Thinking that "gamers" are just one market with one mind and one set of tastes show an incredible lack of business and consumer awareness.
Is somebody said "The recent explosion in take-away, fast-food outlets shows that restaurant-goers are not interested in sitting down and having a long meal in a pleasant environment. The likes of cheap takeaway sandwich sellers have changed the expectations of restaurant-goers. Since restaurant-goers are paying less money, there is less need to create nice-evening-meal-in-the-restaurant experiences because consumers no longer feel shortchanged" you would think them to be morons and yet that's what this "panel" said about games.
To put things bluntly: - The production values of the cheap crap you can play on your own on your mobile when riding the subway to work have absolutely nothing to do with the expected production values for a game you play at home in the evening or during the weekend, on a dedicated game machine connected to a big screen, probably with friends, just like the quality of the food and service from the local sandwich vendor from where I pick-up my lunch when at work has absolutly nothing to do with the quality of the food and service I expect from a good restaurant where I go to in the evening or weekend with my friends, family or someone special.
Simple and secure way to generate a password: - Grab a sentence that you know well and use the first letter of each word for your password.
For extra safety, if there are numbers in that sentence (or words that sound similar to numbers, like "to" for "2" use the number rather than the first letter. If there are any punctuation marks, use upper case for the following letter.
For example: 2bon2bTitq (To be or not to be? That is the question)
Blocking access to a specific site on demand from a specific interest group just opens up a huge can of worms. You do it for one interest group and next you know, everybody and their cat is demanding you do the same for them.
After all, if one group can demand it in order to defend their business model, then certainly other owners of IP can too. For example if somebody reposts a post of mine (of which I automatically own the copyright) in part or in whole, they're breaking my copyright - I think I need to request that access is blocked to every proxy in the planet from Finand.
Then there's the whole "morality" groups - how about, say, muslim groups demanding that access to sites of newspapers critical of Islam is blocked, pro-democracy groups demanding blocking of critical sites, anti-democracy groups demanding blocking of pro-democracy sites, misguided animal-rights groups demanding blocking of access to bonsai-cats and more. After all, as the argument would go, those sites facilitate the spread of defamatory posts and even posts that incite hatred on religious or political grounds (yes, there are places were this is against the law and said law is vaguelly enough written that pretty much everything fits until it comes in front of a court and is proven).
Any and all freedom fighters that took the honorable option of facing off man-to-man against the guys with lots of high-tech powerful weapons are already dead.
The truth is that in assymetrical warfare, most methods used by freedom fighters are the same as those used by the terrorists. Add that to the widespread use of the label "terrorist" to tarnish the image of those with real grievances who are the visible face of oppressed populations and you end up with a situation where the word "terrorist" just Goodwins a discussion.
In the middle of the recent fallout from the discovery of the abuses that happened during the credit bubble years (banker bonuses, press abuses, police corruption, cozy relations between politicians and the press), the Royal Household seems to be one of the few institutions that's coming out as squeaky clean.
So with a bit of luck, actions by the Queen might have a little more impact in public opinion than they would during the "time-of-excesses".
So even though I'm neither a royalist nor a british citizen, I welcome and applaud anything that might portray to kids the notion that technology is cool - they've been too long enthralled by dreams of being footballers or TV celebrities.
I don't really know where you are in the world or what industry you're in, so I can't really comment.
Where I am (Software Development, Finance, London, UK) freelancers (aka contractors) make about 2x as permanent employees. From what I've heard from people I know, the ratio is more or less the same in IT inside companies in other business domains.
In Holland, IT Contractors made about 3x as permanent employees.
As far as I know, certainly in IT, in Europe freelancers are always paid better than permanent employees. This is probably because freelancers have almost no rights, while permies get things like paid sick-leave and vacation days. Also, the "premium" that freelancers get seems to be related to how hard it is to fire a permanent employee (hence it was higher in Holland than it is in England). Lastly, going freelancer seems to be a natural career evolution path for those of us who are experienced, above average techies who don't want to move into management, so while it's hard to find really experienced people who are permies and willing to move, it's a lot easier to find those as contractors.
Personally, after having gone through the fallout of the end of the Internet bubble (number 1, we seem to be heading for a Web 2.0 bubble) I realised that job security was an illusion anyway and you're better off ditching illusionary job-security in exchange for a faster rate of filling-up your war-chest of savings so as to be ready for the next time the brown mater hits the rotary impeller...
