I don't enough (OK, anything) about the meeting and what the goals are, but here's an idea. Why not do both?
Run a message board during the conference, as well as before and after. Encourage people in the conference (planners, attendees) to post.
Then, have specific "chat times" where someone from the conference is available to chat with others. The purpose of this is to get many interested people involved at once. Nothing is more dull than a chat with four people when you expected forty or four hundred. After the chat is done, simply post the log in a thread in the forum. The main ideas can be continued at a more leisurely pace.
There's plenty of free bulletin boards available, and IRC always works for chat.
You probably want to spend the bulk of your time informing participants of these modes of communication (and ensuring participation of key members) than setting up a bunch of software.
I found this US Census page, but I can't find the "live" moving clock. It seems, to me at least, that a 1% yearly growth in population isn't really anything to be alarmed about. In fact, if you look at population density, our population density is less than average: 31 people per km compared to the world average of 48 km. That's less than 10% of the density in Japan or India. Some European countries are way up there as well. Germany and the UK both have more than 200 people per km. Even without Alaska, we're still only at about 37 people per km.
If we had Germany's population density, the US would have 2.2 billion people (and still only about 400 interested in the World Cup).
The question isn't about density, as it is about resources and the ecological footprint that Americans have. We're terribly, awfully wasteful. If we all became more conscious about resource use, in twenty years, even with 360 million people, we could use less resources then than we use today. At that point, the economic benefits of population (and immigration) outweigh the other costs.
I'd be a lot more worried if we've maxed out our resource use efficiency and there was simply no way to improve. No, we've got a lot of improvements we can do. If we follow through with them, US population growth won't be a problem in the next century.
Comcast called me trying to get to switch and told me if the power ever goes out, the VOIP line still functions. Unfortunately, my cordless phone does not. I could always fix it with battery backup, but we've got two cellphones in the house, so I'm not terribly concerned.
Disney's not available through Amazon. Nothing that Buena Vista distributes, at least. No Disney, no Lost episodes, no Miramax movies. It's almost like Disney Boardmember Steve Jobs had something to do with it.
Interesting. Amazon lists over 6,000 DVDs under $7.49. Sure, some of them you've never heard of, but will we see Dark City for $5.99? Superman for $6.99? Fargo for $7.99?
Wal-Mart has bins for titles at $5.50 and I've seen sales on titles as low as $3.50.
But just off the top of my head, what does the general public know about Sony?
They think this: "They make good TVs. They made the Walkman. I think my kid's CD player might be by them. Oh, and the Playstation? That's theirs too, right?"
Sony (along with Microsoft) is one of the most trusted brands in the world. The incessant cackling and yapping from informed or opinionated sources on the Internet is like a toy whistle blowing during a rocket launch. The general public knows very little, unfortunately. Just because $site_you_read talks about Sony (or Microsoft or anything) derisively, doesn't mean the general populace shares that opinion, even if your site has stories bashing these companies every day.
I'm glad this stuff is being reported and discussed but it amounts to near nothing in the grand scheme of things.
...I wait for Slashdot to report the news again! *ducks*
In all seriousness, it's always a good idea to have this information all in one place so you don't have to look for a million results. One thing I liked about my university's library is that they had a portal where you could search all their article databases from one point: You'd get back Lexis-Nexis results, web searches, etc. If Google can do this and tie together trade and scientific journals (say, the APA and thousands of others), then we'll be on our way. Right now one of the other option I can think of is LookSmart's FindArticles, although it seems small at only 10 million articles.
would I have imagined that this game would come to Xbox Live. Furthermore, outside of Slashdot (and even here), there's going to be a huge amount of people who are going to say... "What?"
I know it's de rigueur to mention "The Long Tail", but this is a great example of it; the Long Tail is a theory that in the future, businesses will need to sell small amounts of a huge variety.
Ideally, Catan fever will spread worldwide to a brand new audience. But also, putting a game like this on a console really sets it apart to big Catan fans. Xbox Live Arcade has the possibility to do that by releasing niche games that the target audience really wants. I loathe anecdotal evidence, but I know of two people that have bought an Xbox simply for one of the arcade games (Geometry Wars and Street Fighter).
