The US and European figures seem out of line. For example the MMO spend in the USA is 14x the total UK spend even though the population of the USA is only 5x that of the UK. Similar ratios apply for France and Germany. As a Euro gamer who often gets stuck paying €1 for $1 I am surprised the total US revenues are so much bigger.
Also the expenditure on virtual currency is very high (around 20% of revenues on average). Does this include "black market" gold bought from gold farmers? Given the fact that most big name games don't support legal gold selling it would seem likely.
Perhaps these questions are answered in the full report but the €4,950 price tag is beyond my budget.
Warnce I am not looking for 15Gb/s today, there are no services that need it but in ten years time we are sure to have many more high bandwidth services available. Perhaps we will all be watching high definition holograms. The ac may have been joking about 3D porn but they have a point.
Ten years ago I was surfing the internet at 56kbps. Today I can get a 30Mbs connection for around the same price I was paying for my metered 56kBs a decade ago. That represents more than a 500 fold increase over a decade. To think that the next ten years will only provide a mere 3 fold increase is somewhat depressing.
I learned something about "Group intelligence" from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire in which contestants are given three lifelines to help them answer difficult questions.
The weakest lifeline by far is to appeal to the wisdom of the crowd and ask the audience. This only works for the simplest question.
Phone a friend works better IF you know the right friend.
However the most powerful lifeline. The one smart players keep till last is 50:50 - randomly removing two wrong answers.
So if open source debugging is equivalent to "Ask the Audience" then closed source debugging by the specialised team of developers is "Phone a Friend". Now all we have to do is figure out what is the debugging equivalent of 50:50 and all our problems are solved.
Ok I know I may just be feeding the troll but I am going to have a go at this.
I live in a small pro-western European nation that is pretty middle of the road in terms of politics and liberal/conservative agendas. While I entirely respect the Australian peoples right to choose their own laws it never the less worries me when I see the Australian government do something that I don't want my own government to do.
The problem is that Australia is seen as "one of us" an English speaking westernised liberal democracy. If a policy is successfully implemented in Australia it gains a certain credibility that the same policy implemented in North Korea or Iran or even China would lack. Those of a certain frame of mind in my own country could point to Australia and push for similar legislation here.
This is not true - if you extract energy from the local field then you are going to reduce the local field intensity. This is certainly going to screw up the reception of people around you. Its a bit like putting a solar panel in front of your neighbor's window. You may not be putting any extra load on the sun but you are certainly putting your neighbour in the dark.
I vote snake oil in any case because even though it is feasible to extract energy from an electromagnetic field the energy densities involved are going to be miniscule unless you are sitting right on top of the transmitter (inverse square law as mentioned above). If you do put this device right on top of the transmitter and suck energy out of the signal there then you will kill the signal for everybody else.
I went to see it with my very reluctant wife and she loved it. Thinking about it later I realised that Avatar isn't Science Fiction it is a Fairy Story. Personally I thought it was great.
The New York Times article merely says that these games are not suitable for children and if you read the list they aren't. The NYT does not make nor even imply any judgement about the quality of the games in question.
its really newspapers versus the internet and the newspapers are going to lose. If all of the newspapers together blocked google tomorrow I suspect that the majority of people using google wouldn't notice. The problem for newspapers is that they neither create nor own the news which is their major product. They are merely a distribution channel for that news. While they have served us well for many years as a good and professional distribution channel there are now so many other ways to get that same news that they are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Their only remaining market power is the fact that they offer a higher quality distribution channel than random internet posters but In the battle between quality versus convenience, convenience wins. If newspapers remove their offerings from the internet's largest search engine they make their services much harder to use and pretty much destroy whatever little market power they have remaining.
Anyone who has ever done manual handling course will know that you aren't supposed to use you back to lift things. You should squat with your back straight and use the leg muscles to do the work. This machine may reduce the load on the back but the picture clearly show the guy bending over in what would normally be considered an "unsafe lifting" position.
Thanks for posting those links Klaymen. Don't they appear to confirm that there is a fall in the number of active Wikipedians from 89410 in Oct 2007 to 86951 in Oct 2008? That confirms the original article surely. It is a 3% fall in the number of active editors after six years of continuous growth.