Everyday, real life is boring, there's a lot of nitty gritty, low value things we have to do in order to get to the trully pleasurable bits of it.
Quick example: - Have you noticed that movies don't show in real time the travel time of the characters? Hands up anybody that wants to see in real time the 15h plane trip our action movie heroes take to go from their base to whatever hellhole they're supposed to be blasting stuff up in...
This is why most games do NOT include the "repetitivelly move stuff around" bits in them - because it's not fun. Would, say, any of the Mario Brother's games be any fun if you had to shovel dirt around for 1/2h in between getting each coin or fighting each baddie?
Let me explain this little thing I learned from working a couple of years in Portugal (neverending crunch time), then Holland (8h a day and your manager tells you to go home if you're still in at 5:30 pm) and then England (overwork as norm).
Your total daily productivity working on a norm of 8h/day is significantly better than working on a norm of 10h/day - to put it simply, if you pace yourself and work fewer hours you deliver more.
This is because: - Working more than 8h/day causes chronical tiredness - Chronically tired people in intellectual professions make many more mistakes (that also includes managers, who will take the wrong decisions). - The cost of fixing those mistakes far outweights the gains of working those extra hours.
To put things in software development terms: - If you constantly work longer hours you're constantly tired. If you're constantly tired you make more bugs. Bug fixing consumes a lot more time than doing things right the first time around (often by a factor or 1000x if the bug ends up in Production), so the increase in bugs means a HUGE increase in time spent in bug-fixing. More time wasted in bug fixing means that the project starts to run late, which means clueless managers demanding even more overwork. In other words, a feed-back loop.
So how did I solved it: - Well, in England if somebody tries to get me to overwork is say "No" (I will, however, do a little extra in the last couple of days before a release if needed).
Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.
It says that it can change from Portrait view to Landscape view or the other way around either from information read from the accelerometers of by command from the user using a finger gesture on a touch screen display. Furthermore, the user command causes the view to be locked in the chosen mode until another user command unlocks it.
It is essentially a patent on the combination of the following already patented or widelly used features of: - Show Landscape or Portrait mode depending on information from one or more sensors. - A user command can be used to override automated behaviour. - A user command can be used to remove an override to automated behaviour. - A user command can be given by means of a finger gesture on a touch screen.
The actual combination of features is not novel in that most experts of the field when asked "how would you implement display adjustment when the screen of a mobile device with a touch screen and an accelerometer is tilted" would come up with this solution.
This wouldn't be accepted by eiher the UK's or the EU's pattent office, but did in the US, since your system is thoroughly broken.
Two things: - On one side, the largest game publishers (hi EA) replaced free content updates released as part of game updates with paid-for DLC (and microtransactions). Together with that came overbroad DRM with call-home-activation that doesn't work on the first week of a release and tightly controlled multiplayer that stops working as soon as the next game of the series is released.
- On the other side you have microtransactions being used as the "death by a 1000 cuts" - you can't really convince players to fork $200 upfront, but you can get them to spend that $1 at a time if you spread it long enough. Even worse in some cases, players pay a full game price up-front just to find out that they need to spend another $200 in DLC purchases just to be competitive in multiplayer (and for some of us, the whole fun of multiplayer IS the fighting in a level-field against equally skilled adversaries).
For those gamers that have been around long enough to have seen the prime time of gaming on the PC (when the 1st part of Quake including multiplayer was free, proper DEMOS were release for games and free game updates often had content updates), DLC and in-game purchases just look like a way of selling cripleware with hidden costs, monetising the (previously free) try before you buy period and sneakily turning the buy-to-own model into a buy-then-rent model.
Currently those living in most developed nations enjoy standards of living which are WAY above the average for the whole world.
"Sharing out" as you say helps to even things out and might increase the average for everybody. It does however have the side effect of decreasing the standard of living for those with better standards of living.
This is already on display after more than a decade of outsourcing: - Standards of living in places like India and China have improved, but at the cost of stagnation or even reduction of standards of living for the poor and middle class in places like the US and the UK (which also happen to be those doing the most outsourcing).
Keep an eye out for income statistics that break the results down by income level and you'll notice that, even when AVERAGE real income went up, that was thanks to a huge jump in income for the top 1%, while income for the likes of low- and mid-middle class (mostly blue and white collar workers) went down in real terms.