Microsoft does seem to be serious about this. At Leipzig they also announced that they will "own football" by making Pro Evolution Soccer 6 and FIFA 07 Xbox 360 exclusives. Sony's own Winning Eleven series is of course not affected.
Now, if they'd only give Europe what they really want: fairly priced hardware and software.
You have Microsoft with what amounts to the XBox 2.0. It does everything the XBox does and better, but doesn't add much else on top of it.
By those standards, the only consoles that ever tried anything new were the Sega CD, the DS and the Virtua Boy. The changes in the 360 weren't in the hardware, they were in the software.
The length of an article doesn't imply impact. Sephiroth has more information in his entry than any of the first seven Henry rulers of England. There's more information on Jack Bauer than on Duhamel's integral. There's more information on baseball than there is on George Washington.
The simple matter of fact is, there are more people who can accurately describe Jack Bauer than Duhamel's integral. Because more people have facts to add about baseball than to George Washington. "Pop culture" for better or for worse, is culture, and that's many people are familiar with. So they add and edit those entries. Who, besides some scholar or historian, will be able to add new information regarding George Washington? Compare that to how many people know about the Simpsons, or some pro wrestler, or their favorite movie character.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but Wikipedia is more of a reflection of many people's collective thoughts, and as such, you're going to find a lot of "fluff" topics that an encyclopedia would never even consider covering.
I thought this article was a bit... light. It gives you a good sort of back-of-the-cereal box review of collecting, but it doesn't go any deeper. I won't be expanding on the article, but I had a few thoughts relationg to the topic.
Collecting is here to stay. It will never go away. That's pretty much a given; it is important, however, to differentiate between two types. First, monetary collecting: your Magic cards, Warhammer figures, etc. Second, non-monetary collecting: "earned" items in MMOs, unlockable costumes/endings/characters, etc.
The good news with monetary collecting is that the internet helped implode a lot of markets. With Magic: the Gathering, I remember in the late 90's one card, a Juzam Djinn, carried a pretty hefty price, upwards of $150 if I recall correctly. It should be $175 or $200 now, if we're to believe increasing returns on collectibles and inflation (or eBay sellers with 0 bids). But quick look on eBay shows prices in the $100 area, per card. The most expensive card, the Black Lotus, also goes for about half of its previous price ($1000+).
(Now, some Magic player is going to rebut about how the changing of tournament rules is affecting cards. That might be true to a point. But in the past ten years we've seen the same thing happen with sports collectibles, comic books, term life insurance, and countless other markets; opening a market will have the effect of reducing prices since it reduces scarcity).
Now, monetary collecting in gaming is pretty bad in my eyes, especially for games kids play, since it puts kids without well-off parents at a distinct disadvantage over equaly skilled kids whose parents give them huge allowances or equally skilled working professionals with large discretionary budgets.
Thankfully, in non-monetary collecting, time and skill are the real investment. Most "collectibles" in these games require no money: unique armor for your MMO character, unlockable costumes for your fighters/adventurers, or hats for your Nintendogs, etc. Still, there's some inequality, as people with time but not money constraints pay for training, gold, etc.
Collecting, be it virtual or real, is intrinsic to gaming, video and otherwise. What's a sports player always work for? A Super Bowl ring. Or the Stanley Cup. Or a gold medal. Or any number of physical objects that represent victory. There's a reason there are physical things attached to these victories. It's not that the jewelry is more important than the championship, it's just that it's an object. In MMOs where items serve (usually) a useful purpose it's nice to get a trinket to show you defeated some boss. But it's nicer to get Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood.
I have been researching how I could best invest my money so I have immediate access to it if needed.
One concept I've heard of that I liked combines liquidity (access to money) with a high return. Say you've got $5000 you can put away. Divide it by five and put $1000 each into a 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year Certificate of Deposit (CD). At the end of the first year, when the first CD matures, roll that into a 5-year CD. (The longer the time, the higher the interest rate is you earn, usually). Lather, rinse, repeat. Every year, 20% of your investment becomes available without penalty and you're earning a high rate of return on your money due to the longer term and interest rate averaging over the time period.