How did the parent get modded up to five for such a rude, lazy comment?
The line rodrigoandrade objects to is entirely incidental to the review and strictly speaking incorrect because the original article doesn't actually say that Civ is an RTS.
I note that they do not appear to have included human children in the list of animals evaluated. Perhaps in a follow on study they could determine if eating our own offspring would be beneficial to the environment.
On a more serious note I feel that the summary has drawn some very dodgy conclusions from what could otherwise have be a very useful piece of research. The analysis of the resources consumed by pets is an important lesson and a reminder to us all to try and include Fido and Tiddles in our thinking about sustainable living. The fact that herbivorous pets have a much lower eco footprint than carnivores is perhaps obvious but nevertheless worth reminding people about. However banning cats and dogs is unlikely to ever be acceptable and the suggestion that we only keep pets for the dinner table is laughable.
Then again if they hadn't come up with the headline about eating man's best friend I wouldn't be reading about it on/. would I?
Unrelated question: How do folks who do not have a PhD in computer science get line breaks into their slash dot posts?
That is a sobering post and your story is consistent with other things I have read about Free to Play Games.
However I think there is a distinction to be made between micro-transactions where you pay to "get ahead" and micro-transactions where you pay for additional content.
Micro-transactions where you pay to get ahead (faster XP potions or Item shop weapons and gear for example) are fraught with moral hazard. In order to maximise revenues the developer has to sucker you in to make you want to get ahead but to make the free method of getting there as tedious as possible. In essence you are paying to avoid having to play parts of the game!!!
Microtransactions where you pay for additional content seem less problematic to me. That's a more traditional type of business transaction - if you want to play in that that extra dungeon you pay for it. If you don't want to play in it then you don't.
I haven't played DDO online but I do note they are offering both types of micro transaction: Adventure packs which offer additional content (good imho) and also the usual gamut of faster XP scrolls and bonuses (bad imho).
Slashdot Mirror
The US and European figures seem out of line. For example the MMO spend in the USA is 14x the total UK spend even though the population of the USA is only 5x that of the UK. Similar ratios apply for France and Germany. As a Euro gamer who often gets stuck paying €1 for $1 I am surprised the total US revenues are so much bigger.
Also the expenditure on virtual currency is very high (around 20% of revenues on average). Does this include "black market" gold bought from gold farmers? Given the fact that most big name games don't support legal gold selling it would seem likely.
Perhaps these questions are answered in the full report but the €4,950 price tag is beyond my budget.
Warnce I am not looking for 15Gb/s today, there are no services that need it but in ten years time we are sure to have many more high bandwidth services available. Perhaps we will all be watching high definition holograms. The ac may have been joking about 3D porn but they have a point.
Ten years ago I was surfing the internet at 56kbps. Today I can get a 30Mbs connection for around the same price I was paying for my metered 56kBs a decade ago. That represents more than a 500 fold increase over a decade. To think that the next ten years will only provide a mere 3 fold increase is somewhat depressing.
I learned something about "Group intelligence" from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire in which contestants are given three lifelines to help them answer difficult questions.
The weakest lifeline by far is to appeal to the wisdom of the crowd and ask the audience. This only works for the simplest question.
Phone a friend works better IF you know the right friend.
However the most powerful lifeline. The one smart players keep till last is 50:50 - randomly removing two wrong answers.
So if open source debugging is equivalent to "Ask the Audience" then closed source debugging by the specialised team of developers is "Phone a Friend". Now all we have to do is figure out what is the debugging equivalent of 50:50 and all our problems are solved.
Ok I know I may just be feeding the troll but I am going to have a go at this.
I live in a small pro-western European nation that is pretty middle of the road in terms of politics and liberal/conservative agendas. While I entirely respect the Australian peoples right to choose their own laws it never the less worries me when I see the Australian government do something that I don't want my own government to do.