I for one am not exactly keen on a lower standard of living for me and my descendants to help boost the standard of living of people I don't know. It especially riles me when some people sit in the middle of the flow that is the shift of wealth from middle class in developed nation's to that in developing nations, getting richer from the slice they capture of the difference between lower costs from moving jobs abroad and lower prices from cheaper imports (the first goes down faster than the second), essentially being parasites.
Notice twice as many fatalities per 100000 vehicles in the US (15) than the UK (7).
It's a similary picture in most of Western Europe and there are plenty of roundabouts all over Europe.
Doesn't really prove anything, but it seems unlikelly that roundabouts significantly increase the number of traffic accidents. Even if they do, they certainly do not increase the number of deaths.
The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
Trying to break into a market against a well-established player, when your product is more expensive, has less marketing and is lower in quality isn't going to work
I myself have some really nice ideas for Honeycomb, tablet optimized apps but am holding off from developing them until the platform gets some traction.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world, but if hardware makers persist in sticking it on top of turds and hopping it sells, Apple is going to dominate the tablet market for the next 20 years.
I've altered plenty of contracts before signing them in my time and only once was I told take it or leave it (I had to take it and as soon as I joined I started looking for a new job - in the end I left and they lost more than I did, all for a dumb overbroad non-compete which they were unlikelly to be able to enforce anyway).
Strike-out the stuff you don't like and make sure BOTH copies are altered and the changes are signed before you sign the document.
Opposition to the opinions of the educated based solely on the ground that they are educated is anti-intellectualism.
In the UK, "experts" in "expert bodies" are there to whitewash decisions that have already been taken. The few real experts that actually act the role and do in fact evaluate and make recomendations on the subject matter are ignored, kicked-out of the comission or even villified in the media.
There are several cases of members of expert bodies that did in fact made recommendations that went against what the government wanted to hear (for example, againts canabis being classified in the same group as cocaine) which where first ignored, and were later villified and thrown out when they dared come out to the media with their concerns (in fact after the real expert came out against the current classification of canabis, the UK government actually paid for adds on TV and paraded the "right" "expert"-opinions around to convince people that canabis is a much worse substance than what it actually is).
Trust me, any "expert" in an "expert body" in the UK will be closelly vetted to toe the party line or be surrounded by a majority of other "experts" that put out the opinions they are told to put out.
So the GP is not criticizing the members of the "expert comission" for being expert, he/she is criticizing them because in the UK, the members of such a comission are likelly selected for having weak moral fibber and no spine rather than expertise.
The pattern of human behaviour around BitCoin just looks more and more like the same think that can be seen in any unregulated market.
Just look at all the stories coming into Slashdot which either outright say or imply that BitCoins have value and your should jump into the bandwagon (Even Criminals Want BitCoins!!!).
It all looks a lot like traders pumping up stock with posts in the appropriate forums and/or chain-mails (only BitCoins are aimed at geek-suckers).
BitCoin does not solve the hard problems with estabilishing an independent currency (creating a market on the currency with enough people that trust and use it without requiring a state-sized actor to back it all up using men-with-guns), instead it just solves the (comparativelly) easy bits of how to print a digital currency that cannot be falsified.
A nice tech demo it is, a social breakthrough it's not.
Are you talking about renting VPSs or are you actually doing things like using web-based applications (SaaS) or deploying your own applications in a Cloud environment (IaaS)?
Using VPSs is not really Cloud computing since you still get discrete machines (though of the virtual kind) for which you have root access and which you need to manage yourself.
I expect that for a small company, renting out a couple of virtual machines in a hosting company to run your server apps is a lot easier and cheaper that having your own "iron" in-house (and since they're VMs, you can easilly move to another hosting company if needed), though I'm curious about also replacing desktop applications (or whole application silos, like CRM) with web-based options.
Let me see if I got this right: business managers are changing to Cloud SaaS infrastructures because their own IT departments don't give them new features fast enough?
So they expect a 3rd party supplier will be faster???
The word "Cloud" doesn't make it all magical, with faeries and pony's all over the place and quick response to changing requirements: if you start using software from a 3rd party supplier, Cloud or no Cloud, you better be a big enough customer that they're willing give you more than just the time of the day that your support contract entitles you to.
If you're going to the Cloud for the fast infrastructure rollout bit, software will still need to be developed by your IT department and oh, by the way, your infrastucture bills just went up 2-fold, 'cause the cloud provider needs their profit (and now that you've spent $$$ in making software for their cloud, they have you by the balls), your network infrastructure just couldn't cope with 5x increase in traffic and you had to go to a higher level contract with your ISP since you now need a connection with five-nines availability, 'cause if it falls down all your employees will be twidling their thumbs.
