Running hotter (the Halogen way) ups the UV content which gets filtered out or flouresced down (and if you have a flourescent coating, why not just have a compact flourescent).
Plenty of reasons. Fluorescents aren't full spectrum; CFLs contain mercury; CFLs are expensive to manufacture; etc...
That depends on where you live. There are regional chains that offer much better prices/rates. I've never heard of any other store that offers a flat rate for trade-ins, but then prices them for resale based on demand for the particular title. That's just plain wrong. If you're going to charge a premium at resale, at least some of that should get passed on to the original owner at trade in time.
If GS didn't offer the (highest|lowest) prices why would people (trade|buy) their games there?
Name recognition. They're a big chain, and there are a sufficient number of people out there that don't realize they could do better elsewhere.
The chains that GameStop absorbed (Funcoland, EB, etc...) never had the anti-customer practices that Gamestop has, and the remaining vidoe game specialty stores don't do the little things that make GameStop so terrible. I don't know what they're thinking, but perhaps they'd be better served to stop doing the things that chase the customers away rather than tring to force customers to shop there when they don't want to. I know that with me only one of those things is likely to work.
What types of things am I talking about? Imposing draconian quotas on their employees, which causes the sales associates to bully the customer into sales to prevent losing their job; Forcing pre-orders for items which are not in short supply; Paying pathetic trade-in values while charging outrageous prices for used titles; Maintaining a poor back catalog; Accepting vendor promotions that encourage their sales associates to favor one vendor over others at no real gain to the company; Cramming so much marketing material into the store that you can't find anything you're looking for; Locking PC games in huge plastic security boxes; Selling non-guaranteed pre-orders; Selling not-for-resale demo copies as "used"; etc.
Fix some of those things. It can't be that hard, and it can't cost that much. Then, maybe, I'll consider shopping at GameStop again. Until then I'll take a page out of their book and buy the games they "lock up as exclusives" used from somebody else.
Call the telephone sales number. You can get a discount on almost every PC product they sell if you call on the phone, and they'll price match almost anything. I've ordered N-series products in the past where, as in this case, the N-series version didn't have some free upgrades (the regular version has a free hard drive and DVD upgrade promotion right now, otherwise the N-series would be cheaper), and they matched the offer from the Windows version and gave me a $75 coupon off some other stuff on top of it.
Data has grown larger and more complex, yet file browsers insist on reading *all* the data instead of just metadata. If it was just displaying filenames and types it would be snappy as usual, but instead we have to wait as it calculates image thumbnails, video lengths, word counts, document summaries, etc. Then you filter all that data through malware (otherwise known as anti-virus software) and things get even slower.
Dial the featureset back a little bit to where they were 7 years ago, and you'll see that things are much faster than they were (same code, faster hardware). Of course, if you're a CLI user you're already noticing that things are faster now. Greps that used to take ages are downright snappy thanks to the speedy hardware you can get for a few hundred bucks... Nobody is forcing you to run bloated code.
With the possible example of #4 (did drive compression really catch on all that much before it was included with DOS?) all of your examples are bogus. Either Microsoft hasn't taken over those markets (#1 & 2), the competitor never had the lead to lose (#5), or the competitor is still kicking in one form or another (#3).
Yet there are real examples you neglected.
WordPerfect? 1-2-3? Notes? Netware/Fileservices?
Somehow, though, I suspect that your real motive was to slip the 360/PS3 troll in there, considering that you failed to mention that they haven't pushed Nintendo out dispite their great (to the tune of $4 billion dollars in expenditures) effort.
Believe it or not, there are workplaces where it is safe to voice opposition as long as you do what you're told once the decision is made. Your boss shouldn't mind that you tell him it's a bad idea to port your product to the latest trendy language for no good reason, but once he decides that's what the company is doing, you better deliver, 'cause that's what you're being paid for. It's when you refuse to drop it once a decision has been made that you should have to worry about losing your job.
In my experience, most workplaces are like this, and there is always some whiner that doesn't know when to drop it and get to work who thinks that their opinion (rather than their behavior or performance) is what got them in trouble.
And why should they since they have WMA since lack of an mp3 player won't change whether people buy Vista or not.
Lack of MP3 support *will* reduce the number of people willing to use Windows Media Player as their default media player though. That'll hurt Microsoft big. Their Windows revenue is fixed, since they own the market, but investors demand growth. Microsoft's current strategy seems to be to grow by locking up ownership of key DRM technologies. They need Windows Media Player and XBox 360 to win big, or they lose the DRM market and an indefinite supply of free money anytime anybody publishes, well, anything.
