Your cynicism is partially justified, but not fully. In economics there exists a concept called "normal profit" the gist of which I'm not going to explain but you need to look up. In short if profits from in-game ads start driving total profit of the game company up to an attractive level new competitors will be drawn into this industry and competition will drive prices down. This is a pretty fundamental concept of supply and demand and would work wonderfully in this situation...
BUT
The gamer's problem, however, is going to be that they really don't care about the subscription price enough that they'd be willing to play something other than their favourite game because the subscription price is higher than a competing game they don't enjoy as much. In this case they're pretty much stuck. They have the ability to vote with their dollars but they won't. No sympathy from me.
Video games are not commodities and as such if you really want to play the really hot game you can't expect them to fight tooth and nail to shave a few percent off the price to pass on to you. They don't need to.
Bear in mind that games for mobile phones are probably first run and need to have their development costs covered. Retro games, on the other hand, have already had those covered and need only cover the incrimental cost for each unit in order to make a profit. Rest assured that if Nintendo were to develop a game with Super Nintendo technology now and release it on the Wii it would cost much more than the retro releases and probably something inline with what mobile games cost.
A response to this comment of mine about how to get rid of the scratches suggested toothpaste. I tried it and it actually works reasonably well with a bit of effort. After having scratched the front on the first day and subsequently used toothpaste to fix that I've been more careful since and have not noticed anything really since then.
So I bought one of these yesterday and the first place I put it was in my pocket that I also keep my keys in. Big mistake. 1 iPod Nano, less than a day old, scuffed and scratched.
Does anyone know of any mild abrasives or similiar that can be used to polish an iPod such as a Nano back to scratch and scuff free brilliance? I'd really like to restore mine to normal and then maybe invest in a protective cover.
Incidentally, what's Apple's problem with making it scratch proof? My mobile phone stays in my pocket constantly with my keys and has done so for a year now. It's scratched to hell all over EXCEPT for the glass over the screen. Go figure.
The only reason I still see a lot of movies each month is because one of my local cinema chains offers unlimited movies for £14 a month. In fact, you can get it for £11 a month if you exclude the west London cinemas, but as I live there I pay £14 to include them and every other one in the country.
Given a normal ticket costs £8.50, it's easy to see how it can be paid off. In fact I usually end up seeing one or two movies a week totally as much as 8 or more a month at times. 8 moves for £14? That'll keep me in the cinema, even with inflated drink and popcorn prices.
In projects with long sales cycles it is natural for the sales person to sell features that are not yet in the product. They do this because they are, in theory, selling features that will be in the product at the actual time of implimentation. If they don't do this some other competing vendor will and they won't get the bid.
What sales people have to avoid is not selling features which aren't yet in the product but rather features that have no chance of making it into the product by the intended implimentation date. These are two completely different issues.
Before you dismiss sales staff so quickly you should remember that the only thing worse than working for a company where the sales people are selling a product you can't make is working for a company where you have an excellent product and can't sell it.
As was previously mentioned, pure CPU, disk or other benchmarks are not directly relevant to "Big Iron" servers. What would be useful is benchmarks based on industry products with comparissons to other machines.
A good example would be the benchmarks the Transaction Processing Performance Council uses to test database speed. Naturally I single those benchmarks out as I am a database administrator, but others surely exist for application servers and the like. The key is consistency in benchmarking with loads of comparissons. I don't care if a machine does 1000 zargs a second unless I know how many zargs other machines can do.
Crap? Before you sound off about a product you should make an effort to have even the vaguest notion of what you are talking about. Those of us that work with databases professionally know and appreciate what the likes of Oracle can do for us that the current OSS alternatives simply cannot. I would love to see a free and open database be able to compete with Oracle on a terrabyte scale but we simply aren't there yet.
It's ok to be an OSS fan, but for the love of god stay grounded, man!
Ah, but the new Harry Potter is directed by Alfonso Cuarón who is actually a good director and definitely better than Chris Columbus who directed the other two. I'm sure I don't need mention how much better Cuarón is than Lucas.