I work in IT in banking as freelancer, used to work in IT companies in the past.
Of IT in banking I say the following:
There are 3 ways of doing things: - The right way - The wrong way - The banking way
It very much a self-contained universe (typically, in order to be extended an offer for a job or contract in IT in banking, you must have already had a job or contract in IT in banking) filled with people that have never had had any professional experience working in companies outside the financial sector, so it take AGES for IT best practices to be adopted in there.
For example, about a year ago Agile became fashionable to ask for in job adverts, but it's clear from many job adverts out there (and interviews I've had) that they're going for it because "everybody else is going for it" rather that with an understanding of "how can it help us".
Creation of BitCoins has now reached a level where the items being created for a given unit of time represent a small percentage of the total number of items in circulation: it is now essentially a trader's market.
Isn't that the same definition as a monetary system? That was kinda the point, wasn't it?
There is no natural limit to the amount of new money that can be created in a fiat currency and in fact new money is constantly being create as inflation eats away at the value of each unit of a given currency. For example, an inflation rate of 5% would mean that the amount of dollars would roughly double every 15 years.
There is no significant first mover advantage with fiat currencies because: - To get their hands on it people have to trade it for something. The first ones to use it could not create it out of thin air and neither can the last ones. - More currency is being created all the time, thus reducing the value of existing currency.
As for gold also suffering from the same problems as I listed in my original for BitCoins, this is in fact true (i.e. it was much easier to just find gold and mine it in the beginning than it is now), but...
The difference is in the timescales involved: gold was much easier to find and mine millenia ago. Any "first mover" advantage that our ancestors might have gained from mining all that easy to find gold and holding on to it through hundreds of generations was lost because they (or their direct descendants) traded that gold at the much lower price that was prevalent back then. BitCoins on the other hand became "hard to mine" in a few years, so the "first miners" only had to hold on to them for a couple of years in order to cash in on first mover advantage.
BitCoin seems to have a lot of the properties of a pyramid scheme, mainly:
- First adopters have an inherent advantage since they could create large amounts of BitCoins. - BitCoins have no inherent value. The only value they have is that which is attributed to them by those whose trade in them. - The more people that can be convinced to trade in BitCoins, the higher the pool of real money available to exchange for BitCoins. - Creation of BitCoins has now reached a level where the items being created for a given unit of time represent a small percentage of the total number of items in circulation: it is now essentially a trader's market.
My personal experience having started on a Private Pilot License course (of which I did 12 lessons before I gave up) and flown planes in sims is that real life piloting the kind of plane most people can afford (I flew a Cessna 152 - you can get one which is second hand, 30 years old for about $22k) is incredibly boring compared to flight sims.
To put things in perspective, in real life: - You can't fly below 1000 feet except during takeoff and landing. - You have to submit a flight plan when flying between two airfields and if you're going to be late taking off for more than 30 minutes you have to update that flight plan. - You have to pay attention to permanent restricted airspace (like around major airports), temporary restricted airspace (for example, when a member of the Royal Family - this being the UK - is flying though a certain area) and dangerous areas like nature reservations for water birds at some times of the year. - Even the cheapest, crapiest plane has to have huge amounts of maintenance (from the top of my head: one every 50h of flight, one every 100h of flight, a yearly one, an expensive - think $5k - engine refurbishment at about 1800h and a propeller refurbishment also at about 2000h) - The kind of planes that most individuals can afford to fly are SLOOOW (for example, the C-152's cruise speed is 90 knots). In fact, for the same amount of money you can get a car which is much faster and much cheaper to maintain.
Maybe my view on it is a bit tainted, since I received training from an airfield near a major city (London, UK) where essentially you're surrounded on all sides (and above) by reserved airspace (there's reserved airspace for 4 major airports and one minor plus all those Terminal Approach Areas - essentially blocks of reserved airspace above ground level - for the comercial flights to land and take off on those airports), which meant that flying was quite restricted (for example, you had to fly out at least 10 miles before you came to an area where the reserved airspace above you started above 3500 feet).
By comparisson, in a sim you can just jump into pretty much any plane and take off without any significant costs or paperwork and without needing obbey any rules while flying. That said, the resolution is lower on a sim.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking that "gamers" are just one market with one mind and one set of tastes show an incredible lack of business and consumer awareness.
