three online poker companies were indicted for violating U.S. laws that prohibit the acceptance of any financial instrument in connection with unlawful Internet gambling,[29][30] that is, Internet gambling that involves a "bet or wager" that is illegal under the laws of the state where the bet is made.[31] The indictment alleges that the companies used fraudulent methods to evade this law, for example, by disguising online gambling payments as purchases of merchandise, and by investing money in a local bank in return for the bank's willingness to process online poker transactions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_gambling#United_States
And I bet they made more in a week than that fine cost them. The marketing guys are getting a fat bonus this year (so are their friends at the FTC)
The bans are there simply to drive up the value of these fake virtual items. I can understand bans in a competitive MMO like EQ or WOW. But this is not an MMO, no matter how hard they try to pretend it is. How long do they think this idea of virtual goods being worth real money thing is going to slide past political figures before it dawns on everyone what this really is? Poker chips. The house controls the odds, you usually have no idea what they are... you roll the dice, win something... sell it to other people for real money... It's poker chips plain and simple. They are letting little kids gamble with real money online. One day congress will want to distract everyone from the latest war or something and this shit is going to get real, fast.
I hate to do it, but someone has to.
How many people have been killed by international terrorists on US soil in all of history?
How much have we spend on counter-terrorism efforts in the past 10 years?
Do some math... and we're spending billions per civilian life to stop terrorist attacks.
Lets just stop for a while and see what happens.
Now you're going to jump up and yell "That's cold! It's horrible! How could you?!?!"
Well, yea... fine, I'll accept that. But what if we instead spent all those billions on cancer research?
Not only would we save far more lives, over a much longer term, but dieing from cancer is plain and simple a worse way to die that having your plane blown up or crashed.
Counter terrorism is an excuse to maintain our cold-war levels of military readiness that simply are not needed any longer. We need to stop, and think before we spend and bomb.
I don't really think it's apathy or lack of intelligence. There are plenty of people that are incredibly intelligent that do not have degrees or high paying salaried jobs. Have you ever operated heavy equipment like an excavator? I know guys that are nearly savants with those things. Not a one of them cares about politics. They chose to apply their wisdom and wits to something tangible, something they can change directly. I can understand that. So much of politics is slight of hand, trickery, lies and deceit that many people just refuse to participate any longer. I can understand that as well.
Not true. Telcos have major problems with core backbone traffic. Services like Netflix jump around from provider to provider to get the cheapest rate. If Netflix has a 10gig trunk to level3, telcos will enter a peering agreement with level3 to get a cheaper rate because such a large amount of traffic comes from Netflix. But when netflix drops that trunk and picks one up somewhere else to save money the telcos are left with way to much bandwidth on one network and not enough on another. Suddenly netflix customers have bandwidth issues where they hadn't before, and blame it on their ISP.
The last mile is a bigger problem, but it's not the only problem. As long as services like netflix entice people to all peg their connections at the same time of day, we're going to have this net neutrality problem issue. I think the ISPs would be much more likely to support net neutrality if these types of services had some sort of incentive to consider their affect on the network as a whole. Unfortunately every suggestion I've heard so far pretty much breaks net neutrality or involves taxing the internet. All of which are bad.
Um... most plankton get eaten. Then those that eat it get eaten and so on up the food chain. Those that do die uneaten, along with their predators that die, sink to the bottom of the ARCTIC. Stuff doesn't rot down there. It just piles up frozen.
Why on earth are you buying anything at BestBuy? They charge $30 for an HDMI cable. The only stuff that makes sense to buy locally are things that are so cheap that it doesn't make sense to pay the shipping on them. But BestBuy price gouges on the very things that might get me into the store so heavily that it's usually cheaper for me to buy the cable from newegg and get next day air shipping. A few weeks ago my wife lost the cable for her iPod, so I stopped by Bestbuy... they wanted $20. So I went to walmart: $5 (almost paid that) then I checked amazon and got it for 50 cents, free shippnig.
Now, when I walked out of BestBuy, angrily I might add, I had to drop a mouse pad, some speaker wire, and a book light that I had almost impulse bought. Way to go Bestbuy. I could have spent about $20 at your store, but because you decided you wanted to make 1000% profit on a 2 foot cable you're going to go out of business instead. Congrats.
I'm going to make the assumption that most of these trade shows in the US are held in Vegas:
As of April 30, 2012 (End of Q1), the average wage for regular, full-time hourly associates in Nevada is $13.12 per hour (Walmart Discount Stores, Supercenters, and Neighborhood Markets). Additionally, eligible associates receive an annual incentive based on the company performance.
Associates that contribute to the 401(k) Plan will receive a dollar for dollar match from Walmart of up to 6 percent of pay.
http://www.walmartstores.com/pressroom/StateByState/State.aspx?st=NV
You can pick the drop down and choose any state you'd like but they're all well above what the "booth babes" make.
Oracle isn't competing with Salesforce.com. They have NO sales offering what-so-ever. They just bought RightNow which has a mediocre sales offering, but Oracles specifically told its customers it doesn't plan to invest any time into it, and Rightnow certainly hasn't over the past 10 years. So they basically have a bunch of SAAS ticketing systems, which are nice and work well, but they do not have anything that can even remotely touch salesforce.