On a slightly related note I was booking a flight from Vancouver to London last year and found the cheapest flight in the area was from Seattle to London via Vancouver on Air Canada. Booking the direct flight from Vancouver to London on Air Canada was nearly twice as expensive as taking a commuter flight from Seattle to Vancouver and then getting on that same direct flight to London.
Why not skip the Seattle leg and get on in Vancouver? If you miss the first leg of a flight you are not allowed to make the second leg even when in this case there was an 8 hour layover in Vancouver. As Seattle is only 2.5 hours drive from Vancouver it is conceivable someone could miss the flight from Seattle to Vancouver and still quite easily make the flight from Vancouver to London by catching the train north.
My point, anyways, was that I was pissed that an airline subsidized by Canadian taxpayers was offering flights to Americans at just over half the price they were offering it to Canadians.
And before any of you idiots ask the price difference had nothing to do with the exchange rate.;)
Re:"prepare-for-disappointment department"?
on
The Simpsons Movie
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· Score: 1
A friend of mine invented (I think) the word "anticipointment" for situations like this after Star Wars Episode I came out.
I went on a three day vacation to Seville and took enough pictures to fill a 256MB card. If the trip had been any longer I would have had to start making tough decisions about which pictures to delete in order to make room for new ones.
Synchronizing pictures from a net cafe in just about any country in the world is absolutely out of the question. Do you have the time to wait for 256MB to synchronize from a shared ISDN line while you are on vacation? I didn't think so.
Now imagine your vacation is longer. Perhaps you go to South America for a month or longer. I suppose you are expecting to find an abundance of net cafes with ultra high bandwith connections in the jungles of Brazil?
For any serious digital photographer gigabytes and gigabytes of space is needed to have room for an extended trip's worth of photos.
I've been to a lecture by Wolfram and it was disappointingly low-level. He touched on many interesting subjects but unfortunately didn't delve deep enough to make the lecture really very worthwhile. All in all it seemed like a marketing gimmic to sell his book and software.
The only good part about the whole thing was the completely misguided people asking him truly bizarre questions at the end of the lecture. It was really amusing to see him struggle to answer some truly retarded questions.
Cut off all your RFID tags and keep them somewhere safe. On a weekly basis get together with all your friends and put all your collective tags in one bucket. Take, at random, your share and carry them with you for that coming week. Repeat process next week. This way any data gathered through these tags would be a random assortment of movements from you and your friends.
I can't imagine wanting to watch this movie on IMAX. To fit the screen they would have to crop the sides and effectively Pan-and-Scan it. Additionally non-Imax movies are not framed to be displayed on an Imax screen.
Imax movies are framed such that you don't have to look at the very top and bottom of the screens unless they intend to deliberately draw your vision up or down. Because non-Imax movies are framed full top-to-bottom it makes for a very uncomfortable viewing experience as it is difficult to take the entirety of the shot in without moving your eyes or head.
Go ahead and watch it in Imax. The rest of us who understand how the movie was intended to be watched will not, as we are not so gullible as to believe it would be a better viewing experience.
In Vancouver, BC, anyways. Competition and something peculiar about the local market has always had CDs around $13-14 CDN new. Thats less than $10 US! Of course, I have moved to London, England, where I can now expect to pay 16 per CD ($24 US). And what a miracle, I am suddenly less inclined to buy music.
The music industry should take a big hint. Back in Vancouver I bought music because the original CD and added value of case & artwork made it worth buying instead of downloading. Here in the UK I cannot justify buying music anymore so instead I am back on my P2P network. Hmmm...
DeBeer's is responsible for the distribution of Canadian diamonds. Undoubtedly they muscled their way in to make sure they could maintain the monopoly. This taints Canadian diamonds because even though there is no "blood" involved in producing them they still fund an immoral monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
Your cynicism is partially justified, but not fully. In economics there exists a concept called "normal profit" the gist of which I'm not going to explain but you need to look up. In short if profits from in-game ads start driving total profit of the game company up to an attractive level new competitors will be drawn into this industry and competition will drive prices down. This is a pretty fundamental concept of supply and demand and would work wonderfully in this situation...