Is somebody said "The recent explosion in take-away, fast-food outlets shows that restaurant-goers are not interested in sitting down and having a long meal in a pleasant environment. The likes of cheap takeaway sandwich sellers have changed the expectations of restaurant-goers. Since restaurant-goers are paying less money, there is less need to create nice-evening-meal-in-the-restaurant experiences because consumers no longer feel shortchanged" you would think them to be morons and yet that's what this "panel" said about games.
To put things bluntly:
- The production values of the cheap crap you can play on your own on your mobile when riding the subway to work have absolutely nothing to do with the expected production values for a game you play at home in the evening or during the weekend, on a dedicated game machine connected to a big screen, probably with friends, just like the quality of the food and service from the local sandwich vendor from where I pick-up my lunch when at work has absolutly nothing to do with the quality of the food and service I expect from a good restaurant where I go to in the evening or weekend with my friends, family or someone special.
They're different markets!
Simple and secure way to generate a password:
- Grab a sentence that you know well and use the first letter of each word for your password.
For extra safety, if there are numbers in that sentence (or words that sound similar to numbers, like "to" for "2" use the number rather than the first letter. If there are any punctuation marks, use upper case for the following letter.
For example:
2bon2bTitq
(To be or not to be? That is the question)
Blocking access to a specific site on demand from a specific interest group just opens up a huge can of worms. You do it for one interest group and next you know, everybody and their cat is demanding you do the same for them.
After all, if one group can demand it in order to defend their business model, then certainly other owners of IP can too. For example if somebody reposts a post of mine (of which I automatically own the copyright) in part or in whole, they're breaking my copyright - I think I need to request that access is blocked to every proxy in the planet from Finand.
Then there's the whole "morality" groups - how about, say, muslim groups demanding that access to sites of newspapers critical of Islam is blocked, pro-democracy groups demanding blocking of critical sites, anti-democracy groups demanding blocking of pro-democracy sites, misguided animal-rights groups demanding blocking of access to bonsai-cats and more.
After all, as the argument would go, those sites facilitate the spread of defamatory posts and even posts that incite hatred on religious or political grounds (yes, there are places were this is against the law and said law is vaguelly enough written that pretty much everything fits until it comes in front of a court and is proven).
Any and all freedom fighters that took the honorable option of facing off man-to-man against the guys with lots of high-tech powerful weapons are already dead.
The truth is that in assymetrical warfare, most methods used by freedom fighters are the same as those used by the terrorists. Add that to the widespread use of the label "terrorist" to tarnish the image of those with real grievances who are the visible face of oppressed populations and you end up with a situation where the word "terrorist" just Goodwins a discussion.
In the middle of the recent fallout from the discovery of the abuses that happened during the credit bubble years (banker bonuses, press abuses, police corruption, cozy relations between politicians and the press), the Royal Household seems to be one of the few institutions that's coming out as squeaky clean.
So with a bit of luck, actions by the Queen might have a little more impact in public opinion than they would during the "time-of-excesses".
So even though I'm neither a royalist nor a british citizen, I welcome and applaud anything that might portray to kids the notion that technology is cool - they've been too long enthralled by dreams of being footballers or TV celebrities.
I don't really know where you are in the world or what industry you're in, so I can't really comment.
Where I am (Software Development, Finance, London, UK) freelancers (aka contractors) make about 2x as permanent employees. From what I've heard from people I know, the ratio is more or less the same in IT inside companies in other business domains.
In Holland, IT Contractors made about 3x as permanent employees.
As far as I know, certainly in IT, in Europe freelancers are always paid better than permanent employees. This is probably because freelancers have almost no rights, while permies get things like paid sick-leave and vacation days. Also, the "premium" that freelancers get seems to be related to how hard it is to fire a permanent employee (hence it was higher in Holland than it is in England). Lastly, going freelancer seems to be a natural career evolution path for those of us who are experienced, above average techies who don't want to move into management, so while it's hard to find really experienced people who are permies and willing to move, it's a lot easier to find those as contractors.
Personally, after having gone through the fallout of the end of the Internet bubble (number 1, we seem to be heading for a Web 2.0 bubble) I realised that job security was an illusion anyway and you're better off ditching illusionary job-security in exchange for a faster rate of filling-up your war-chest of savings so as to be ready for the next time the brown mater hits the rotary impeller ...
Everyday, real life is boring, there's a lot of nitty gritty, low value things we have to do in order to get to the trully pleasurable bits of it.
