I think I know what your point is, but I'm confused by the line of my comment you've quoted. Are you referring to the beleaguered V-22 which we would have done well to cancel when Dick Cheney wanted to back in the '80s?
That's a good example of something we should have cut our losses on much earlier (before we started?), but somehow I don't think it's the kind of project that the original poster would be in favor of.
He had to plan well in advance when he could sell this stock. He has a regular stock sale plan. It's illegal for him to change his purchase plan because he has inside knowledge of a product release.
But it's not really making any new arguments; it's just the classic objection to libertarianism that there are commons that are best maintained communally because of the free riders. In many ways, the non-infrastructure elements of the budget (like the military) are a much better demonstration of that argument.
The trouble with this whole discussion is that that the debate between philosophies is always between the fundamentalist positions. In reality most people are pretty reasonable. Most libertarians would agree that it makes perfect sense to maintain some public infrastructure and most liberals (and I use that term hesitantly, since it has self contradictory meanings) don't favor socialism. Most people recognize that a balance is appropriate and merely disagree on where to draw the line.
The value of public infrastructure could be, in fact it is considerable, yet the numbers in the original post are still ludicrous. Worse, generally people who spew such figures use it as an argument in favor of more "investment in infrastructure" regardless of type; as if all future spending will generate the same level of value no matter what the project, or worse, that any spending will generate that value even if it's not on what could be considered infrastructure, strictly speaking. Really, our infrastructure is so valuable because we were deliberate and conflicted about most of the money that was spent, and didn't go creating public projects on a whim. Far more infrastructure investments by the US government have been denied than have been approved.
Palm doesn't own PalmOS, so they have to choose things they have control over for their development. They appear to be replacing PalmOS with Windows Mobile and Linux anyway.
What good is stock as compensation if you can't ever sell it and spend the cash?
I think this device is pretty cool. You would have a hard time paying me enough to carry a laptop around, but a lightweight device with really long battery life, low price, and wireless? That's a different story. I bet these are expensive though...
The only well documented instance of Pay On Scan outside of the periodical content or publishing issues I can find reference to is auto parts, and even then only a very small number of vendors.
Unlike the book industry, the games and software industries have been reluctant, defiant even, in adopting Pay On Scan. I don't see why Microsoft would be willing to do for Zune what they are unwiling to do for Xbox, Xbox games, and Windows.
Re:Best Buy, Comp USA, Wal-Mart?
on
A Million Zunes Sold
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
NPD data isn't Microsoft data, and unless every user registers their product Microsoft doesn't know how many were "sold" to end users. They don't much care either. They don't sell Zunes to end users. They sell them to distributors and retailers. If they collected money for a million units, they've sold a million units. If every WalMart, Target, and BestBuy still has 4 on the shelf, Microsoft still "sold" a million units, even though only half of that is in the wild. This article doesn't mention NPD data at all.
Not that it matters anyway. Saying you've sold a million at this point is admitting defeat. Apple sold that many players last week. A million in almost a year is horrible and complete failure.
The mental image that goes along with that is a Halo avatar tea-bagging a PS3.... Which reminds me why I hope you're wrong.
If Microsoft doesn't get their quality issues straightened out, you'll be *very* wrong. You're probably wrong anyway, because this generations numbers already look really different when you compare ((units shipped) - (units in retail stock) - (units broken)) instead of the usual (units shipped). Also because the 360 has failed in Japan, where a huge percentage of games come from; thus destroying your vicious cycle theory.
Well that's nice. Can you add additional tuners (I have two and will probably add a third)? What about adding storage (real expansion, as in adding drives to an LVM or something similar, not just replacing the stock drive)? Can it do RAID, so you don't lose the content you've collected? Can you play back downloaded content? What about music you've ripped from your CDs? I'm sure I could go on.
Yes, with multi-room viewing, adding additional tuners is as easy as adding an additional Tivo. Though two is enough for 98% of everybody. Yes, you can add storage without losing your recordings. The mechanism isn't LVM, but it is possible. The newer boxes have an eSata port that is supposed to be available in a near-future release that will make adding storage, and hot-swapping storage, even easier. If Tivo doesn't officially support hanging a DVD or BluRay burner off the eSata port I'm sure unofficial support will be trvial. Yes you can play back downloaded content. The API is open, so you can even serve the content off a linux box (or anything that runs java). Yes you can play back ripped music.