That, or find a financial advisor you can trust. A good one will value your relationship and look forward to making you money for many years. A bad one will want you to trade stuff in your account often (earning them high commissions) and leaving you in the poorhouse.
That, or invest in mutual funds that cover a lot of type of investments: some index funds, some international/European funds, a few bonds here and there. It's very easy to avoid scams and beat your savings account rate. Optimizing that is what is a bit trickier.
I'm pretty sure that currently, the Xbox 360 only lets you store content like game saves, downloaded trailers, XBLA titles, etc. on either the official 360 hard-drive or a 64MB memory card. The easy solution is to sell the 20GB laptop drive that is the Xbox 360 drive at a fair price: $40 or $50. Then make the $100 hard-drive 80GB.
The cool thing is that through AWS (Amazon Web Services) Amazon lets you into some of their data. An example here is the sales history of Running Blogs with Slash. TicTap keeps 60-day sales rank history. I'm guessing with this book there was some free publicity on June 13 and July 19, because the ranks shot up a whole lot. You can then see it died out for a while, then shot back up.
First off, Amazon sales rankings aren't that useful. But, it's still interesting to look into them. For example, look at the Clerks DVD. It's been steadily gaining sales, presumably from the theatrical release of Clerks II. (You can see the same effect on sales with other DVDs related to recent theatrical releases, from Pirates of the Caribbean to The Sixth Sense. It looks like the effect kicks in a couple of weeks before the movie; maybe when advertising begins to really ramp up?)
I'm actually surprised this information is given out so openly. In the past, it may have cost thousands of dollars to get this kind of data, if the companies released it at all. Maybe someday Wal-Mart will make their huge database accessible and we can finally find the link between hurricanes and Pop-Tart sales.
Let's say your advertising budget is $100. In our example, each $1 you spent on advertising (historically) returns you $20 in sales and $5 in profits. You spent $20 of your budget on Google Adwords, 25% of which went to click fraud. So that's not only $10 wasted, but $200 less in sales and $50 less in profit that you could've had if there was no fraud.
Given the hundreds of press releases I get in my inbox on a weekly basis, PR folks in general need to learn that lesson regardless of their clients.
Which inbox... your personal or your business one? Your personal one shouldn't get any PR material. But your business one... well, that's just how the world works. Businesses will get mail targeted for what they are doing. That at least is relevant. I have a tad bit more patience for relevant advertising mail than for "be$t CIA1is softabs!" and Rolex replicas.
Press Releases aren't, they're just tedious. And everyone writes them. Even OSDN and OSTG. And considering you are a news source, consider it a blessing that you get press releases; it confirms your relevance. Plus, every once in a while, you'll find one that's actually interesting.
How does it "not go over well"? Sure, rural area residents complain about being limited to 56k and satellite; suburbanites itch for FTTP that hasn't been widely deployed. These are complaints limited to the private sector. I don't remember the government stepping in and saying "Look, provider, you have to give this to everyone, or nobody gets it at all."
They make a paper money version? I wish someone had told me sooner.
I've been playing the "Monopoly: Yap Edition" from Micronesia. Keeping track of and moving hundreds of giant stone discs is not as fun as it sounds. Passing Go! is usually seen as physical punishment, not a reward. Toes get stubbed. Basically, after about 15 minutes, everyone gets too exhausted to keep going.
I think most of your comment was well-written. This stuck out to me, though:
"Sony is more willing to embrace user created content... And the PSP is still a favorite for eclectic games and homebrew."
Sony doesn't embrace homebrew content, at least if the PSP is any indication. I don't know to what extent the big three embrace small developers.
I was also going to say something about how downloadable PS1 and PS2 games seemed a bit out the question, but a lot of the demos on Xbox Live Marketplace are near 500MB. It clearly is not out of the question. (Now HD content... that's another matter).
That's not a surprise. For years, I've been friendly enough to offer sharing my genetic code with any number of buxom, nubile females. I was told the code was "incompatible" and often never even got to the I/O phase.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't enough (OK, anything) about the meeting and what the goals are, but here's an idea. Why not do both?