Quick example: ...
- Have you noticed that movies don't show in real time the travel time of the characters? Hands up anybody that wants to see in real time the 15h plane trip our action movie heroes take to go from their base to whatever hellhole they're supposed to be blasting stuff up in
This is why most games do NOT include the "repetitivelly move stuff around" bits in them - because it's not fun. Would, say, any of the Mario Brother's games be any fun if you had to shovel dirt around for 1/2h in between getting each coin or fighting each baddie?
Let me explain this little thing I learned from working a couple of years in Portugal (neverending crunch time), then Holland (8h a day and your manager tells you to go home if you're still in at 5:30 pm) and then England (overwork as norm).
Your total daily productivity working on a norm of 8h/day is significantly better than working on a norm of 10h/day - to put it simply, if you pace yourself and work fewer hours you deliver more.
This is because:
- Working more than 8h/day causes chronical tiredness
- Chronically tired people in intellectual professions make many more mistakes (that also includes managers, who will take the wrong decisions).
- The cost of fixing those mistakes far outweights the gains of working those extra hours.
To put things in software development terms:
- If you constantly work longer hours you're constantly tired. If you're constantly tired you make more bugs. Bug fixing consumes a lot more time than doing things right the first time around (often by a factor or 1000x if the bug ends up in Production), so the increase in bugs means a HUGE increase in time spent in bug-fixing. More time wasted in bug fixing means that the project starts to run late, which means clueless managers demanding even more overwork. In other words, a feed-back loop.
So how did I solved it:
- Well, in England if somebody tries to get me to overwork is say "No" (I will, however, do a little extra in the last couple of days before a release if needed).
Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.
It says that it can change from Portrait view to Landscape view or the other way around either from information read from the accelerometers of by command from the user using a finger gesture on a touch screen display. Furthermore, the user command causes the view to be locked in the chosen mode until another user command unlocks it.
It is essentially a patent on the combination of the following already patented or widelly used features of:
- Show Landscape or Portrait mode depending on information from one or more sensors.
- A user command can be used to override automated behaviour.
- A user command can be used to remove an override to automated behaviour.
- A user command can be given by means of a finger gesture on a touch screen.
The actual combination of features is not novel in that most experts of the field when asked "how would you implement display adjustment when the screen of a mobile device with a touch screen and an accelerometer is tilted" would come up with this solution.
This wouldn't be accepted by eiher the UK's or the EU's pattent office, but did in the US, since your system is thoroughly broken.
Two things:
- On one side, the largest game publishers (hi EA) replaced free content updates released as part of game updates with paid-for DLC (and microtransactions).
Together with that came overbroad DRM with call-home-activation that doesn't work on the first week of a release and tightly controlled multiplayer that stops working as soon as the next game of the series is released.
- On the other side you have microtransactions being used as the "death by a 1000 cuts" - you can't really convince players to fork $200 upfront, but you can get them to spend that $1 at a time if you spread it long enough. Even worse in some cases, players pay a full game price up-front just to find out that they need to spend another $200 in DLC purchases just to be competitive in multiplayer (and for some of us, the whole fun of multiplayer IS the fighting in a level-field against equally skilled adversaries).
For those gamers that have been around long enough to have seen the prime time of gaming on the PC (when the 1st part of Quake including multiplayer was free, proper DEMOS were release for games and free game updates often had content updates), DLC and in-game purchases just look like a way of selling cripleware with hidden costs, monetising the (previously free) try before you buy period and sneakily turning the buy-to-own model into a buy-then-rent model.
Currently those living in most developed nations enjoy standards of living which are WAY above the average for the whole world.
"Sharing out" as you say helps to even things out and might increase the average for everybody. It does however have the side effect of decreasing the standard of living for those with better standards of living.
This is already on display after more than a decade of outsourcing:
- Standards of living in places like India and China have improved, but at the cost of stagnation or even reduction of standards of living for the poor and middle class in places like the US and the UK (which also happen to be those doing the most outsourcing).
Keep an eye out for income statistics that break the results down by income level and you'll notice that, even when AVERAGE real income went up, that was thanks to a huge jump in income for the top 1%, while income for the likes of low- and mid-middle class (mostly blue and white collar workers) went down in real terms.