I'm sure you could go on. Shall you?
I do miss MythDVD, and maybe I'll run a Myth box in parallel to my Tivo to get that functionality back at some point (Though I may not run MythDVD. The interface is awful and it doesn't preserve menus.)
Good luck with modding the satellite box to have firewire out. I looked into that in an attempt to keep going with MythTV, but the solutions were all really expensive, and either required a windows box to run proprietary decryption software, or were reviewed as horribly unreliable. If you have any luck, let me know; I'd love to hear about it.
Sure, Tivos have controls in place to stop you from modifying the OS, but they've always been easily defeated, and Tivo has never really done anything to stop it... Helped in some cases even. Tivo has *always* been friendly to people who want to expand their systems. You can even add DVD burners to the SD ones. The required drivers even "happen to be" on the hard drive already. I bet they did that by accident...
Sure, they're a commercial device, so they have to jump through the hoops required not to get sued out of business. But in exchange for putting up with a few annoyances that Tivo as a company clearly would rather spare their customers of, you get things like HD support, maintenance, and subsidized, low noise, low profile hardware.
I had a series 1, and a DirecTV series 2 for years, then I switched to MythTV when DirecTV dropped Tivo support. It was a complete headache to keep running well. I don't know anybody with a MythTV setup that isn't constantly fiddling with it. The UI between plugins is inconsistent and slow (on a 3Ghz machine even). Additionally, the hardware to get a good multi-tuner rig going was expensive. More than "buying" (they give you a free series 2 with a one year signup) a Series 2 Tivo and paying the fee for 3 years, and the box was still bigger, louder, and uglier. When I got my HDTV and the Myth box couldn't support it, it pushed me back over the edge to Tivo. And yes, I modded and upgraded the unit before I even hooked it up the first time.
Firewire ports *are* a requirement.... But displaying encrypted video out them isn't. If you get a box with a Firewire port, you're probably only going to get OTA content out of it.
If they were actually willing to fire these guys, I'd bet money that this was actually because they weren't drawing a large enough audience to justify their salaries, and they were looking for an excuse. If they were going to make an example for the FCC, and they were bringing in listeners, they simply would have suspended them or disciplined them in some other way.
Opie and Anthony are still doing the same bits they used to do way back in the day on WAAF in Boston over 10 years ago. It was mildly amusing back then, and it's just old now. I wouldn't be surprised if their fanbase was dwindling now that it costs money to listen to them.
(which I assume are the best ones in order to get mentioned)
You assume incorrectly. They are they ones that are most recognizable. Pirates, and Harry Potter, Madden, etc... The games on the list were mentioned for name recognition, not in reference to the relative quality compared to the others.
Thinking I of all people am a Democrat proves you to be an idiot. You have nothing to base that on. I have integrity, so speak out against criminals. That is your sole basis for that judgement.
You're a moron.
I didn't make any statement regarding your political affiliation. Go re-read my comment and apply some reading comprehension. Clearly "you're" in that context is in reference to the people making the accusations (in this case congressional Democrats). Unless you're a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives, I wasn't talking about you.
Having the integrity to admit that you were wrong (even after it's a simple matter of fact) takes some courage. Persisting on spouting ignorant lies in spite of every fact being against you in order to avoid admitting that you were wrong is cowardly.
Come back when you learn to debate civilly and have learned some history. Swearing, and declaring that we should do things differently than we;ve done in our government for many decades because it's convenient for your party now makes you look like an idiot.
And when you find a dictionary you should look up "cowardly". I don't think it means what you think it means.
Because when what he thinks they should be doing is going after "the other party" it makes a pathetic joke out of our entire system of justice.
Do you have any questions that a bright 5 year old couldn't answer?
"What" he wants them to do is an entirely different story. What I said was that it's a political position and they can and should be fired for political reasons. If the other party is breaking the law then he has every right to tell them to go after the other party; as long as he doesn't tell them to look the other way when his own party breaks the law.