Run a message board during the conference, as well as before and after. Encourage people in the conference (planners, attendees) to post.
Then, have specific "chat times" where someone from the conference is available to chat with others. The purpose of this is to get many interested people involved at once. Nothing is more dull than a chat with four people when you expected forty or four hundred. After the chat is done, simply post the log in a thread in the forum. The main ideas can be continued at a more leisurely pace.
There's plenty of free bulletin boards available, and IRC always works for chat.
You probably want to spend the bulk of your time informing participants of these modes of communication (and ensuring participation of key members) than setting up a bunch of software.
I found this US Census page, but I can't find the "live" moving clock. It seems, to me at least, that a 1% yearly growth in population isn't really anything to be alarmed about. In fact, if you look at population density, our population density is less than average: 31 people per km compared to the world average of 48 km. That's less than 10% of the density in Japan or India. Some European countries are way up there as well. Germany and the UK both have more than 200 people per km. Even without Alaska, we're still only at about 37 people per km.
If we had Germany's population density, the US would have 2.2 billion people (and still only about 400 interested in the World Cup).
The question isn't about density, as it is about resources and the ecological footprint that Americans have. We're terribly, awfully wasteful. If we all became more conscious about resource use, in twenty years, even with 360 million people, we could use less resources then than we use today. At that point, the economic benefits of population (and immigration) outweigh the other costs.
I'd be a lot more worried if we've maxed out our resource use efficiency and there was simply no way to improve. No, we've got a lot of improvements we can do. If we follow through with them, US population growth won't be a problem in the next century.
Comcast called me trying to get to switch and told me if the power ever goes out, the VOIP line still functions. Unfortunately, my cordless phone does not. I could always fix it with battery backup, but we've got two cellphones in the house, so I'm not terribly concerned.
Disney's not available through Amazon. Nothing that Buena Vista distributes, at least. No Disney, no Lost episodes, no Miramax movies. It's almost like Disney Boardmember Steve Jobs had something to do with it.
Interesting. Amazon lists over 6,000 DVDs under $7.49. Sure, some of them you've never heard of, but will we see Dark City for $5.99? Superman for $6.99? Fargo for $7.99?
Wal-Mart has bins for titles at $5.50 and I've seen sales on titles as low as $3.50.
They think this: "They make good TVs. They made the Walkman. I think my kid's CD player might be by them. Oh, and the Playstation? That's theirs too, right?"
Sony (along with Microsoft) is one of the most trusted brands in the world. The incessant cackling and yapping from informed or opinionated sources on the Internet is like a toy whistle blowing during a rocket launch. The general public knows very little, unfortunately. Just because $site_you_read talks about Sony (or Microsoft or anything) derisively, doesn't mean the general populace shares that opinion, even if your site has stories bashing these companies every day.
I'm glad this stuff is being reported and discussed but it amounts to near nothing in the grand scheme of things.
...I wait for Slashdot to report the news again! *ducks*
In all seriousness, it's always a good idea to have this information all in one place so you don't have to look for a million results. One thing I liked about my university's library is that they had a portal where you could search all their article databases from one point: You'd get back Lexis-Nexis results, web searches, etc. If Google can do this and tie together trade and scientific journals (say, the APA and thousands of others), then we'll be on our way. Right now one of the other option I can think of is LookSmart's FindArticles, although it seems small at only 10 million articles.
would I have imagined that this game would come to Xbox Live. Furthermore, outside of Slashdot (and even here), there's going to be a huge amount of people who are going to say... "What?"
I know it's de rigueur to mention "The Long Tail", but this is a great example of it; the Long Tail is a theory that in the future, businesses will need to sell small amounts of a huge variety.
Ideally, Catan fever will spread worldwide to a brand new audience. But also, putting a game like this on a console really sets it apart to big Catan fans. Xbox Live Arcade has the possibility to do that by releasing niche games that the target audience really wants. I loathe anecdotal evidence, but I know of two people that have bought an Xbox simply for one of the arcade games (Geometry Wars and Street Fighter).