So at what point do the US models fall victim to the same fate? I want to hold off on buying a PS3 for as long as possible, but I'll probably end up with one eventually (I typically end up buying all the major consoles...) and I don't want a crippled one. I need to know exactly how long I can wait before picking one up and still be able to get the good backwards compatibility.
Oh, and I said "pile" because that's literally what it was. A stack of boxes on their side. They weren't nice and arranged in the glass case like they usually are.
I can't say I'm surprised that stores near the city would sell out faster... Outside 495 there are way fewer people, the same number of Target/BestBuy-like stores, and the stores seem to get the same allotments as their city counterparts.
I don't think the PSP applies. UMD didn't fail because it was a proprietary format. It failed because people don't want to pay for a movie that is "portable only". Sure, it failed at capturing the market, but it was an imaginary market.
That said, I think the PS3 will only give BluRay a short term lead. In the long run, dual-format players will mean that both formats are here to stay, and everybody loses/wins.
When was the last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season in just North America?
I bet you didn't think your smart-assed rhetorical question that was supposed to drive your point home had an answer...
The last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season was less than a year ago. July 2006 was the last time. It was the month after the DS lite came out. There was practically no shortage (readily available within 3 weeks of launch) despite high demand for a machine that is still selling well even 8 months later.
Keep in mind all this irrelevant useless data. The result is the Wii is in the lead.
Here's the hard truth: Games sell consoles. Not brands, not power, not fanboys. Games.
There are no compelling games for the PS3 yet, so it is not selling. End of story.
The only "news" on the availability front is that Nintendo can't meet demand after their system has been on the market for three months. It's not news because it means demand is high (that's an acceptable excuse the first month and a half). It's news because it means Nintendo has dropped the ball.
A pile was three as far as I could see. Also, Wiis are selling for $300 on eBay. I'd have had to pay MA sales tax, eBay fees, PayPal fees... The profit margin is not sufficient to deal with the hassle that is eBay. If they were still selling for $350 it would have been a different story. I also wasn't the only one who saw them and didn't buy one. There were a couple of guys looking at them talking about how much the PS3 sucks and they wanted a Wii, but couldn't afford one yet.
I *was* there, and they *did* have consoles, so I have to assume it is you that is lying. If you were really looking for Wiis, why wouldn't you have called first before driving a half hour?
I have done research (in order to purchase my Wii. The Target in question gets shipments every Wednesday (though may get them other days too), and both stores release the consoles for sale as soon as they have been checked into inventory. Neither hold them until Sunday. If there was a line outside the store Sunday morning as was implied, you wouldn't ever expect to see one in the afternoon.
I was speaking even relative to cheap fluorescents. Most people aren't willing to spend $9-10 on a bulb when they can get one that is "just as good" for $3.
I agree completely. Craftsmen should know how to maintain and set up their tools. Just as a woodworker should know how to sharpen their chisels, and calibrate their machines, software developers should know how to operate and maintain their computers. Now, perhaps they'll have an IT staff that does it for them, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't know how.
A degree and title in IT and CS means only that one has a degree in IT and CS, nothing more. It doesn't mean they're anointed and it doesn't mean they know more about technology than users.
I find that a lot of issues arise because many people — people in decision making roles — do not know that there is a difference between IT and CS. People who know IT typically don't know very much about CS, and CS guys typically don't know a lot about IT. Programmers exist in both disciplines, and don't necessarily know anything about either.
IT and CS are in fact completely unrelated with the exception that each of them depend somewhat on the product of the other. Yet managers routinely require or accept credentials for one of those fields as proof of knowledge of the other. This results in a much higher density of people doing jobs they have no business doing than in most any other industries.
That's a lovely interpretation of the rules if you happen to sell data retention equipment or work as a corporate lawyer.
It all comes down to where you draw the line between personal and corporate activities. When are you an employee, and when are you an individual? You have to draw that line somewhere, and no matter where you draw it you are going to get busted for drawing it in the wrong place when one of your employees commits fraud. You're better off drawing the line such that when an employee uses a personal service such as Gmail, they are acting as an individual, and you shouldn't be retaining that data (it's not yours to retain).
Personally, I don't think it's the color temperature that matters. It's what people think the problem is, since it's what they can see... The real issue is the diversity of wavelengths that are used to make the light "white". An incandescent lamp has a fairly continuous spectrum, but a cheap to moderate fluorescent has a limited number of wavelengths. Over time, I find this fatiguing. You can get full spectrum fluorescents, but most people don't because they are very expensive (relatively speaking).
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Running hotter (the Halogen way) ups the UV content which gets filtered out or flouresced down (and if you have a flourescent coating, why not just have a compact flourescent).
Plenty of reasons. Fluorescents aren't full spectrum; CFLs contain mercury; CFLs are expensive to manufacture; etc...