Can you post a response without resorting to juvenile rhetorical questions? I'm very glad for you that you've realized a 5 year old can parrot what they heard some US representative say on CNN. When you grow up from being 5, you usually learn to think for yourself instead of cleverly restating other people's opinions.
what's worse, that they might have been motivated by the attorneys not breaking the law to help certain republicans.
That's different than firing them because they're not loyal to their boss.
If the president can't fire them because they're not doing what he thinks they should be doing, why bother having them be presidential appointees. The whole point is that they're political appointees. If you think that politicizing the attorney's office is a bad thing you're basically just missing the point. These are prosecutors, not judges.
I bet the included the hundreds of copies still on the shelves in thousands of retail outlets and the thousands of copies in hundreds of mail-order company warehouses.
Bush, however, not only did not do that, he waited until two years into his second term to fire eight attorneys which he had previously appointed!
So he made a mistake, and changed course to fix the problem.... Exactly what Bush opponents accuse him of never doing, and you're bitching about that too?
This isn't in the American news because only the elite of the Bush-haters actually care about the story, and it's something to put on TV on slow news days. I can't wait until the day that this political charade comes back to bite a Democratic president in the ass. This partisan bullshit is exhausting.
Yes, the firings were for political reasons, and you should be OK with that.
The lying and the cover-up are another story. Those are despicable, and Gonzales should be fired (non of this "resigning" shit).
They don't want to open the can of worms. They have no intention of opening that can of worms.
This is the best FUD against Linux ever. They had SCO playing dirty up until now, so they didn't have to bother, but with SCO completely discredited, they just want to get this out there to keep that fear in the back of CIOs' minds when it comes time to replace aging proprietary UNIX servers. Microsoft wants the datacenter, and they want it bad. It's going to be Windows or Linux, and the tide will turn any quarter now...
They don't need to sue, they don't need to win, and they certainly wouldn't get enough money out of a suit to justify it. All they need is to make big businesses worried about choosing Linux.
Judging from job offers I've had in the past (and turned down), "breaking in" straight into development is also grueling and low-pay at a large percentage of studios. Salaries are low because there are people, excellent people, who are so desperate to work in games that the studios don't have to pay much to attract talent.
Getting in to the game industry is the same as getting into any other industry with that one additional catch. Just like every other industry, you can get in easy if you know your stuff well, and network. The additional hurdle is that you have to be willing to work for well, well below the average salary for somebody with the required skills. Most good game developers can earn 2-3x in salary with less hours in other industries.
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I think I know what your point is, but I'm confused by the line of my comment you've quoted. Are you referring to the beleaguered V-22 which we would have done well to cancel when Dick Cheney wanted to back in the '80s?
That's a good example of something we should have cut our losses on much earlier (before we started?), but somehow I don't think it's the kind of project that the original poster would be in favor of.
He had to plan well in advance when he could sell this stock. He has a regular stock sale plan. It's illegal for him to change his purchase plan because he has inside knowledge of a product release.
Plus, the stock went up 2.6% on the announcement.
The trouble with this whole discussion is that that the debate between philosophies is always between the fundamentalist positions. In reality most people are pretty reasonable. Most libertarians would agree that it makes perfect sense to maintain some public infrastructure and most liberals (and I use that term hesitantly, since it has self contradictory meanings) don't favor socialism. Most people recognize that a balance is appropriate and merely disagree on where to draw the line.
The value of public infrastructure could be, in fact it is considerable, yet the numbers in the original post are still ludicrous. Worse, generally people who spew such figures use it as an argument in favor of more "investment in infrastructure" regardless of type; as if all future spending will generate the same level of value no matter what the project, or worse, that any spending will generate that value even if it's not on what could be considered infrastructure, strictly speaking. Really, our infrastructure is so valuable because we were deliberate and conflicted about most of the money that was spent, and didn't go creating public projects on a whim. Far more infrastructure investments by the US government have been denied than have been approved.
Palm doesn't own PalmOS, so they have to choose things they have control over for their development. They appear to be replacing PalmOS with Windows Mobile and Linux anyway.
What good is stock as compensation if you can't ever sell it and spend the cash?