I for one am not exactly keen on a lower standard of living for me and my descendants to help boost the standard of living of people I don't know. It especially riles me when some people sit in the middle of the flow that is the shift of wealth from middle class in developed nation's to that in developing nations, getting richer from the slice they capture of the difference between lower costs from moving jobs abroad and lower prices from cheaper imports (the first goes down faster than the second), essentially being parasites.
here
The US is conveniently located close to the UK.
Notice twice as many fatalities per 100000 vehicles in the US (15) than the UK (7).
It's a similary picture in most of Western Europe and there are plenty of roundabouts all over Europe.
Doesn't really prove anything, but it seems unlikelly that roundabouts significantly increase the number of traffic accidents. Even if they do, they certainly do not increase the number of deaths.
The Honeycomb tablets currently in the market are expensive, many even more expensive than an iPad and yet less polished.
Trying to break into a market against a well-established player, when your product is more expensive, has less marketing and is lower in quality isn't going to work
I myself have some really nice ideas for Honeycomb, tablet optimized apps but am holding off from developing them until the platform gets some traction.
It might very well be that Honeycomb is this beautiful, hard-working, honey-making bee of the mobile OS world, but if hardware makers persist in sticking it on top of turds and hopping it sells, Apple is going to dominate the tablet market for the next 20 years.
I've altered plenty of contracts before signing them in my time and only once was I told take it or leave it (I had to take it and as soon as I joined I started looking for a new job - in the end I left and they lost more than I did, all for a dumb overbroad non-compete which they were unlikelly to be able to enforce anyway).
Strike-out the stuff you don't like and make sure BOTH copies are altered and the changes are signed before you sign the document.
I, for one, welcome our new article reading Slashdot overlords.
In the UK, "experts" in "expert bodies" are there to whitewash decisions that have already been taken. The few real experts that actually act the role and do in fact evaluate and make recomendations on the subject matter are ignored, kicked-out of the comission or even villified in the media.
There are several cases of members of expert bodies that did in fact made recommendations that went against what the government wanted to hear (for example, againts canabis being classified in the same group as cocaine) which where first ignored, and were later villified and thrown out when they dared come out to the media with their concerns (in fact after the real expert came out against the current classification of canabis, the UK government actually paid for adds on TV and paraded the "right" "expert"-opinions around to convince people that canabis is a much worse substance than what it actually is).
Trust me, any "expert" in an "expert body" in the UK will be closelly vetted to toe the party line or be surrounded by a majority of other "experts" that put out the opinions they are told to put out.
So the GP is not criticizing the members of the "expert comission" for being expert, he/she is criticizing them because in the UK, the members of such a comission are likelly selected for having weak moral fibber and no spine rather than expertise.
The pattern of human behaviour around BitCoin just looks more and more like the same think that can be seen in any unregulated market.
Just look at all the stories coming into Slashdot which either outright say or imply that BitCoins have value and your should jump into the bandwagon (Even Criminals Want BitCoins!!!).
It all looks a lot like traders pumping up stock with posts in the appropriate forums and/or chain-mails (only BitCoins are aimed at geek-suckers).
BitCoin does not solve the hard problems with estabilishing an independent currency (creating a market on the currency with enough people that trust and use it without requiring a state-sized actor to back it all up using men-with-guns), instead it just solves the (comparativelly) easy bits of how to print a digital currency that cannot be falsified.
A nice tech demo it is, a social breakthrough it's not.
Are you talking about renting VPSs or are you actually doing things like using web-based applications (SaaS) or deploying your own applications in a Cloud environment (IaaS)?
Using VPSs is not really Cloud computing since you still get discrete machines (though of the virtual kind) for which you have root access and which you need to manage yourself.
I expect that for a small company, renting out a couple of virtual machines in a hosting company to run your server apps is a lot easier and cheaper that having your own "iron" in-house (and since they're VMs, you can easilly move to another hosting company if needed), though I'm curious about also replacing desktop applications (or whole application silos, like CRM) with web-based options.
Let me see if I got this right: business managers are changing to Cloud SaaS infrastructures because their own IT departments don't give them new features fast enough?
So they expect a 3rd party supplier will be faster???
The word "Cloud" doesn't make it all magical, with faeries and pony's all over the place and quick response to changing requirements: if you start using software from a 3rd party supplier, Cloud or no Cloud, you better be a big enough customer that they're willing give you more than just the time of the day that your support contract entitles you to.