That depends on where you live. There are regional chains that offer much better prices/rates. I've never heard of any other store that offers a flat rate for trade-ins, but then prices them for resale based on demand for the particular title. That's just plain wrong. If you're going to charge a premium at resale, at least some of that should get passed on to the original owner at trade in time.
If GS didn't offer the (highest|lowest) prices why would people (trade|buy) their games there?
Name recognition. They're a big chain, and there are a sufficient number of people out there that don't realize they could do better elsewhere.
....then they wouldn't have to pull this crap.
The chains that GameStop absorbed (Funcoland, EB, etc...) never had the anti-customer practices that Gamestop has, and the remaining vidoe game specialty stores don't do the little things that make GameStop so terrible. I don't know what they're thinking, but perhaps they'd be better served to stop doing the things that chase the customers away rather than tring to force customers to shop there when they don't want to. I know that with me only one of those things is likely to work.
What types of things am I talking about? Imposing draconian quotas on their employees, which causes the sales associates to bully the customer into sales to prevent losing their job; Forcing pre-orders for items which are not in short supply; Paying pathetic trade-in values while charging outrageous prices for used titles; Maintaining a poor back catalog; Accepting vendor promotions that encourage their sales associates to favor one vendor over others at no real gain to the company; Cramming so much marketing material into the store that you can't find anything you're looking for; Locking PC games in huge plastic security boxes; Selling non-guaranteed pre-orders; Selling not-for-resale demo copies as "used"; etc.
Fix some of those things. It can't be that hard, and it can't cost that much. Then, maybe, I'll consider shopping at GameStop again. Until then I'll take a page out of their book and buy the games they "lock up as exclusives" used from somebody else.
Only an idiot pays the price on the Dell website.
Call the telephone sales number. You can get a discount on almost every PC product they sell if you call on the phone, and they'll price match almost anything. I've ordered N-series products in the past where, as in this case, the N-series version didn't have some free upgrades (the regular version has a free hard drive and DVD upgrade promotion right now, otherwise the N-series would be cheaper), and they matched the offer from the Windows version and gave me a $75 coupon off some other stuff on top of it.
The answer is stupid but simple.
Data has grown larger and more complex, yet file browsers insist on reading *all* the data instead of just metadata. If it was just displaying filenames and types it would be snappy as usual, but instead we have to wait as it calculates image thumbnails, video lengths, word counts, document summaries, etc. Then you filter all that data through malware (otherwise known as anti-virus software) and things get even slower.
Dial the featureset back a little bit to where they were 7 years ago, and you'll see that things are much faster than they were (same code, faster hardware). Of course, if you're a CLI user you're already noticing that things are faster now. Greps that used to take ages are downright snappy thanks to the speedy hardware you can get for a few hundred bucks... Nobody is forcing you to run bloated code.
...there are real ones?
With the possible example of #4 (did drive compression really catch on all that much before it was included with DOS?) all of your examples are bogus. Either Microsoft hasn't taken over those markets (#1 & 2), the competitor never had the lead to lose (#5), or the competitor is still kicking in one form or another (#3).
Yet there are real examples you neglected.
WordPerfect?
1-2-3?
Notes?
Netware/Fileservices?
Somehow, though, I suspect that your real motive was to slip the 360/PS3 troll in there, considering that you failed to mention that they haven't pushed Nintendo out dispite their great (to the tune of $4 billion dollars in expenditures) effort.
Let me guess. You read that line and responded, instead of reading the whole comment.
Good job!
So you get out and get another job.
Believe it or not, there are workplaces where it is safe to voice opposition as long as you do what you're told once the decision is made. Your boss shouldn't mind that you tell him it's a bad idea to port your product to the latest trendy language for no good reason, but once he decides that's what the company is doing, you better deliver, 'cause that's what you're being paid for. It's when you refuse to drop it once a decision has been made that you should have to worry about losing your job.
In my experience, most workplaces are like this, and there is always some whiner that doesn't know when to drop it and get to work who thinks that their opinion (rather than their behavior or performance) is what got them in trouble.
Lack of MP3 support *will* reduce the number of people willing to use Windows Media Player as their default media player though. That'll hurt Microsoft big. Their Windows revenue is fixed, since they own the market, but investors demand growth. Microsoft's current strategy seems to be to grow by locking up ownership of key DRM technologies. They need Windows Media Player and XBox 360 to win big, or they lose the DRM market and an indefinite supply of free money anytime anybody publishes, well, anything.
So at what point do the US models fall victim to the same fate? I want to hold off on buying a PS3 for as long as possible, but I'll probably end up with one eventually (I typically end up buying all the major consoles...) and I don't want a crippled one. I need to know exactly how long I can wait before picking one up and still be able to get the good backwards compatibility.
