They need to more fully embrace Steam's strategy.
on
Amazon's eBook Math
·
· Score: 1
Retail the books at whatever price the publisher wants, but then arrange with publishers to do amazing sales. If they manage to advertise the sales to likely consumers based on product purchasing history (Nico buys fantasy novels at a disproportionate rate to others, advertise this fantasy novel to him) they stand to make a lot of money. For instance yesterday I had been watching some comic con panels that featured some of my favorite authors. One of the other authors (Patrick Rothfuss) on the panel was an author I had been interested in and meaning to read for some time. Yesterday I went to buy the book and to my pleasant surprise it was marked down to only four bucks. I bought it instantly. However if that had happened and it had been advertised to me at any point in the last six months, I would have bought the book on the spot at that point. If they can find a way to make such happy accidents happen regularly, everybody wins.
He was with Epic when it was making isometric shareware games. He was a big part of the reason Epic became one of the most influential AAA development houses on the planet, and that grew out of a startup. So he has already been there, he knows the path, and he has helped create some of the best and most influential games in the history of gaming.
I'd say he has a damned good chance at making it again considering his premier game with the startup is a multi-player shooter. UT 2004 is still a hell of a lot more fun than most of the multiplayer shooters out there these days. The reason UT III failed miserably is because the company released it broken, didn't patch it up to snuff quickly, and generally failed to support the game because they believed the PC was a much worse market than console.
Cliff is coming back to the PC, with a free-to-play shooter, which if he does right, will be a massive success on the scale of games like League of Legends. The reason PC was believed to be inferior by lots of developers was that people pirate games. But they can't pirate your game if it's free right? The game will be supported, and likely regularly release new content because he's not dumb enough to let it die. This might be the shooter people have been waiting for for 10 years. Not some shitty Console port, but an honest to god PC monster. I can't wait.
Hackers gonna hack right? This guy obviously had the necessary skillset to hack "critical infrastructure" before the game released. I mean unless they want us to believe that anybody inspired by a video game can learn how to hack such things in the span of a little over a month, this guy already had the skillset. So are they implying that the game provided the motivation? Last time I checked, hackers didn't need video games to provide them with motivation. Likely the guy is a fan of Watchdogs both because it is a fun game, and because he is intelligent enough to tie his activities to a popular video game in order to boost his notoriety.
Of course a small percentage of fans of the game will experiment with such things. But chances are, these were already people that were likely to do such things. What we can look forward to now is the media going on and on about every single hack like this and trying to tie it to the game. Just waiting for one of these media dinosaurs to come along and talk about how the game is basically hacking practice.
All of the examples they gave in the article break one of the fundamental rules in that XKCD strip. The words shouldn't be words that are easily associated with each other. Of course picking a quote straight out of fiction is stupid. Four random 4-6 letter words that don't appear together in common language usage would be harder to crack for people using the strategy in the article http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
Push this "controversy" as far as they can without actually getting themselves kicked out of the program because they only come off looking really good and cool and the government agency looks like its splitting hairs and being a baby. Of course Tesla is proud of how safe they've made their cars, and they want people to know how safe their cars are, and now people will know that they scored so high they got in trouble for saying how high they scored.
This didn't result in the loss of human life. Who knows what might have happened? The plug could have come undone. My father manages the (clean) water for a property and even a small plug left unfastened can leak insane amounts of water in a short period of time.
Guess I should have read the article more closely. Originally, the phrasing and headline (sigh, sensationalization anybody?) made it seem like it was intentional. Seems like it wasn't which means my previous comment was made out of ignorance. Sorry, I will try to be better at this.
The problem is the goddamn double standard. Spray a few ounces of spray paint on a wall, and you get criminal charges pressed against you. Hell there was a guy arrested for writing in chalk outside Bank of America, on the sidewalks... wash away chalk. But dump 50k gallons of polluted water into the wild and it's all NBD.