I think this device is pretty cool. You would have a hard time paying me enough to carry a laptop around, but a lightweight device with really long battery life, low price, and wireless? That's a different story. I bet these are expensive though...
8% of the revenue isn't 8% market share. Zunes are not average to below-average priced. Like the iPod, they're priced at a premium.
Also, NPD doesn't take Apple's direct sales into account. At all.
Pay On Scan is rare for tangible goods.
The only well documented instance of Pay On Scan outside of the periodical content or publishing issues I can find reference to is auto parts, and even then only a very small number of vendors.
Unlike the book industry, the games and software industries have been reluctant, defiant even, in adopting Pay On Scan. I don't see why Microsoft would be willing to do for Zune what they are unwiling to do for Xbox, Xbox games, and Windows.
NPD data isn't Microsoft data, and unless every user registers their product Microsoft doesn't know how many were "sold" to end users. They don't much care either. They don't sell Zunes to end users. They sell them to distributors and retailers. If they collected money for a million units, they've sold a million units. If every WalMart, Target, and BestBuy still has 4 on the shelf, Microsoft still "sold" a million units, even though only half of that is in the wild. This article doesn't mention NPD data at all.
Not that it matters anyway. Saying you've sold a million at this point is admitting defeat. Apple sold that many players last week. A million in almost a year is horrible and complete failure.
The mental image that goes along with that is a Halo avatar tea-bagging a PS3.... Which reminds me why I hope you're wrong.
If Microsoft doesn't get their quality issues straightened out, you'll be *very* wrong. You're probably wrong anyway, because this generations numbers already look really different when you compare ((units shipped) - (units in retail stock) - (units broken)) instead of the usual (units shipped). Also because the 360 has failed in Japan, where a huge percentage of games come from; thus destroying your vicious cycle theory.
Yes, with multi-room viewing, adding additional tuners is as easy as adding an additional Tivo. Though two is enough for 98% of everybody. Yes, you can add storage without losing your recordings. The mechanism isn't LVM, but it is possible. The newer boxes have an eSata port that is supposed to be available in a near-future release that will make adding storage, and hot-swapping storage, even easier. If Tivo doesn't officially support hanging a DVD or BluRay burner off the eSata port I'm sure unofficial support will be trvial. Yes you can play back downloaded content. The API is open, so you can even serve the content off a linux box (or anything that runs java). Yes you can play back ripped music.
I'm sure you could go on. Shall you?
I do miss MythDVD, and maybe I'll run a Myth box in parallel to my Tivo to get that functionality back at some point (Though I may not run MythDVD. The interface is awful and it doesn't preserve menus.)
Good luck with modding the satellite box to have firewire out. I looked into that in an attempt to keep going with MythTV, but the solutions were all really expensive, and either required a windows box to run proprietary decryption software, or were reviewed as horribly unreliable. If you have any luck, let me know; I'd love to hear about it.
Which device would that be?
Sure, Tivos have controls in place to stop you from modifying the OS, but they've always been easily defeated, and Tivo has never really done anything to stop it... Helped in some cases even. Tivo has *always* been friendly to people who want to expand their systems. You can even add DVD burners to the SD ones. The required drivers even "happen to be" on the hard drive already. I bet they did that by accident...
Sure, they're a commercial device, so they have to jump through the hoops required not to get sued out of business. But in exchange for putting up with a few annoyances that Tivo as a company clearly would rather spare their customers of, you get things like HD support, maintenance, and subsidized, low noise, low profile hardware.
I had a series 1, and a DirecTV series 2 for years, then I switched to MythTV when DirecTV dropped Tivo support. It was a complete headache to keep running well. I don't know anybody with a MythTV setup that isn't constantly fiddling with it. The UI between plugins is inconsistent and slow (on a 3Ghz machine even). Additionally, the hardware to get a good multi-tuner rig going was expensive. More than "buying" (they give you a free series 2 with a one year signup) a Series 2 Tivo and paying the fee for 3 years, and the box was still bigger, louder, and uglier. When I got my HDTV and the Myth box couldn't support it, it pushed me back over the edge to Tivo. And yes, I modded and upgraded the unit before I even hooked it up the first time.