Oh, and I said "pile" because that's literally what it was. A stack of boxes on their side. They weren't nice and arranged in the glass case like they usually are.
It was actually later than 3PM. It was probably around 7PM.. .Definatly between 6 and 8.
Maybe they arrived after you left.
If they pick the best names the first time around, they won't have any room to innovate new fancy names for these technologies in the next Windows.
Really the title of this article should be "Microsoft Implements Fresh New Names for Existing and Obvious Technology in Vista Kernel."
I can't say I'm surprised that stores near the city would sell out faster... Outside 495 there are way fewer people, the same number of Target/BestBuy-like stores, and the stores seem to get the same allotments as their city counterparts.
I don't think the PSP applies. UMD didn't fail because it was a proprietary format. It failed because people don't want to pay for a movie that is "portable only". Sure, it failed at capturing the market, but it was an imaginary market.
That said, I think the PS3 will only give BluRay a short term lead. In the long run, dual-format players will mean that both formats are here to stay, and everybody loses/wins.
I bet you didn't think your smart-assed rhetorical question that was supposed to drive your point home had an answer...
The last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season was less than a year ago. July 2006 was the last time. It was the month after the DS lite came out. There was practically no shortage (readily available within 3 weeks of launch) despite high demand for a machine that is still selling well even 8 months later.
Here's the hard truth: Games sell consoles. Not brands, not power, not fanboys. Games.
There are no compelling games for the PS3 yet, so it is not selling. End of story.
The only "news" on the availability front is that Nintendo can't meet demand after their system has been on the market for three months. It's not news because it means demand is high (that's an acceptable excuse the first month and a half). It's news because it means Nintendo has dropped the ball.
A pile was three as far as I could see. Also, Wiis are selling for $300 on eBay. I'd have had to pay MA sales tax, eBay fees, PayPal fees... The profit margin is not sufficient to deal with the hassle that is eBay. If they were still selling for $350 it would have been a different story. I also wasn't the only one who saw them and didn't buy one. There were a couple of guys looking at them talking about how much the PS3 sucks and they wanted a Wii, but couldn't afford one yet.
I *was* there, and they *did* have consoles, so I have to assume it is you that is lying. If you were really looking for Wiis, why wouldn't you have called first before driving a half hour?
I have done research (in order to purchase my Wii. The Target in question gets shipments every Wednesday (though may get them other days too), and both stores release the consoles for sale as soon as they have been checked into inventory. Neither hold them until Sunday. If there was a line outside the store Sunday morning as was implied, you wouldn't ever expect to see one in the afternoon.
I was speaking even relative to cheap fluorescents. Most people aren't willing to spend $9-10 on a bulb when they can get one that is "just as good" for $3.
I agree completely. Craftsmen should know how to maintain and set up their tools. Just as a woodworker should know how to sharpen their chisels, and calibrate their machines, software developers should know how to operate and maintain their computers. Now, perhaps they'll have an IT staff that does it for them, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't know how.
Alas, we do not live in a perfect world.
That's a good point. So maybe they had arrived that day.
A degree and title in IT and CS means only that one has a degree in IT and CS, nothing more. It doesn't mean they're anointed and it doesn't mean they know more about technology than users.
I find that a lot of issues arise because many people — people in decision making roles — do not know that there is a difference between IT and CS. People who know IT typically don't know very much about CS, and CS guys typically don't know a lot about IT. Programmers exist in both disciplines, and don't necessarily know anything about either.
IT and CS are in fact completely unrelated with the exception that each of them depend somewhat on the product of the other. Yet managers routinely require or accept credentials for one of those fields as proof of knowledge of the other. This results in a much higher density of people doing jobs they have no business doing than in most any other industries.
That's a lovely interpretation of the rules if you happen to sell data retention equipment or work as a corporate lawyer.
It all comes down to where you draw the line between personal and corporate activities. When are you an employee, and when are you an individual? You have to draw that line somewhere, and no matter where you draw it you are going to get busted for drawing it in the wrong place when one of your employees commits fraud. You're better off drawing the line such that when an employee uses a personal service such as Gmail, they are acting as an individual, and you shouldn't be retaining that data (it's not yours to retain).
Personally, I don't think it's the color temperature that matters. It's what people think the problem is, since it's what they can see... The real issue is the diversity of wavelengths that are used to make the light "white". An incandescent lamp has a fairly continuous spectrum, but a cheap to moderate fluorescent has a limited number of wavelengths. Over time, I find this fatiguing. You can get full spectrum fluorescents, but most people don't because they are very expensive (relatively speaking).