The situation of Valve is unique. The culture there, from everything I have read on the company, is one comprised of highly skilled, motivated individuals committed to conceiving and developing incredibly high quality products. The hiring process for the company is unique, most of their hires come from people in the company noticing something of quality that the person has accomplished. Their artists, designers etc. are hired almost exclusively based on previous accomplishments. They find people that have already demonstrated their passion and self motivation. Not every company is capable of fostering that kind of environment. The companies that tend to have something close to Valve's extreme case are other creative companies. So, could other game studios do the same thing? Yes. Could Ford accomplish this? Nope.
Are not utilities. Electricity, gas, water, and sewage are all fundamentally integral to society. The bottom line is that your life is not threatened if you decide you can't use facebook or google because you don't like the way they handle your information. There are also plenty of competing services available to you. Stop whining for the government to make companies do what you want. Vote with your money. If you don't like facebook's service, don't use it, same for google, or any other service.
I can guarantee that the banks will have made billions more money from defrauding honest people than they will pay out in "fines". But is the term fines really applicable? When you commit a crime on a global scale, that a regular person would get 20 or more years in prison for, and you get off with paying a fine that doesn't even amount to the profit from your fraud. Isn't that really more like bribery?
Did you read the rest of my post? Competition is happening. Competitors are cropping up all over the place, one of which is one of the most powerful companies in technology.
Competition will solve this problem. It may take a little while but Google's beta test of their ISP service seems to be going well and has the telcos running scared (even reportedly going door to door in KC checking on customer satisfaction). Google is making a move here and I can't believe they intend to come to some sort of gentlemen's agreement with the telcos considering one of the motivations for Google entering the market was to thwart extortion attempts by the major ISPs where they were attempting to force Google to pay them a fee in order for them to deliver Google's content at the higher speeds, when we already pay them for the service of delivering Google's content to us. This move by Google smacks of the style of the old industrialists, like Rockefeller building oil pipelines to circumvent back door deals made by the railroads to charge him more money for shipping oil. This industry is still young, but if Google proves it can be profitable to lay new fiber and thereby dispels the idea that we have to use the existing infrastructure of the telcos, we will see even more new players enter the market. Already many cities are partnering with local companies and universities to offer residents high quality local ISPs for less money. I think it's too early in this industry to jump on the whole "we need the government to fix this for us" train... in the end I can't see that being a great answer anyway... especially when you consider that all conventional utilities have to do is provide consistent power/water supply to their customers, and there is a lower quality of service ceiling than in the ISP game.
We've already lost manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, that ship has sailed. Couldn't it therefor be argued that a move to robot based manufacturing would benefit the U.S. in the long run? If the majority of manufacturing jobs are in Asia, then the move to a robot based manufacturing workforce would bring manufacturing back to the U.S. We would be able to produce higher quality goods, at a higher rate, for a lower cost, and wouldn't have to spend any money getting them across the pacific ocean. If we couple this with changes to the education system, to train more innovators, inventors, artists, thinkers, scientists, doctors, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and mathematicians, instead of using our education system to train the majority of people to perform menial tasks such as those required by the industrial revolution of the early 1900s, we might be able to increase the rate of the advancement of the human race exponentially.
This is a laugh, it's not really possible for even boiling water to cause third degree burns in under five seconds. I've seen two third degree burns in my ten years of working in food service. Both were caused by accidents involving 350 degree plus deep friar oil. I've seen many people get second degree burns from scalding and boiling water but not third. Third degree burns require all three layers of skin to have been completely killed and nerve endings fried to be classified in that way. Coffee is generally served at a temperature of 160-175 degrees for full flavor, for the temperature to have been sixty degrees higher than that, it would have had to have been hotter than boiling point. Also the claim in the lawsuit that water this hot can cause third degree burns in under two seconds seems inaccurate to me as today I splashed myself with boiling water this morning and have not incurred third degree burns or anything like them.