This isn't a job. It's a way to make a few bucks while a trade show is in town. When your job is "Stand there and look hot", complaining about the fact that people stare at you, when the entire point of you being there is to have people stare at you with the small hope that they might glance at whatever nonsense you're holding in your hands for a second, seems rather silly. Walmart, McDonalds, Department stores, all pay more than $100/day. The only difference is they'd have to WORK while there and they couldn't claim to be a "model"
I have no pity for people that base their entire carer on their looks and then complain that it's not lucrative enough. It's not lucrative enough because you're not all that good looking. If you were hotter you'd have better options than booth babe. Sorry, but it's a shallow business you got into there.
Seriously? Are you guys nuts?
Contract Contract Contract
You get mixed up with the wrong customer with a bad contract and you could be out of business before you can blink.
You should have very specific, MEASURABLE deliverables. Things like "Make the interface faster" are not going to fly. What does "faster" really mean?
Your support structure should be very specific. They should be signing off on every single thing in the deliverables. After that your contract should specifically state what's considered a bug and what's considered a scope enhancement. I guarantee you that every single thing they find that isn't exactly what they imagined in their many managerial meetings they are going to consider a "Bug".
"You designed this forum for us, but when we try to attach this 4 Gigabyte file to the post, internet explorer crashes before it can even upload. Clearly this is a bug!"
My company has many types of support contracts and it all depends on the project and who we're working with. The company that built and maintains our website has been supporting it for over 10 years. We have an on-going contract with them, and they basically build or change anything we want, whenever we want. That contract is VERY lucrative for them however. We actually have offices for a few of their employees in our building. I don't even have an office!
Other contracts we have basically state that bugs found that are IN SCOPE are handled, for free, by the vendor for a certain period after we've accepted the product. 2 weeks seem awfully short to me. I doubt we'd ever except that. Usually it's more like 90 days. We're a relatively big vendor and pay a premium for what we want though... so we get what we want or don't do business with you. After that 90 days we have a set hourly rate that the vendor will charge us, for another set period of time. Say 1 to 2 years. Usually that hourly rate is somewhere in the $100-$200/hr range.
If you don't have good, solid contracts to base your work on, you are either going to get screwed, or get a name for yourself for screwing your customers. Or worse, sued into oblivion when you have a disagreement with the wrong customer that just happened to a have a whole floor full of bored lawyers just waiting for you to screw up.
This is the same nonsense that goes on in every media industry. There are artists that produce what's really changing the industry, that are creating the real art.... Then there are giant media houses that do nothing more than buy up the content those artists made, promote and capitalize on it. Music is a perfect example. Really great bands often don't make much money... soon after they make their debuet, revolutionary album, all of the hack bands that have their music written for them are doing the same thing, but have huge publishers behind them paying radio stations to play their songs and getting them spots on Jay Lenno.
Did you notice that every single title in that list is a sequel? And none of them are even based on a game that wasn't half assed copy of something some smaller studio designed first. The difference is marketing dollars.
I don't understand why they are doing this at all. It seems to me that this will just lead to people faking websites for malware purposes. Like: www.Microsoft.update etc... Since I could just have www.any_god_damned_thing_I_Want_I_dont_see_the_reason_for_this_at_All.com
No... the stars in a galaxy are orbiting their own collective center of gravity, not the blackhole. It just so happens that this collective center of gravity often attracts enough stars that it collapses into a super massive black hole. The most likely scenario for the blackhole to lose it's galaxy is in a collision with another galaxy (although "Collision" is a bad word since nothing actually hits anything else) The center of mass of the 2 combined galaxies would radically change rather suddenly (in galactic terms) and the Super massive blackhole would begin orbiting the new center of gravity. If it's orbit is too far out, it would get flung off. In most situations stars would get flung out with it. But rarely it could shoot off on it's own.
Agreed. I don't pirate games now... solely because of steam. Steam makes paying for the game easier than pirating it. Steam also solves all sorts of general issues that have plauged gaming for decades. Centralized billing... losing CD keys, storage of media, losing your saved games, centralized password, REAL bans for hackers (their account is linked to their steam account) I wish Valve would issue an IPO so that I could invest.
am I both crazy AND stupid. That seems like a raw deal to me.
What the fuck are you talking about? It's insane what people think war is today. War is horrible, awful, terrible. All assets of a country you are at war at are legitimate targets. Babies, puppies, little old ladies. Anything that would stop the German people from trying to rule the world was a legitimate target. Imagine if the Nazis had won the war... Whole races of people could have been wiped off the face of the earth. Imagine if we had taken another 6 months to a year to defeat them and they had come up with their own atomic weapon and dropped it on London...
The very idea that there are "rules of war" is just stupid. War crimes are what the winners of a war charge the leadership of the losers so they can execute them in some semi-legal way.
The rules of engagement that the US military exercises are a token effort made by our leadership because our military is so ridiculously over equipped and the enemy is usually so completely out-classed that it costs us relatively little to avoid some of the more publicly distasteful practices. I promise you, if we ever got into a war with an enemy that was even remotely evenly matched to our military our rules of engagement would be out the window in a heartbeat. Would you shoot some strangers baby in the face if the alternative was that he would shoot your baby in the face? Of course you would. Now shut the fuck up.