it doesn't cost a publisher $BIGNUM to just *produce* the book
That doesn't matter at all.
The fact of the matter is that the actual box in the store only costs a few dollars to make. There's no reason not to make tons of them and overstock, then pay the publisher/developer the high price when it sells. The only difference between that and the way it works now is that you would waste a couple of dollars for every extra copy you made that didn't sell, but even then you could probably re-use packaging like DVD cases, etc...
In the bookstore world, a return could often consist of just the cover, and the bookstore throws the rest of the book away. The value is in the software to the user after the sale, not in the physical copy, so there's no reason to have a limited supply of physical copies.
Re:No, I meant fitness for a particular purpose...
on
GameStop buys EB
·
· Score: 1
Every game store does this, and it is to prevent piracy.
It's bullshit, and it's illegal.
Also, for new games, EB doesn't give you $5, they give you 75% of the purchase price.
Do you know how much it would cost, and how much room it would take, if GS/EB stocked EVERY shitty little game?
Ever been to a book store? Wal-Mart sells books. Why aren't they putting Borders out of business?
Here's the thing with the game publishing industry. They don't take returns. That's broken. Bookstores stock thousands of titles dating back *literally* hundreds of years. They can do it because publishers know that it really only costs a few dollars to print the book, and they take returns. That makes the book store willing to take on the risk of stocking titles they may never sell.
If the game publishing industry worked like this, sure they may make a little less profit, but a store like EB could stock tons of a high profile title right after release, and then scale back their stock when demand slows so they could keep one or two of a large number of titles on hand. Remember, these games don't actually cost $40.25, they cost more like $1.50 up until the point where a customer actually licenses the software in the box.
Right now, stores like EB are actually a large enough force in the market to ask for things like this, but once it's all Wal-Mart all the time, there won't be a games retailer out there to push for fixing the business model. You won't be able to buy older games at all, anywhere. Fun, huh?
No, I meant fitness for a particular purpose...
on
GameStop buys EB
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Ivan256, the original poster, used this one incident to imply that Electronics Boutique has a corporate directive to break the law.
Many states disallow waiver of the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. When a game shop sells, for example, a PC game with system requirements listed on the side of the box, it's implied that the software contained in that box is fit to run on the specified hardware. In the past EB would accept returns of games. If you bought a game that was buggy and crashed frequently you could simply return the game to the store.
I live in Massachusetts. It's one of the states that disallows the waiver of implied warranties. Under EB's new return policy, you can't return software that has been open unless you're exchanging it for another copy of the same title. If the game doesn't work, then that policy is against the law.
What makes this worse is that they falsely claim that this policy exists to prevent piracy. If this were the case, they wouldn't let you sell the game back to them for trade-in credit... The policy change, illegally, in order to prop up their high margin used games business.
It used to be that Funcoland and EB were both great. Then GameStop bought Funcoland and turned it to shit, and EB dropped their customer friendly return policy. Even more recently both stores have adopted a hostile policy of pushing pre-orders. Perhaps together they can propel the customer service level to lows previously unobtainable in a gaming store.
Somebody should remind these companies that they are value-added retailers. If they don't go out of their way to please every customer, then there's no reason not to buy your games at Wal-Mart. That means they shoud stock enough games and drop the pre-order shit, and they should have a return policy that doesn't violate the laws of most states.
Not from the sound of it: the article says that users would still have to be convinced "to open a malicious document with an unpatched application.
While running openoffice as root...
Not to mention that you don't need openoffice for this at all. If you can convince somebody to open a rogue document, you probably can convince them to run some application or script. Either way... Not root? Not a problem.
Man, I'm glad you told me that. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why a library required on GTK+ wouldn't compile on my redhat box. I now know I was dreaming!
You were trying to solve the wrong problem. You need to upgrade to either a modern distribution or a good distribution. Then your solution becomes 'apt-get install whatevercrappyGTKapp-you-were-trying-to-run,' and the dependency stuff is figured out for you.
Seriously though, I'll wade through that shit. You think an 8 year old would? Or even know where to look?
An eight year old (provided he had been taught to read at an early age) would have figured out that there was an easy way instead of wasting the better part of a day trying to do something the hard way.
Of course the eight year old would have been really screwed if it was a windows machine. They wouldn't have cash to purchase the software with in the first place.
Nintendo and Sega after two... it was always the newcomer who took the crown.
How do you figure?