BUT
The gamer's problem, however, is going to be that they really don't care about the subscription price enough that they'd be willing to play something other than their favourite game because the subscription price is higher than a competing game they don't enjoy as much. In this case they're pretty much stuck. They have the ability to vote with their dollars but they won't. No sympathy from me.
Video games are not commodities and as such if you really want to play the really hot game you can't expect them to fight tooth and nail to shave a few percent off the price to pass on to you. They don't need to.
Nice try, you're not blaming us for George W.
Bear in mind that games for mobile phones are probably first run and need to have their development costs covered. Retro games, on the other hand, have already had those covered and need only cover the incrimental cost for each unit in order to make a profit. Rest assured that if Nintendo were to develop a game with Super Nintendo technology now and release it on the Wii it would cost much more than the retro releases and probably something inline with what mobile games cost.
A response to this comment of mine about how to get rid of the scratches suggested toothpaste. I tried it and it actually works reasonably well with a bit of effort. After having scratched the front on the first day and subsequently used toothpaste to fix that I've been more careful since and have not noticed anything really since then.
So I bought one of these yesterday and the first place I put it was in my pocket that I also keep my keys in. Big mistake. 1 iPod Nano, less than a day old, scuffed and scratched.
Does anyone know of any mild abrasives or similiar that can be used to polish an iPod such as a Nano back to scratch and scuff free brilliance? I'd really like to restore mine to normal and then maybe invest in a protective cover.
Incidentally, what's Apple's problem with making it scratch proof? My mobile phone stays in my pocket constantly with my keys and has done so for a year now. It's scratched to hell all over EXCEPT for the glass over the screen. Go figure.
The only reason I still see a lot of movies each month is because one of my local cinema chains offers unlimited movies for £14 a month. In fact, you can get it for £11 a month if you exclude the west London cinemas, but as I live there I pay £14 to include them and every other one in the country.
Given a normal ticket costs £8.50, it's easy to see how it can be paid off. In fact I usually end up seeing one or two movies a week totally as much as 8 or more a month at times. 8 moves for £14? That'll keep me in the cinema, even with inflated drink and popcorn prices.
In projects with long sales cycles it is natural for the sales person to sell features that are not yet in the product. They do this because they are, in theory, selling features that will be in the product at the actual time of implimentation. If they don't do this some other competing vendor will and they won't get the bid.
What sales people have to avoid is not selling features which aren't yet in the product but rather features that have no chance of making it into the product by the intended implimentation date. These are two completely different issues.
Before you dismiss sales staff so quickly you should remember that the only thing worse than working for a company where the sales people are selling a product you can't make is working for a company where you have an excellent product and can't sell it.
As was previously mentioned, pure CPU, disk or other benchmarks are not directly relevant to "Big Iron" servers. What would be useful is benchmarks based on industry products with comparissons to other machines.
A good example would be the benchmarks the Transaction Processing Performance Council uses to test database speed. Naturally I single those benchmarks out as I am a database administrator, but others surely exist for application servers and the like. The key is consistency in benchmarking with loads of comparissons. I don't care if a machine does 1000 zargs a second unless I know how many zargs other machines can do.
Wow, that's just over 9 people per party! ROCK ON!
Tragic, looks like the geeks still can't get anyone to come to their parties. Maybe someone should call the Beastie Boys.
Who cares about a crap closed-source database?
Crap? Before you sound off about a product you should make an effort to have even the vaguest notion of what you are talking about. Those of us that work with databases professionally know and appreciate what the likes of Oracle can do for us that the current OSS alternatives simply cannot. I would love to see a free and open database be able to compete with Oracle on a terrabyte scale but we simply aren't there yet.
It's ok to be an OSS fan, but for the love of god stay grounded, man!
Ah, but the new Harry Potter is directed by Alfonso Cuarón who is actually a good director and definitely better than Chris Columbus who directed the other two. I'm sure I don't need mention how much better Cuarón is than Lucas.
On a slightly related note I was booking a flight from Vancouver to London last year and found the cheapest flight in the area was from Seattle to London via Vancouver on Air Canada. Booking the direct flight from Vancouver to London on Air Canada was nearly twice as expensive as taking a commuter flight from Seattle to Vancouver and then getting on that same direct flight to London.