Without HD Cable content.
Firewire ports *are* a requirement.... But displaying encrypted video out them isn't. If you get a box with a Firewire port, you're probably only going to get OTA content out of it.
If they were actually willing to fire these guys, I'd bet money that this was actually because they weren't drawing a large enough audience to justify their salaries, and they were looking for an excuse. If they were going to make an example for the FCC, and they were bringing in listeners, they simply would have suspended them or disciplined them in some other way.
Opie and Anthony are still doing the same bits they used to do way back in the day on WAAF in Boston over 10 years ago. It was mildly amusing back then, and it's just old now. I wouldn't be surprised if their fanbase was dwindling now that it costs money to listen to them.
You assume incorrectly. They are they ones that are most recognizable. Pirates, and Harry Potter, Madden, etc... The games on the list were mentioned for name recognition, not in reference to the relative quality compared to the others.
Welcome to the games section.
You're a moron.
I didn't make any statement regarding your political affiliation. Go re-read my comment and apply some reading comprehension. Clearly "you're" in that context is in reference to the people making the accusations (in this case congressional Democrats). Unless you're a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives, I wasn't talking about you.
I'm overwhelmed by the irony.
Wow, just wow.
Come back when you learn to debate civilly and have learned some history. Swearing, and declaring that we should do things differently than we;ve done in our government for many decades because it's convenient for your party now makes you look like an idiot.
And when you find a dictionary you should look up "cowardly". I don't think it means what you think it means.
"What" he wants them to do is an entirely different story. What I said was that it's a political position and they can and should be fired for political reasons. If the other party is breaking the law then he has every right to tell them to go after the other party; as long as he doesn't tell them to look the other way when his own party breaks the law.
Can you post a response without resorting to juvenile rhetorical questions? I'm very glad for you that you've realized a 5 year old can parrot what they heard some US representative say on CNN. When you grow up from being 5, you usually learn to think for yourself instead of cleverly restating other people's opinions.
That's different than firing them because they're not loyal to their boss.
If the president can't fire them because they're not doing what he thinks they should be doing, why bother having them be presidential appointees. The whole point is that they're political appointees. If you think that politicizing the attorney's office is a bad thing you're basically just missing the point. These are prosecutors, not judges.
I bet the included the hundreds of copies still on the shelves in thousands of retail outlets and the thousands of copies in hundreds of mail-order company warehouses.
So he made a mistake, and changed course to fix the problem.... Exactly what Bush opponents accuse him of never doing, and you're bitching about that too?
This isn't in the American news because only the elite of the Bush-haters actually care about the story, and it's something to put on TV on slow news days. I can't wait until the day that this political charade comes back to bite a Democratic president in the ass. This partisan bullshit is exhausting.
Yes, the firings were for political reasons, and you should be OK with that.
The lying and the cover-up are another story. Those are despicable, and Gonzales should be fired (non of this "resigning" shit).
Something tells me that you have either heat, vibration, or power issues.
Either that or you're incredibly unlucky.
They don't want to open the can of worms. They have no intention of opening that can of worms.
This is the best FUD against Linux ever. They had SCO playing dirty up until now, so they didn't have to bother, but with SCO completely discredited, they just want to get this out there to keep that fear in the back of CIOs' minds when it comes time to replace aging proprietary UNIX servers. Microsoft wants the datacenter, and they want it bad. It's going to be Windows or Linux, and the tide will turn any quarter now...
They don't need to sue, they don't need to win, and they certainly wouldn't get enough money out of a suit to justify it. All they need is to make big businesses worried about choosing Linux.
The '80s were a long time ago.
Judging from job offers I've had in the past (and turned down), "breaking in" straight into development is also grueling and low-pay at a large percentage of studios. Salaries are low because there are people, excellent people, who are so desperate to work in games that the studios don't have to pay much to attract talent.
Getting in to the game industry is the same as getting into any other industry with that one additional catch. Just like every other industry, you can get in easy if you know your stuff well, and network. The additional hurdle is that you have to be willing to work for well, well below the average salary for somebody with the required skills. Most good game developers can earn 2-3x in salary with less hours in other industries.