Remember that the SNES and the Genesis were in the same console generation. You'd be hard pressed to say that either company "won" that round, and Sega was hardly a newcomer at this point. You can't call Microsoft a newcomer anymore either.
If you jump out of a dark space into a light area you're going to be blinded. It's going to be really bright until your eyes adjust. It can be used the other way around, too.
It seems to me that in real life, it's not the ambient light where your are that causes your eyes to react, but how bright what you're looking at is. Why should it make any difference that you've moved from/to a dark/well-lit area if you're still looking at the same object that is still illuminated the same way?
By being platform dependant, BitMover won't have to worry too much about losing their customer base.
I think that's a bit short-sighted. I don't have their customer list, but I'll bet that the vast majority of bitkeeper customers are using it in a linux development environment. Companies don't like using multiple version control tools. My experience in the past with companies I've worked for or contracted with was that they either made everything use bitkeeper because it's what the kernel used, or they put the kernel into their own standard repository with their tool of choice. Now that Linux won't be using bitkeeper anymore, the only reason people would have to use bitkeeper is that it's better than the alternatives... except that it isn't. Sure it may have been the best of the free ones out there, but the world of proprietary source control software is vast, and there are lots of high quality, feature rich alternatives out there that blow bitkeeper away. If you're going to pay for source control software, and you're not tied to bitkeeper by the linux kernel, why would you choose it over the alternatives?
But giving out the free version *wasn't* hurting the bottom line. Starting to charge for the free version isn't going to get the people who were using it to start paying, instead it's likely to get them to find some other tool. It's not like source control packages aren't a dime a dozen...
In the past developers were exposed to bitkeeper through work on the Linux kernel. Then there was the possibility that through that exposure they would recommend BitKeeper for the proprietary projects they build on top of linux. This model seemed to work well due to the 'open comments' rule. (Anybody using the free version had their commit comments posted for all to see on the bitkeeper website).
Now there is no high profile exposure for bitkeeper. They're about to lose the best free advertizing they ever had. In two years nobody will be using bitkeeper at all.
The costs of the road should be subsidized via some kind of toll-based system (which could be a fuel-based tax, but if alternate fuels sprung up you'd have to keep adjusting the tax rates to account for market share/efficiency). The costs of providing gas should be imposed in a fuel tax on gas alone.
I have no issue with your arguments on the costs. Yes, they exist. What I have issue with is your argument that things like tolls and gas taxes will somehow limit these costs to the users of the roads and of gasoline and diesel fuels.
This is clearly not the case. People who don't drive at all would be free from paying these costs directly, even though they reap the benefits created by the use of oil for transportation. Our use of oil for transportation benefits every single person in our society, and the costs of that use should be distributed across all who benefit. The costs of transportation will be passed on to individual consumers regardless of who collects the tax.
A hydrogen-based car where hydrogen was produced by solar or coal power [...] Even if the cost of this fuel were an extra $500 per year per car
You have no clue how outrageously expensive solar power is compared to using fossil fuels, do you? And when I ask that, keep in mind that I'm taking all the 'hidden' costs that you listed above into account. Once you got past all those costs, you'd still have the issue of where to put all the collectors. We will never live in a solar powered society. The cost in life of buring coal compared to the cost in life of fighting our most recent war would be an interesting comparison too. I bet the numbers would be pretty close.
Why is it when people go off on a rant about the costs of oil use on our society, and start proposing alternatives, they never mention fission?
However, this neglects the fact that gasoline has hidden costs - such as wars in the middle east. Right now those are paid for out of income taxes for the most part, or via debt.
It seems from this comment that when you say 'wars in the middle east', you only mean wars fought by the west, or perhaps even only the US war in Iraq. Most wars in the middle east have been paid for with the lives of the local residents, and not US taxpayer dollars. While this is terrible, it's not clear that these people are worse off than they would have been if their desert countries had no valuable natural resource, or if that resource were something other than oil.
The only way anybody could make that argument work is to focus on a narrow set of statistics and ignore the big economic picture.
The "costs on society" that I have to assume you're talking about since you didn't specify, can't all be put on the shoulders of drivers. It's not just the drivers of vehicles on the roads that are recieving the benefits of the conveyance.
When you go to the store and buy, well, *anything*, how do you think it got there? That's just for starters. Use your imagination. Think of all the ways employees who commute, service employees, or consumables that are shipped fit into your everyday life.