The problem is that Australia is seen as "one of us" an English speaking westernised liberal democracy. If a policy is successfully implemented in Australia it gains a certain credibility that the same policy implemented in North Korea or Iran or even China would lack. Those of a certain frame of mind in my own country could point to Australia and push for similar legislation here.
This is not true - if you extract energy from the local field then you are going to reduce the local field intensity. This is certainly going to screw up the reception of people around you. Its a bit like putting a solar panel in front of your neighbor's window. You may not be putting any extra load on the sun but you are certainly putting your neighbour in the dark. I vote snake oil in any case because even though it is feasible to extract energy from an electromagnetic field the energy densities involved are going to be miniscule unless you are sitting right on top of the transmitter (inverse square law as mentioned above). If you do put this device right on top of the transmitter and suck energy out of the signal there then you will kill the signal for everybody else.
I went to see it with my very reluctant wife and she loved it. Thinking about it later I realised that Avatar isn't Science Fiction it is a Fairy Story. Personally I thought it was great.
The New York Times article merely says that these games are not suitable for children and if you read the list they aren't. The NYT does not make nor even imply any judgement about the quality of the games in question.
its really newspapers versus the internet and the newspapers are going to lose. If all of the newspapers together blocked google tomorrow I suspect that the majority of people using google wouldn't notice. The problem for newspapers is that they neither create nor own the news which is their major product. They are merely a distribution channel for that news. While they have served us well for many years as a good and professional distribution channel there are now so many other ways to get that same news that they are in danger of becoming irrelevant. Their only remaining market power is the fact that they offer a higher quality distribution channel than random internet posters but In the battle between quality versus convenience, convenience wins. If newspapers remove their offerings from the internet's largest search engine they make their services much harder to use and pretty much destroy whatever little market power they have remaining.
Anyone who has ever done manual handling course will know that you aren't supposed to use you back to lift things. You should squat with your back straight and use the leg muscles to do the work. This machine may reduce the load on the back but the picture clearly show the guy bending over in what would normally be considered an "unsafe lifting" position.
Thanks for posting those links Klaymen. Don't they appear to confirm that there is a fall in the number of active Wikipedians from 89410 in Oct 2007 to 86951 in Oct 2008? That confirms the original article surely. It is a 3% fall in the number of active editors after six years of continuous growth.
How did the parent get modded up to five for such a rude, lazy comment? The line rodrigoandrade objects to is entirely incidental to the review and strictly speaking incorrect because the original article doesn't actually say that Civ is an RTS.
I note that they do not appear to have included human children in the list of animals evaluated. Perhaps in a follow on study they could determine if eating our own offspring would be beneficial to the environment. On a more serious note I feel that the summary has drawn some very dodgy conclusions from what could otherwise have be a very useful piece of research. The analysis of the resources consumed by pets is an important lesson and a reminder to us all to try and include Fido and Tiddles in our thinking about sustainable living. The fact that herbivorous pets have a much lower eco footprint than carnivores is perhaps obvious but nevertheless worth reminding people about. However banning cats and dogs is unlikely to ever be acceptable and the suggestion that we only keep pets for the dinner table is laughable. Then again if they hadn't come up with the headline about eating man's best friend I wouldn't be reading about it on /. would I?
Unrelated question: How do folks who do not have a PhD in computer science get line breaks into their slash dot posts?
That is a sobering post and your story is consistent with other things I have read about Free to Play Games. However I think there is a distinction to be made between micro-transactions where you pay to "get ahead" and micro-transactions where you pay for additional content. Micro-transactions where you pay to get ahead (faster XP potions or Item shop weapons and gear for example) are fraught with moral hazard. In order to maximise revenues the developer has to sucker you in to make you want to get ahead but to make the free method of getting there as tedious as possible. In essence you are paying to avoid having to play parts of the game!!! Microtransactions where you pay for additional content seem less problematic to me. That's a more traditional type of business transaction - if you want to play in that that extra dungeon you pay for it. If you don't want to play in it then you don't. I haven't played DDO online but I do note they are offering both types of micro transaction: Adventure packs which offer additional content (good imho) and also the usual gamut of faster XP scrolls and bonuses (bad imho).