You put a magazine away. Magazines don't update periodically and draw your attention. Ever seen a refrigerator with an LCD screen on the front? Now, imagine that you can buy a fridge that displays ads on the front all the time. Annoying, animated, flashing ads. And that fridge is $30 cheaper than one that doesn't display ads. Now, imagine your landlord is replacing all the fridges in your apartment complex. Which one do you think he's going to buy? Are you ready to break your lease to get away from that thing? Or live with a piece of plastic taped over it all the time (which covers a variety of touch sensitve controls)?
Advertising has also given me ~40 years of free television, 30 years of free talk or musicradio, free webpages instead of paypages, cheap $1 magazines, and so on. Free is better than spending ~$5000 a year to get the same level of service. (IMHO)
It makes me sick because I see the future. The difference is that the Kindle advertising was always on. Even when you weren't reading. This is different than your TV, where you accept ads intermixed with the content. You shut off the content on your TV, and the ads go with them. Extrapolate the Kindle model to one where every connected device with a screen in your house is displaying advertising all the time that it has power. You're getting dystopian at that point.
Nothing cheapens a product like plastering it with ads even if you can get rid of them by paying.
See the Kindle for a concrete example.. Every time I go to my parent's house and see their Kindle sitting there with a Visa ad on the front, it makes me feel nauseous.
IAMD announced that they have something to compete with TB, but there is no details and I have not heard anything about it since a small blip in an interview from months ago.
The funny thing about this is that you occasionally see the Pre-Columbia-Pictures Sony in some products. Sony's eBook reader, for instance, is a model product. It uses the ePub format (the real, standardized one, not the hacked version that B&N sells). it uses a standard USB cable to transfer data, and charge. It doesn't have any backdoor via wireless or anything else that will let them pull a 1984 on books you've already purchased.
Eventually, though, Sony may end up with a publishing company through some merger/aquisition, and they'll fuck this up too.
"Best Buy may not be Shangri La, but in many rural and semi-rural parts of the U.S., it's the nearest and best place to actually find a wide selection of electronics."
As Yoda says, "that is why you fail". The fact is, there's almost no middle anymore. Bottom of the barrel electronics have gotten good enough that low end buyer buy almost exclusively on price. High end buyers have the awareness and ability to comparison shop online for yet a wider selection at better prices. Best Buy loses the first group to Wal-Mart, and the second to the internet. And the in-between isn't big enough to make any money on.
They should get you to write their web site. I clicked the link, and after reading the summary on the first page, I still didn't have any idea WTF it was for...
It's getting to the point right now, that charging $60 for game is going to slow sales for many, MANY titles.
I don't believe this to be true. We're at a point where at debut, premire titles sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies within the first 24 hours of release. There are release parties, where people rejoice in their freedom to drop three Jacksons plus tax for the right to get a game within minutes of its availability. There was nothing of this magnitude in the NES era.
If that's what the market will bear, then that's what the price will be. If people are willing to pay it, then it's a fair price. This sucks for poor people who happen to be video game enthusiasts, but such is the way with a free market.
The other thing to remember is that we're not talking about bread, or water, or heating oil, or any of a variety of fundamental needs. It really is pretty viable for you to decide to go down to the library and read a book for free instead of playing the latest video game. Then buy it when it drops to $40 or whatever your purchase point is.
Perhaps, but you may be getting more product in return. In the end, most companies don't really care how much money they make per customer, as much as they care about how much of a return they get on the money they invested. If they can make more money from their development expense by selling more copies at a lower price, they will. If they can make more money by selling less copies at a higher price, they'll do that. That's why companies sink money into marketing. If a marketing dollar spent results in $1.10 worth of additional profit, then they'll spend it. Generally speaking, they'd love it if you buy older games for not much money, as that's icing on the cake for them.
They aren't going to be married to a $60 price point. If they cut out the used game market, then it becomes a curve over time. Right now, we have a situation where a small number of die hards pay $100 + for a pre-release version with some extra trinkets, the first-day adopters pay $60 for a new game, a large number of people buy it at retail for $40 a year later, then it goes in the bargin bin for $20 or $30 a few years later. That's the curve. The problem for publishers is that they have to compete with their own used games at the end of this curve.
The new model will look different, and will vary a lot from game to game. Basically, the game publishers will try to maximize revenue by getting each customer to pay the highest price they are willing to pay, with the reward of getting the game sooner than you would have for a lower price. When your distribution costs approach zero as they do with digitial distribution (remember that Wal-Mart probably gets somewhere between $10 and $20 out of that $60), you can sell a game for $7 and still make a profit. And that beats not making a profit. So expect used games on consoles to follow the same thing that's happened on Steam. Eventually some pretty good but old games will show up for a few dollars on the consoles; this is a price point that isn't worth GameStop's trouble. There's already some flavor of this with the fact that you can buy MarioCart for N64 on the Wii market for $5.