What would be a greater cost to society? The environmental and maintnence costs of our roads and traffic, or the costs of *not* having well maintained roads and the traffic that travels on them? It doesn't matter if the costs are "subsidized" by other taxes or not. If you live in modern society, even if you never drive, you will be paying these costs, because you reap the benefits of fossil fuel powered road transportation, and the people paying for the gas/diesel fuel will gladly pass the costs on to you.
How about just that they just don't have any software ready yet that they feel shows off the hardware in a way they like?
Is there a reason that anything one of these companies says has to be a lie? Perhaps they're telling the truth. They don't want to put pressure on developers to get something that looks good out the door in time for this demo.
I'm failing to understand what the issue with "pressuring game publishers" is.
Perhaps they don't want to pressure developers into rushing something to be ready to demo at this pre-E3 showing. It's all well and good for them to have hardware ready to show, but they need software to demo as well, otherwise you just have a box.
Because retail shops typically charge more than double the price of a monitor bought online or mail-order. When that means you're spending $550 on a 20.1" monitor instead of $1200, it makes it worth dealing with shipping a few bad panels back.
I went into EB about two weeks before the PSP release to buy Xenosaga Ep. 2, and the cashier was harassing me to pre-order. When I responded with my typical "I don't pre-order *anything*" comment, he went on and on about how I'd never be able to get one for months after they came out if I didn't pre-order right then...
The WalMart in Hudson MA has a full case of PSPs and there's a big sign on the window: "Due to extreme demand, PSP sales are limited to one per customer."
The guy I talked to said they've only sold 10-12 so far, out of their initial shipment.
They bundles a ~$180 piece of equipment with a crappy carying case and a tiny memory stick and added $70 to the price. There's at least 30 of them in the case at the local WalMart here, but most people I know are waiting for the non "Value" Pack version to come out.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but that doesn't make sense.
it doesn't cost a publisher $BIGNUM to just *produce* the book
That doesn't matter at all.
The fact of the matter is that the actual box in the store only costs a few dollars to make. There's no reason not to make tons of them and overstock, then pay the publisher/developer the high price when it sells. The only difference between that and the way it works now is that you would waste a couple of dollars for every extra copy you made that didn't sell, but even then you could probably re-use packaging like DVD cases, etc...
In the bookstore world, a return could often consist of just the cover, and the bookstore throws the rest of the book away. The value is in the software to the user after the sale, not in the physical copy, so there's no reason to have a limited supply of physical copies.
Every game store does this, and it is to prevent piracy.
It's bullshit, and it's illegal.
Also, for new games, EB doesn't give you $5, they give you 75% of the purchase price.
You can't even spell. Seriously.
It was a typo. Get over it.
Do you know how much it would cost, and how much room it would take, if GS/EB stocked EVERY shitty little game?
Ever been to a book store? Wal-Mart sells books. Why aren't they putting Borders out of business?
Here's the thing with the game publishing industry. They don't take returns. That's broken. Bookstores stock thousands of titles dating back *literally* hundreds of years. They can do it because publishers know that it really only costs a few dollars to print the book, and they take returns. That makes the book store willing to take on the risk of stocking titles they may never sell.
If the game publishing industry worked like this, sure they may make a little less profit, but a store like EB could stock tons of a high profile title right after release, and then scale back their stock when demand slows so they could keep one or two of a large number of titles on hand. Remember, these games don't actually cost $40.25, they cost more like $1.50 up until the point where a customer actually licenses the software in the box.
Right now, stores like EB are actually a large enough force in the market to ask for things like this, but once it's all Wal-Mart all the time, there won't be a games retailer out there to push for fixing the business model. You won't be able to buy older games at all, anywhere. Fun, huh?
Ivan256, the original poster, used this one incident to imply that Electronics Boutique has a corporate directive to break the law.
Many states disallow waiver of the implied warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. When a game shop sells, for example, a PC game with system requirements listed on the side of the box, it's implied that the software contained in that box is fit to run on the specified hardware. In the past EB would accept returns of games. If you bought a game that was buggy and crashed frequently you could simply return the game to the store.
I live in Massachusetts. It's one of the states that disallows the waiver of implied warranties. Under EB's new return policy, you can't return software that has been open unless you're exchanging it for another copy of the same title. If the game doesn't work, then that policy is against the law.
What makes this worse is that they falsely claim that this policy exists to prevent piracy. If this were the case, they wouldn't let you sell the game back to them for trade-in credit... The policy change, illegally, in order to prop up their high margin used games business.