Microsoft does seem to be serious about this. At Leipzig they also announced that they will "own football" by making Pro Evolution Soccer 6 and FIFA 07 Xbox 360 exclusives. Sony's own Winning Eleven series is of course not affected.
Now, if they'd only give Europe what they really want: fairly priced hardware and software.
Daily Kos and Moveon didn't sink Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman sunk Joe Lieberman.
I thought Dead Rising already came out last week.
By those standards, the only consoles that ever tried anything new were the Sega CD, the DS and the Virtua Boy. The changes in the 360 weren't in the hardware, they were in the software.
The length of an article doesn't imply impact. Sephiroth has more information in his entry than any of the first seven Henry rulers of England. There's more information on Jack Bauer than on Duhamel's integral. There's more information on baseball than there is on George Washington.
The simple matter of fact is, there are more people who can accurately describe Jack Bauer than Duhamel's integral. Because more people have facts to add about baseball than to George Washington. "Pop culture" for better or for worse, is culture, and that's many people are familiar with. So they add and edit those entries. Who, besides some scholar or historian, will be able to add new information regarding George Washington? Compare that to how many people know about the Simpsons, or some pro wrestler, or their favorite movie character.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but Wikipedia is more of a reflection of many people's collective thoughts, and as such, you're going to find a lot of "fluff" topics that an encyclopedia would never even consider covering.
Maybe the cops thought the song was,
"Two young snipers in a tree,
K-I-L-L-I-N-G..."
I mean, it's a common mistake.
If this doesn't come out favorably, don't blame me!
I voted for Kodos.
I thought this article was a bit... light. It gives you a good sort of back-of-the-cereal box review of collecting, but it doesn't go any deeper. I won't be expanding on the article, but I had a few thoughts relationg to the topic.
Collecting is here to stay. It will never go away. That's pretty much a given; it is important, however, to differentiate between two types. First, monetary collecting: your Magic cards, Warhammer figures, etc. Second, non-monetary collecting: "earned" items in MMOs, unlockable costumes/endings/characters, etc.
The good news with monetary collecting is that the internet helped implode a lot of markets. With Magic: the Gathering, I remember in the late 90's one card, a Juzam Djinn, carried a pretty hefty price, upwards of $150 if I recall correctly. It should be $175 or $200 now, if we're to believe increasing returns on collectibles and inflation (or eBay sellers with 0 bids). But quick look on eBay shows prices in the $100 area, per card. The most expensive card, the Black Lotus, also goes for about half of its previous price ($1000+).
(Now, some Magic player is going to rebut about how the changing of tournament rules is affecting cards. That might be true to a point. But in the past ten years we've seen the same thing happen with sports collectibles, comic books, term life insurance, and countless other markets; opening a market will have the effect of reducing prices since it reduces scarcity).
Now, monetary collecting in gaming is pretty bad in my eyes, especially for games kids play, since it puts kids without well-off parents at a distinct disadvantage over equaly skilled kids whose parents give them huge allowances or equally skilled working professionals with large discretionary budgets.
Thankfully, in non-monetary collecting, time and skill are the real investment. Most "collectibles" in these games require no money: unique armor for your MMO character, unlockable costumes for your fighters/adventurers, or hats for your Nintendogs, etc. Still, there's some inequality, as people with time but not money constraints pay for training, gold, etc.
Collecting, be it virtual or real, is intrinsic to gaming, video and otherwise. What's a sports player always work for? A Super Bowl ring. Or the Stanley Cup. Or a gold medal. Or any number of physical objects that represent victory. There's a reason there are physical things attached to these victories. It's not that the jewelry is more important than the championship, it's just that it's an object. In MMOs where items serve (usually) a useful purpose it's nice to get a trinket to show you defeated some boss. But it's nicer to get Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood.
One concept I've heard of that I liked combines liquidity (access to money) with a high return. Say you've got $5000 you can put away. Divide it by five and put $1000 each into a 1-, 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year Certificate of Deposit (CD). At the end of the first year, when the first CD matures, roll that into a 5-year CD. (The longer the time, the higher the interest rate is you earn, usually). Lather, rinse, repeat. Every year, 20% of your investment becomes available without penalty and you're earning a high rate of return on your money due to the longer term and interest rate averaging over the time period.