I would say that any usage is a good metric. If you google the name of your project, and another person has made a positive comment somewhere about it, the it's a success, because you've touched someone. You don't have to measure yourself by the standard of Apache or Android or Firefox.
It reminds me of a story: Two men are walking along a beach after the tide has gone out, leaving stranded starfish for as far as they can see. One man leans down and picks one up, and throws it back into the sea. "Why bother?" the other man asks. "Look at all of them. It doesn't make any difference." "It made a huge difference to that one," he replied.
That's 2001 think. How much revenue has Hulu gained from those 1.5 mil customers? Volume doesn't help you if you aren't making an average profit per customer. Lexis Nexis and other such firms have relatively small customer bases, but generate a large amount of revenue per customer. That's 2012 think. At least for the majority of new companies that will still be around in 2016.
The spacecraft is worth a substantial amount of money. And the spacecraft needs the spam inside to make it work right. Even if you're only talking about economic interest, they'll put a fair amount of effort towards protecting said spam.
That's the wrong analogy, though. NASA is more like the Wright Brothers, or Charles Lindberg. ValuJet is exactly what we're shooting for. Making space travel a commodity. Frankly, even a reliabilty record with a failure rate two orders of magnitude worse than ValueJet's will make SpaceX phenominally successful, and drastically safer than the space shuttle.
As much admiration as I have for these guys, sometimes I get tired of hearing them talk, only because of their lack of perspective. I heard a talk from an SR-71 pilot a while ago, lamenting the end of that program, and how wonderful it was, and how special it is to have it so that people can do such things, and how we should still be doing it. And I do think it's neat, and had a place in the world when it was created. It was a technological wonder that doubtless caused research that lead to a lot of other mass benefits.
But that's not my point. I think some of these guys see the stuff as worthwhile just for its own sake, and lose the fact that millions of people pay billions of dollars so that scores of pilots can fly really fast. And they lose the wonder of the advances made in the everyday world, for the everyday person.
Yesterday, I downloaded an app, for free, to my Android phone. It used satellites and radios to track me a course to ride on my bike superimposed on images sent from a server across the continent. That's fucking amazing. And everyone can do it.
I wonder sometimes if part of the opposition to this sort of space exploration is the fact that, some day, space travel may just not be that special. And they'll lose the romanticism of it.
And he's only talking about rasterization. Expect a switch to raytracing somewhere in the not so near future.
But that won't really matter either. The problem at this point isn't the number of pixels, or the number of polygons, or the depth or resolution of the textures. It's the fact that the image is being projected on a rectangle with a strip of plastic around it. In the end, what we really are shooting for is what literature people call "Suspension of disblief". You can only get so far looking into a glowing rectangle. The wrap-around screens of eyefinity help some, and 3d glasses have the potential to help a little bit.
The reality is that hte most immersive gaming experience I've had was in the mid to late 90's when i was hooked up to a real VR system with a helmet, and held a gun with approximately wii-controller input capability. The ability of that system, despite its craptacular by today's standard rendering capability, to be immersive was much higher, because the ability to see my entire environment by moving my neck and body was more important the the quality of the environment itself.
At 1Tbps, you could copy my porn collection in only five hours!!!!!
That would be great. Over my cable modem it took nearly 2 days. BTW, your girlfriend's birthmark is really cute. Oh, and you should really change your password.
This is a geek site. You can just say 1 Tbps, and expect the reader to comprehend that without some bullshit hokey metric that doesn't mean anything at all. It's 128gb a second, how the fuck is that 500 "high definition movies"?
Perhaps you missed the dozens and dozens of posts above yours, but we get a charge out of poking pedantic holes in this kind of bullshit. In a society where being well-informed, of above average intellegence, or well educated is increasingly equated with being some sort of eliteist snob, this is where we come to seek comradery and refuge and try to resist the rising tide of anti-itellectualism. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wait for the next article ot appear so I can try to get FIRST POST!
Slashdot Mirror
This site really does attract a lot of assholes.
Slashdot.org or the World Trade Center Site? Probably right on both counts.
If the Ford Sync system is any indication, Microsoft seems to be able to pull off something like this quite well.