It used to be that Funcoland and EB were both great. Then GameStop bought Funcoland and turned it to shit, and EB dropped their customer friendly return policy. Even more recently both stores have adopted a hostile policy of pushing pre-orders. Perhaps together they can propel the customer service level to lows previously unobtainable in a gaming store.
Somebody should remind these companies that they are value-added retailers. If they don't go out of their way to please every customer, then there's no reason not to buy your games at Wal-Mart. That means they shoud stock enough games and drop the pre-order shit, and they should have a return policy that doesn't violate the laws of most states.
The Bush goverment could start pushing people to conserve energy but I think they would rather let the high oil prices do that for them.
You should check your facts instead of making assumptions about what the Bush administration thinks.
Go read the transcript of the president's radio address from this weekend . Be sure to take note of what he says the first step should be....
Not from the sound of it: the article says that users would still have to be convinced "to open a malicious document with an unpatched application.
While running openoffice as root...
Not to mention that you don't need openoffice for this at all. If you can convince somebody to open a rogue document, you probably can convince them to run some application or script. Either way... Not root? Not a problem.
There's no reason you can't install both versions of a library on Linux.
If you're using Debian, and you use packages from the Debian repository, you never have the problem you describe.
Man, I'm glad you told me that. I spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out why a library required on GTK+ wouldn't compile on my redhat box. I now know I was dreaming!
You were trying to solve the wrong problem. You need to upgrade to either a modern distribution or a good distribution. Then your solution becomes 'apt-get install whatevercrappyGTKapp-you-were-trying-to-run,' and the dependency stuff is figured out for you.
Seriously though, I'll wade through that shit. You think an 8 year old would? Or even know where to look?
An eight year old (provided he had been taught to read at an early age) would have figured out that there was an easy way instead of wasting the better part of a day trying to do something the hard way.
Of course the eight year old would have been really screwed if it was a windows machine. They wouldn't have cash to purchase the software with in the first place.
Nintendo and Sega after two... it was always the newcomer who took the crown.
How do you figure?
Remember that the SNES and the Genesis were in the same console generation. You'd be hard pressed to say that either company "won" that round, and Sega was hardly a newcomer at this point. You can't call Microsoft a newcomer anymore either.
If you jump out of a dark space into a light area you're going to be blinded. It's going to be really bright until your eyes adjust. It can be used the other way around, too.
It seems to me that in real life, it's not the ambient light where your are that causes your eyes to react, but how bright what you're looking at is. Why should it make any difference that you've moved from/to a dark/well-lit area if you're still looking at the same object that is still illuminated the same way?
There's lots of crap, but there's good stuff out there too. Good stuff that is better and more mature than Bitkeeper.
I guess one good thing is that it was built by Microsoft, so it won't work correctly until v3.0.
You better hope that means it doesn't find anything, rather than it incorrectly finding you.
By being platform dependant, BitMover won't have to worry too much about losing their customer base.
I think that's a bit short-sighted. I don't have their customer list, but I'll bet that the vast majority of bitkeeper customers are using it in a linux development environment. Companies don't like using multiple version control tools. My experience in the past with companies I've worked for or contracted with was that they either made everything use bitkeeper because it's what the kernel used, or they put the kernel into their own standard repository with their tool of choice. Now that Linux won't be using bitkeeper anymore, the only reason people would have to use bitkeeper is that it's better than the alternatives... except that it isn't. Sure it may have been the best of the free ones out there, but the world of proprietary source control software is vast, and there are lots of high quality, feature rich alternatives out there that blow bitkeeper away. If you're going to pay for source control software, and you're not tied to bitkeeper by the linux kernel, why would you choose it over the alternatives?
They're screwed.
But giving out the free version *wasn't* hurting the bottom line. Starting to charge for the free version isn't going to get the people who were using it to start paying, instead it's likely to get them to find some other tool. It's not like source control packages aren't a dime a dozen...
In the past developers were exposed to bitkeeper through work on the Linux kernel. Then there was the possibility that through that exposure they would recommend BitKeeper for the proprietary projects they build on top of linux. This model seemed to work well due to the 'open comments' rule. (Anybody using the free version had their commit comments posted for all to see on the bitkeeper website).
Now there is no high profile exposure for bitkeeper. They're about to lose the best free advertizing they ever had. In two years nobody will be using bitkeeper at all.