;)
Why not skip the Seattle leg and get on in Vancouver? If you miss the first leg of a flight you are not allowed to make the second leg even when in this case there was an 8 hour layover in Vancouver. As Seattle is only 2.5 hours drive from Vancouver it is conceivable someone could miss the flight from Seattle to Vancouver and still quite easily make the flight from Vancouver to London by catching the train north.
My point, anyways, was that I was pissed that an airline subsidized by Canadian taxpayers was offering flights to Americans at just over half the price they were offering it to Canadians.
And before any of you idiots ask the price difference had nothing to do with the exchange rate.
A friend of mine invented (I think) the word "anticipointment" for situations like this after Star Wars Episode I came out.
I went on a three day vacation to Seville and took enough pictures to fill a 256MB card. If the trip had been any longer I would have had to start making tough decisions about which pictures to delete in order to make room for new ones.
Synchronizing pictures from a net cafe in just about any country in the world is absolutely out of the question. Do you have the time to wait for 256MB to synchronize from a shared ISDN line while you are on vacation? I didn't think so.
Now imagine your vacation is longer. Perhaps you go to South America for a month or longer. I suppose you are expecting to find an abundance of net cafes with ultra high bandwith connections in the jungles of Brazil?
For any serious digital photographer gigabytes and gigabytes of space is needed to have room for an extended trip's worth of photos.
I've been to a lecture by Wolfram and it was disappointingly low-level. He touched on many interesting subjects but unfortunately didn't delve deep enough to make the lecture really very worthwhile. All in all it seemed like a marketing gimmic to sell his book and software.
The only good part about the whole thing was the completely misguided people asking him truly bizarre questions at the end of the lecture. It was really amusing to see him struggle to answer some truly retarded questions.
Cut off all your RFID tags and keep them somewhere safe. On a weekly basis get together with all your friends and put all your collective tags in one bucket. Take, at random, your share and carry them with you for that coming week. Repeat process next week. This way any data gathered through these tags would be a random assortment of movements from you and your friends.
Correlate that, bitches!
I say go one step further for ultimate security and telnet to port 80.
All I ask in return is that you set me up with your sister. She should be between the ages of 18 and 28 and living in London, England.
Seriously, why pay for an invite when all you have to do is pimp out your sibling. Think about it, people. You know how to contact me.
So... quantum whatever... can I touch it? Without massive pain? What's it feel like?
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
You're the damn physics tutor, you tell me.
Road trip?
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
I gather the new models are faster and smaller. Perhaps not ideal when shopping for a boyfriend.
I can't imagine wanting to watch this movie on IMAX. To fit the screen they would have to crop the sides and effectively Pan-and-Scan it. Additionally non-Imax movies are not framed to be displayed on an Imax screen.
Imax movies are framed such that you don't have to look at the very top and bottom of the screens unless they intend to deliberately draw your vision up or down. Because non-Imax movies are framed full top-to-bottom it makes for a very uncomfortable viewing experience as it is difficult to take the entirety of the shot in without moving your eyes or head.
Go ahead and watch it in Imax. The rest of us who understand how the movie was intended to be watched will not, as we are not so gullible as to believe it would be a better viewing experience.
In Vancouver, BC, anyways. Competition and something peculiar about the local market has always had CDs around $13-14 CDN new. Thats less than $10 US! Of course, I have moved to London, England, where I can now expect to pay 16 per CD ($24 US). And what a miracle, I am suddenly less inclined to buy music.
The music industry should take a big hint. Back in Vancouver I bought music because the original CD and added value of case & artwork made it worth buying instead of downloading. Here in the UK I cannot justify buying music anymore so instead I am back on my P2P network. Hmmm...
There are two women in that group photo. Clearly it is a fake designed to psychologically manipulate us into supporting KDE over Gnome.
Damn it, I think it's working.
DeBeer's is responsible for the distribution of Canadian diamonds. Undoubtedly they muscled their way in to make sure they could maintain the monopoly. This taints Canadian diamonds because even though there is no "blood" involved in producing them they still fund an immoral monopoly.