If you're going to the Cloud for the fast infrastructure rollout bit, software will still need to be developed by your IT department and oh, by the way, your infrastucture bills just went up 2-fold, 'cause the cloud provider needs their profit (and now that you've spent $$$ in making software for their cloud, they have you by the balls), your network infrastructure just couldn't cope with 5x increase in traffic and you had to go to a higher level contract with your ISP since you now need a connection with five-nines availability, 'cause if it falls down all your employees will be twidling their thumbs.
Nah, they'll just lobby to get laws passed to ban hacking tools ...
I work in IT in banking as freelancer, used to work in IT companies in the past.
Of IT in banking I say the following:
There are 3 ways of doing things:
- The right way
- The wrong way
- The banking way
It very much a self-contained universe (typically, in order to be extended an offer for a job or contract in IT in banking, you must have already had a job or contract in IT in banking) filled with people that have never had had any professional experience working in companies outside the financial sector, so it take AGES for IT best practices to be adopted in there.
For example, about a year ago Agile became fashionable to ask for in job adverts, but it's clear from many job adverts out there (and interviews I've had) that they're going for it because "everybody else is going for it" rather that with an understanding of "how can it help us".
There is no natural limit to the amount of new money that can be created in a fiat currency and in fact new money is constantly being create as inflation eats away at the value of each unit of a given currency. For example, an inflation rate of 5% would mean that the amount of dollars would roughly double every 15 years.
There is no significant first mover advantage with fiat currencies because:
- To get their hands on it people have to trade it for something. The first ones to use it could not create it out of thin air and neither can the last ones.
- More currency is being created all the time, thus reducing the value of existing currency.
As for gold also suffering from the same problems as I listed in my original for BitCoins, this is in fact true (i.e. it was much easier to just find gold and mine it in the beginning than it is now), but ...
The difference is in the timescales involved: gold was much easier to find and mine millenia ago. Any "first mover" advantage that our ancestors might have gained from mining all that easy to find gold and holding on to it through hundreds of generations was lost because they (or their direct descendants) traded that gold at the much lower price that was prevalent back then. BitCoins on the other hand became "hard to mine" in a few years, so the "first miners" only had to hold on to them for a couple of years in order to cash in on first mover advantage.
BitCoin seems to have a lot of the properties of a pyramid scheme, mainly:
- First adopters have an inherent advantage since they could create large amounts of BitCoins.
- BitCoins have no inherent value. The only value they have is that which is attributed to them by those whose trade in them.
- The more people that can be convinced to trade in BitCoins, the higher the pool of real money available to exchange for BitCoins.
- Creation of BitCoins has now reached a level where the items being created for a given unit of time represent a small percentage of the total number of items in circulation: it is now essentially a trader's market.
My personal experience having started on a Private Pilot License course (of which I did 12 lessons before I gave up) and flown planes in sims is that real life piloting the kind of plane most people can afford (I flew a Cessna 152 - you can get one which is second hand, 30 years old for about $22k) is incredibly boring compared to flight sims.
To put things in perspective, in real life:
- You can't fly below 1000 feet except during takeoff and landing.
- You have to submit a flight plan when flying between two airfields and if you're going to be late taking off for more than 30 minutes you have to update that flight plan.
- You have to pay attention to permanent restricted airspace (like around major airports), temporary restricted airspace (for example, when a member of the Royal Family - this being the UK - is flying though a certain area) and dangerous areas like nature reservations for water birds at some times of the year.
- Even the cheapest, crapiest plane has to have huge amounts of maintenance (from the top of my head: one every 50h of flight, one every 100h of flight, a yearly one, an expensive - think $5k - engine refurbishment at about 1800h and a propeller refurbishment also at about 2000h)
- The kind of planes that most individuals can afford to fly are SLOOOW (for example, the C-152's cruise speed is 90 knots). In fact, for the same amount of money you can get a car which is much faster and much cheaper to maintain.
Maybe my view on it is a bit tainted, since I received training from an airfield near a major city (London, UK) where essentially you're surrounded on all sides (and above) by reserved airspace (there's reserved airspace for 4 major airports and one minor plus all those Terminal Approach Areas - essentially blocks of reserved airspace above ground level - for the comercial flights to land and take off on those airports), which meant that flying was quite restricted (for example, you had to fly out at least 10 miles before you came to an area where the reserved airspace above you started above 3500 feet).
By comparisson, in a sim you can just jump into pretty much any plane and take off without any significant costs or paperwork and without needing obbey any rules while flying.
That said, the resolution is lower on a sim.
37? Awkward?
Nah!
It's a prime age my friend.