The costs of the road should be subsidized via some kind of toll-based system (which could be a fuel-based tax, but if alternate fuels sprung up you'd have to keep adjusting the tax rates to account for market share/efficiency). The costs of providing gas should be imposed in a fuel tax on gas alone.
I have no issue with your arguments on the costs. Yes, they exist. What I have issue with is your argument that things like tolls and gas taxes will somehow limit these costs to the users of the roads and of gasoline and diesel fuels.
This is clearly not the case. People who don't drive at all would be free from paying these costs directly, even though they reap the benefits created by the use of oil for transportation. Our use of oil for transportation benefits every single person in our society, and the costs of that use should be distributed across all who benefit. The costs of transportation will be passed on to individual consumers regardless of who collects the tax.
A hydrogen-based car where hydrogen was produced by solar or coal power [...] Even if the cost of this fuel were an extra $500 per year per car
You have no clue how outrageously expensive solar power is compared to using fossil fuels, do you? And when I ask that, keep in mind that I'm taking all the 'hidden' costs that you listed above into account. Once you got past all those costs, you'd still have the issue of where to put all the collectors. We will never live in a solar powered society. The cost in life of buring coal compared to the cost in life of fighting our most recent war would be an interesting comparison too. I bet the numbers would be pretty close.
Why is it when people go off on a rant about the costs of oil use on our society, and start proposing alternatives, they never mention fission?
However, this neglects the fact that gasoline has hidden costs - such as wars in the middle east. Right now those are paid for out of income taxes for the most part, or via debt.
It seems from this comment that when you say 'wars in the middle east', you only mean wars fought by the west, or perhaps even only the US war in Iraq. Most wars in the middle east have been paid for with the lives of the local residents, and not US taxpayer dollars. While this is terrible, it's not clear that these people are worse off than they would have been if their desert countries had no valuable natural resource, or if that resource were something other than oil.
Excuse me, but...
Bullshit.
The only way anybody could make that argument work is to focus on a narrow set of statistics and ignore the big economic picture.
The "costs on society" that I have to assume you're talking about since you didn't specify, can't all be put on the shoulders of drivers. It's not just the drivers of vehicles on the roads that are recieving the benefits of the conveyance.
When you go to the store and buy, well, *anything*, how do you think it got there? That's just for starters. Use your imagination. Think of all the ways employees who commute, service employees, or consumables that are shipped fit into your everyday life.
What would be a greater cost to society? The environmental and maintnence costs of our roads and traffic, or the costs of *not* having well maintained roads and the traffic that travels on them? It doesn't matter if the costs are "subsidized" by other taxes or not. If you live in modern society, even if you never drive, you will be paying these costs, because you reap the benefits of fossil fuel powered road transportation, and the people paying for the gas/diesel fuel will gladly pass the costs on to you.
I think it's more like a subliminal order:
"Shop at ThinkGeek fools!"
How about just that they just don't have any software ready yet that they feel shows off the hardware in a way they like?
Is there a reason that anything one of these companies says has to be a lie? Perhaps they're telling the truth. They don't want to put pressure on developers to get something that looks good out the door in time for this demo.
I'm failing to understand what the issue with "pressuring game publishers" is.
Perhaps they don't want to pressure developers into rushing something to be ready to demo at this pre-E3 showing. It's all well and good for them to have hardware ready to show, but they need software to demo as well, otherwise you just have a box.
Because retail shops typically charge more than double the price of a monitor bought online or mail-order. When that means you're spending $550 on a 20.1" monitor instead of $1200, it makes it worth dealing with shipping a few bad panels back.
I went into EB about two weeks before the PSP release to buy Xenosaga Ep. 2, and the cashier was harassing me to pre-order. When I responded with my typical "I don't pre-order *anything*" comment, he went on and on about how I'd never be able to get one for months after they came out if I didn't pre-order right then...
I've since been back to the store to taunt him.
The WalMart in Hudson MA has a full case of PSPs and there's a big sign on the window: "Due to extreme demand, PSP sales are limited to one per customer."
The guy I talked to said they've only sold 10-12 so far, out of their initial shipment.
They bundles a ~$180 piece of equipment with a crappy carying case and a tiny memory stick and added $70 to the price. There's at least 30 of them in the case at the local WalMart here, but most people I know are waiting for the non "Value" Pack version to come out.
The test patterns really only work well on LCDs with digital interfaces.