You put a magazine away. Magazines don't update periodically and draw your attention. Ever seen a refrigerator with an LCD screen on the front? Now, imagine that you can buy a fridge that displays ads on the front all the time. Annoying, animated, flashing ads. And that fridge is $30 cheaper than one that doesn't display ads. Now, imagine your landlord is replacing all the fridges in your apartment complex. Which one do you think he's going to buy? Are you ready to break your lease to get away from that thing? Or live with a piece of plastic taped over it all the time (which covers a variety of touch sensitve controls)?
Thanks!
Advertising has also given me ~40 years of free television, 30 years of free talk or musicradio, free webpages instead of paypages, cheap $1 magazines, and so on. Free is better than spending ~$5000 a year to get the same level of service. (IMHO)
It makes me sick because I see the future. The difference is that the Kindle advertising was always on. Even when you weren't reading. This is different than your TV, where you accept ads intermixed with the content. You shut off the content on your TV, and the ads go with them. Extrapolate the Kindle model to one where every connected device with a screen in your house is displaying advertising all the time that it has power. You're getting dystopian at that point.
Nothing cheapens a product like plastering it with ads even if you can get rid of them by paying.
See the Kindle for a concrete example.. Every time I go to my parent's house and see their Kindle sitting there with a Visa ad on the front, it makes me feel nauseous.
IAMD announced that they have something to compete with TB, but there is no details and I have not heard anything about it since a small blip in an interview from months ago.
Yeah. it's called USB 3.0.
Actually, a lot of it did go down to that. The protection they used to keep hackers from copying shit off their network was clearly insufficent.
The funny thing about this is that you occasionally see the Pre-Columbia-Pictures Sony in some products. Sony's eBook reader, for instance, is a model product. It uses the ePub format (the real, standardized one, not the hacked version that B&N sells). it uses a standard USB cable to transfer data, and charge. It doesn't have any backdoor via wireless or anything else that will let them pull a 1984 on books you've already purchased.
Eventually, though, Sony may end up with a publishing company through some merger/aquisition, and they'll fuck this up too.
It sounds like you're saying they should become Radio Shack, which isn't doing spectacularly either.
"Best Buy may not be Shangri La, but in many rural and semi-rural parts of the U.S., it's the nearest and best place to actually find a wide selection of electronics."
As Yoda says, "that is why you fail". The fact is, there's almost no middle anymore. Bottom of the barrel electronics have gotten good enough that low end buyer buy almost exclusively on price. High end buyers have the awareness and ability to comparison shop online for yet a wider selection at better prices. Best Buy loses the first group to Wal-Mart, and the second to the internet. And the in-between isn't big enough to make any money on.
They should get you to write their web site. I clicked the link, and after reading the summary on the first page, I still didn't have any idea WTF it was for...
It's getting to the point right now, that charging $60 for game is going to slow sales for many, MANY titles.
I don't believe this to be true. We're at a point where at debut, premire titles sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies within the first 24 hours of release. There are release parties, where people rejoice in their freedom to drop three Jacksons plus tax for the right to get a game within minutes of its availability. There was nothing of this magnitude in the NES era.
If that's what the market will bear, then that's what the price will be. If people are willing to pay it, then it's a fair price. This sucks for poor people who happen to be video game enthusiasts, but such is the way with a free market.
The other thing to remember is that we're not talking about bread, or water, or heating oil, or any of a variety of fundamental needs. It really is pretty viable for you to decide to go down to the library and read a book for free instead of playing the latest video game. Then buy it when it drops to $40 or whatever your purchase point is.
Perhaps, but you may be getting more product in return. In the end, most companies don't really care how much money they make per customer, as much as they care about how much of a return they get on the money they invested. If they can make more money from their development expense by selling more copies at a lower price, they will. If they can make more money by selling less copies at a higher price, they'll do that. That's why companies sink money into marketing. If a marketing dollar spent results in $1.10 worth of additional profit, then they'll spend it. Generally speaking, they'd love it if you buy older games for not much money, as that's icing on the cake for them.
They aren't going to be married to a $60 price point. If they cut out the used game market, then it becomes a curve over time. Right now, we have a situation where a small number of die hards pay $100 + for a pre-release version with some extra trinkets, the first-day adopters pay $60 for a new game, a large number of people buy it at retail for $40 a year later, then it goes in the bargin bin for $20 or $30 a few years later. That's the curve. The problem for publishers is that they have to compete with their own used games at the end of this curve.