Slashdot Mirror
Retail the books at whatever price the publisher wants, but then arrange with publishers to do amazing sales. If they manage to advertise the sales to likely consumers based on product purchasing history (Nico buys fantasy novels at a disproportionate rate to others, advertise this fantasy novel to him) they stand to make a lot of money. For instance yesterday I had been watching some comic con panels that featured some of my favorite authors. One of the other authors (Patrick Rothfuss) on the panel was an author I had been interested in and meaning to read for some time. Yesterday I went to buy the book and to my pleasant surprise it was marked down to only four bucks. I bought it instantly. However if that had happened and it had been advertised to me at any point in the last six months, I would have bought the book on the spot at that point. If they can find a way to make such happy accidents happen regularly, everybody wins.
He was with Epic when it was making isometric shareware games. He was a big part of the reason Epic became one of the most influential AAA development houses on the planet, and that grew out of a startup. So he has already been there, he knows the path, and he has helped create some of the best and most influential games in the history of gaming. I'd say he has a damned good chance at making it again considering his premier game with the startup is a multi-player shooter. UT 2004 is still a hell of a lot more fun than most of the multiplayer shooters out there these days. The reason UT III failed miserably is because the company released it broken, didn't patch it up to snuff quickly, and generally failed to support the game because they believed the PC was a much worse market than console. Cliff is coming back to the PC, with a free-to-play shooter, which if he does right, will be a massive success on the scale of games like League of Legends. The reason PC was believed to be inferior by lots of developers was that people pirate games. But they can't pirate your game if it's free right? The game will be supported, and likely regularly release new content because he's not dumb enough to let it die. This might be the shooter people have been waiting for for 10 years. Not some shitty Console port, but an honest to god PC monster. I can't wait.
It's the thing that makes the magic box go!
Politicians saying one thing and doing another? I am totally surprised about this!
Hackers gonna hack right? This guy obviously had the necessary skillset to hack "critical infrastructure" before the game released. I mean unless they want us to believe that anybody inspired by a video game can learn how to hack such things in the span of a little over a month, this guy already had the skillset. So are they implying that the game provided the motivation? Last time I checked, hackers didn't need video games to provide them with motivation. Likely the guy is a fan of Watchdogs both because it is a fun game, and because he is intelligent enough to tie his activities to a popular video game in order to boost his notoriety. Of course a small percentage of fans of the game will experiment with such things. But chances are, these were already people that were likely to do such things. What we can look forward to now is the media going on and on about every single hack like this and trying to tie it to the game. Just waiting for one of these media dinosaurs to come along and talk about how the game is basically hacking practice.
It's a boarding school yeah? So my statement doesn't imply that the search for porn need to take place within actual school hours.
Never underestimate the determination of an adolescent boy in search of porn.
Just one more thing internet trolls and politicians have in common.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
All of the examples they gave in the article break one of the fundamental rules in that XKCD strip. The words shouldn't be words that are easily associated with each other. Of course picking a quote straight out of fiction is stupid. Four random 4-6 letter words that don't appear together in common language usage would be harder to crack for people using the strategy in the article http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/
Push this "controversy" as far as they can without actually getting themselves kicked out of the program because they only come off looking really good and cool and the government agency looks like its splitting hairs and being a baby. Of course Tesla is proud of how safe they've made their cars, and they want people to know how safe their cars are, and now people will know that they scored so high they got in trouble for saying how high they scored.
This didn't result in the loss of human life. Who knows what might have happened? The plug could have come undone. My father manages the (clean) water for a property and even a small plug left unfastened can leak insane amounts of water in a short period of time.
Guess I should have read the article more closely. Originally, the phrasing and headline (sigh, sensationalization anybody?) made it seem like it was intentional. Seems like it wasn't which means my previous comment was made out of ignorance. Sorry, I will try to be better at this.
The problem is the goddamn double standard. Spray a few ounces of spray paint on a wall, and you get criminal charges pressed against you. Hell there was a guy arrested for writing in chalk outside Bank of America, on the sidewalks... wash away chalk. But dump 50k gallons of polluted water into the wild and it's all NBD.
That poor woman. I hope she doesn't blame herself. These people are snakes.