That, or find a financial advisor you can trust. A good one will value your relationship and look forward to making you money for many years. A bad one will want you to trade stuff in your account often (earning them high commissions) and leaving you in the poorhouse.
That, or invest in mutual funds that cover a lot of type of investments: some index funds, some international/European funds, a few bonds here and there. It's very easy to avoid scams and beat your savings account rate. Optimizing that is what is a bit trickier.
I'm pretty sure that currently, the Xbox 360 only lets you store content like game saves, downloaded trailers, XBLA titles, etc. on either the official 360 hard-drive or a 64MB memory card. The easy solution is to sell the 20GB laptop drive that is the Xbox 360 drive at a fair price: $40 or $50. Then make the $100 hard-drive 80GB.
The cool thing is that through AWS (Amazon Web Services) Amazon lets you into some of their data. An example here is the sales history of Running Blogs with Slash . TicTap keeps 60-day sales rank history. I'm guessing with this book there was some free publicity on June 13 and July 19, because the ranks shot up a whole lot. You can then see it died out for a while, then shot back up.
First off, Amazon sales rankings aren't that useful. But, it's still interesting to look into them. For example, look at the Clerks DVD. It's been steadily gaining sales, presumably from the theatrical release of Clerks II. (You can see the same effect on sales with other DVDs related to recent theatrical releases, from Pirates of the Caribbean to The Sixth Sense. It looks like the effect kicks in a couple of weeks before the movie; maybe when advertising begins to really ramp up?)
I'm actually surprised this information is given out so openly. In the past, it may have cost thousands of dollars to get this kind of data, if the companies released it at all. Maybe someday Wal-Mart will make their huge database accessible and we can finally find the link between hurricanes and Pop-Tart sales.
Let's say your advertising budget is $100. In our example, each $1 you spent on advertising (historically) returns you $20 in sales and $5 in profits. You spent $20 of your budget on Google Adwords, 25% of which went to click fraud. So that's not only $10 wasted, but $200 less in sales and $50 less in profit that you could've had if there was no fraud.
That's the basic logic, I believe.
Which inbox... your personal or your business one? Your personal one shouldn't get any PR material. But your business one... well, that's just how the world works. Businesses will get mail targeted for what they are doing. That at least is relevant. I have a tad bit more patience for relevant advertising mail than for "be$t CIA1is softabs!" and Rolex replicas.
Press Releases aren't, they're just tedious. And everyone writes them. Even OSDN and OSTG. And considering you are a news source, consider it a blessing that you get press releases; it confirms your relevance. Plus, every once in a while, you'll find one that's actually interesting.
How does it "not go over well"? Sure, rural area residents complain about being limited to 56k and satellite; suburbanites itch for FTTP that hasn't been widely deployed. These are complaints limited to the private sector. I don't remember the government stepping in and saying "Look, provider, you have to give this to everyone, or nobody gets it at all."
They make a paper money version? I wish someone had told me sooner.
I've been playing the "Monopoly: Yap Edition" from Micronesia. Keeping track of and moving hundreds of giant stone discs is not as fun as it sounds. Passing Go! is usually seen as physical punishment, not a reward. Toes get stubbed. Basically, after about 15 minutes, everyone gets too exhausted to keep going.
No, I bet he goes into the courtroom and says, "Hogan smash!" and then tosses chairs around.
Wait, wrong Hulk. I mean, he goes into the courtroom yelling "It's clobberin' time!" then eating some Slim Jims.
Sony doesn't embrace homebrew content, at least if the PSP is any indication. I don't know to what extent the big three embrace small developers.
I was also going to say something about how downloadable PS1 and PS2 games seemed a bit out the question, but a lot of the demos on Xbox Live Marketplace are near 500MB. It clearly is not out of the question. (Now HD content... that's another matter).
That's not a surprise. For years, I've been friendly enough to offer sharing my genetic code with any number of buxom, nubile females. I was told the code was "incompatible" and often never even got to the I/O phase.