The new model will look different, and will vary a lot from game to game. Basically, the game publishers will try to maximize revenue by getting each customer to pay the highest price they are willing to pay, with the reward of getting the game sooner than you would have for a lower price. When your distribution costs approach zero as they do with digitial distribution (remember that Wal-Mart probably gets somewhere between $10 and $20 out of that $60), you can sell a game for $7 and still make a profit. And that beats not making a profit. So expect used games on consoles to follow the same thing that's happened on Steam. Eventually some pretty good but old games will show up for a few dollars on the consoles; this is a price point that isn't worth GameStop's trouble. There's already some flavor of this with the fact that you can buy MarioCart for N64 on the Wii market for $5.
I think widespread usage is a good metric...
I would say that any usage is a good metric. If you google the name of your project, and another person has made a positive comment somewhere about it, the it's a success, because you've touched someone. You don't have to measure yourself by the standard of Apache or Android or Firefox.
It reminds me of a story:
Two men are walking along a beach after the tide has gone out, leaving stranded starfish for as far as they can see. One man leans down and picks one up, and throws it back into the sea.
"Why bother?" the other man asks. "Look at all of them. It doesn't make any difference."
"It made a huge difference to that one," he replied.
If "work" means only 454,000 subscribers total, compared to Spotify adding 1.5 million customer to a total of 2.5 mil, or Hulu reaching 1.5 mil customers in a year... I don't think it's working for NYT.
That's 2001 think. How much revenue has Hulu gained from those 1.5 mil customers? Volume doesn't help you if you aren't making an average profit per customer. Lexis Nexis and other such firms have relatively small customer bases, but generate a large amount of revenue per customer. That's 2012 think. At least for the majority of new companies that will still be around in 2016.
The spacecraft is worth a substantial amount of money. And the spacecraft needs the spam inside to make it work right. Even if you're only talking about economic interest, they'll put a fair amount of effort towards protecting said spam.
That's the wrong analogy, though. NASA is more like the Wright Brothers, or Charles Lindberg. ValuJet is exactly what we're shooting for. Making space travel a commodity. Frankly, even a reliabilty record with a failure rate two orders of magnitude worse than ValueJet's will make SpaceX phenominally successful, and drastically safer than the space shuttle.
As much admiration as I have for these guys, sometimes I get tired of hearing them talk, only because of their lack of perspective. I heard a talk from an SR-71 pilot a while ago, lamenting the end of that program, and how wonderful it was, and how special it is to have it so that people can do such things, and how we should still be doing it. And I do think it's neat, and had a place in the world when it was created. It was a technological wonder that doubtless caused research that lead to a lot of other mass benefits.
But that's not my point. I think some of these guys see the stuff as worthwhile just for its own sake, and lose the fact that millions of people pay billions of dollars so that scores of pilots can fly really fast. And they lose the wonder of the advances made in the everyday world, for the everyday person.
Yesterday, I downloaded an app, for free, to my Android phone. It used satellites and radios to track me a course to ride on my bike superimposed on images sent from a server across the continent. That's fucking amazing. And everyone can do it.
I wonder sometimes if part of the opposition to this sort of space exploration is the fact that, some day, space travel may just not be that special. And they'll lose the romanticism of it.
I don't think so; if you read the first question out loud, he sounds Canadian.
And he's only talking about rasterization. Expect a switch to raytracing somewhere in the not so near future.
But that won't really matter either. The problem at this point isn't the number of pixels, or the number of polygons, or the depth or resolution of the textures. It's the fact that the image is being projected on a rectangle with a strip of plastic around it. In the end, what we really are shooting for is what literature people call "Suspension of disblief". You can only get so far looking into a glowing rectangle. The wrap-around screens of eyefinity help some, and 3d glasses have the potential to help a little bit.
The reality is that hte most immersive gaming experience I've had was in the mid to late 90's when i was hooked up to a real VR system with a helmet, and held a gun with approximately wii-controller input capability. The ability of that system, despite its craptacular by today's standard rendering capability, to be immersive was much higher, because the ability to see my entire environment by moving my neck and body was more important the the quality of the environment itself.
At 1Tbps, you could copy my porn collection in only five hours!!!!!
That would be great. Over my cable modem it took nearly 2 days. BTW, your girlfriend's birthmark is really cute. Oh, and you should really change your password.
This is a geek site. You can just say 1 Tbps, and expect the reader to comprehend that without some bullshit hokey metric that doesn't mean anything at all. It's 128gb a second, how the fuck is that 500 "high definition movies"?
Perhaps you missed the dozens and dozens of posts above yours, but we get a charge out of poking pedantic holes in this kind of bullshit. In a society where being well-informed, of above average intellegence, or well educated is increasingly equated with being some sort of eliteist snob, this is where we come to seek comradery and refuge and try to resist the rising tide of anti-itellectualism. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go wait for the next article ot appear so I can try to get FIRST POST!