The situation of Valve is unique. The culture there, from everything I have read on the company, is one comprised of highly skilled, motivated individuals committed to conceiving and developing incredibly high quality products. The hiring process for the company is unique, most of their hires come from people in the company noticing something of quality that the person has accomplished. Their artists, designers etc. are hired almost exclusively based on previous accomplishments. They find people that have already demonstrated their passion and self motivation. Not every company is capable of fostering that kind of environment. The companies that tend to have something close to Valve's extreme case are other creative companies. So, could other game studios do the same thing? Yes. Could Ford accomplish this? Nope.
Are not utilities. Electricity, gas, water, and sewage are all fundamentally integral to society. The bottom line is that your life is not threatened if you decide you can't use facebook or google because you don't like the way they handle your information. There are also plenty of competing services available to you. Stop whining for the government to make companies do what you want. Vote with your money. If you don't like facebook's service, don't use it, same for google, or any other service.
I can guarantee that the banks will have made billions more money from defrauding honest people than they will pay out in "fines". But is the term fines really applicable? When you commit a crime on a global scale, that a regular person would get 20 or more years in prison for, and you get off with paying a fine that doesn't even amount to the profit from your fraud. Isn't that really more like bribery?
Not troves.
Did you read the rest of my post? Competition is happening. Competitors are cropping up all over the place, one of which is one of the most powerful companies in technology.
Competition will solve this problem. It may take a little while but Google's beta test of their ISP service seems to be going well and has the telcos running scared (even reportedly going door to door in KC checking on customer satisfaction). Google is making a move here and I can't believe they intend to come to some sort of gentlemen's agreement with the telcos considering one of the motivations for Google entering the market was to thwart extortion attempts by the major ISPs where they were attempting to force Google to pay them a fee in order for them to deliver Google's content at the higher speeds, when we already pay them for the service of delivering Google's content to us. This move by Google smacks of the style of the old industrialists, like Rockefeller building oil pipelines to circumvent back door deals made by the railroads to charge him more money for shipping oil. This industry is still young, but if Google proves it can be profitable to lay new fiber and thereby dispels the idea that we have to use the existing infrastructure of the telcos, we will see even more new players enter the market. Already many cities are partnering with local companies and universities to offer residents high quality local ISPs for less money. I think it's too early in this industry to jump on the whole "we need the government to fix this for us" train... in the end I can't see that being a great answer anyway... especially when you consider that all conventional utilities have to do is provide consistent power/water supply to their customers, and there is a lower quality of service ceiling than in the ISP game.
Whatever method the robot does use, I bet the Chinese government blames it on poor coding.
We've already lost manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, that ship has sailed. Couldn't it therefor be argued that a move to robot based manufacturing would benefit the U.S. in the long run? If the majority of manufacturing jobs are in Asia, then the move to a robot based manufacturing workforce would bring manufacturing back to the U.S. We would be able to produce higher quality goods, at a higher rate, for a lower cost, and wouldn't have to spend any money getting them across the pacific ocean. If we couple this with changes to the education system, to train more innovators, inventors, artists, thinkers, scientists, doctors, engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and mathematicians, instead of using our education system to train the majority of people to perform menial tasks such as those required by the industrial revolution of the early 1900s, we might be able to increase the rate of the advancement of the human race exponentially.
This is a laugh, it's not really possible for even boiling water to cause third degree burns in under five seconds. I've seen two third degree burns in my ten years of working in food service. Both were caused by accidents involving 350 degree plus deep friar oil. I've seen many people get second degree burns from scalding and boiling water but not third. Third degree burns require all three layers of skin to have been completely killed and nerve endings fried to be classified in that way. Coffee is generally served at a temperature of 160-175 degrees for full flavor, for the temperature to have been sixty degrees higher than that, it would have had to have been hotter than boiling point. Also the claim in the lawsuit that water this hot can cause third degree burns in under two seconds seems inaccurate to me as today I splashed myself with boiling water this morning and have not incurred third degree burns or anything like them.
This is exactly like cake. I've been saying it for years. Everybody who eats cake dies. Cake must be stopped before everybody dies.