Yawn. A lame flame attempt by an anonymous coward.
Your figures are meaningless. They show only growth and decline. They don't show sales numbers.
[If the XBOX is easily clobbering the Gamecube in America]
Easily clobbering? Outpacing by a fraction, 8.6 million to 7.46 million in 2003 in North America.
XBox sales numbers are well-known to be the lowest of the three major consoles, and with the highest production costs, and therefore the lowest profit per unit.
It's nothing like Oracle and PeopleSoft. We know that Oracle is the Big Boy and their products are the best sellers. In the console world, Microsoft is the little guy and their products are the worst sellers.
Because we know this, this story is indicative not of an attempt to monopolize the market (if it were, the Microsoft would try to buy Sony) but of an attempt to stay in the market at all.
I own neither a Gamecube nor an XBox. I'm not big on console gaming.
Whenever I go to a newspaper or other media site to read an article and they demand registration, the odds are really good that someone has already registered a 'shill' account with some predictable username and password. Often [site]user@[site].com, with the password [site].
One day, the time will come when they'll start comparing IP addresses against the registrar of any given account, but until then, I don't bother with my own accounts anymore. To be frank, I can't even remember what I used to sign up (once upon a time) for the LA Times.
I'm an end user. I don't read quarterly reports, or even quaterly ones. But when I hear that Gates wants to buy Nintendo, it makes me think twice about buying an XBox.
Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it's blogging. Tomorrow it'll be a search engine. Next week it'll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.
(I get the feeling that the most popular screen colour for these Japanese blogs will be blue, for some reason.)
Gates wanted to buy out Nintendo years ago; his failure to do so led directly to the decision to produce the XBox.
If Gates is interested again in buying Nintendo, this would seem to be to be a strong indication that the XBox is underperforming, and Microsoft is looking for a new way to compete with Sony in the console market.
In CoH, it took me 29 days to go from "Wow, this is amazingly cool" to "This is nine shades of suck."
Every door mission is the same. Getting a group to stay together long enough to complete a Task Force is nearly impossible. At level 19, I've essentially run out of new power options.
Still, I got more play out of it than I did with Everquest or Ultima Online.
One of the major issues (or so I've read) about developing games for the PS1 and PS@ has been that they're difficult and expensive to develop for. Hopefully this will decrease development times with some form of cooperative graphics system, and thereby reduce costs and speed production.
The additional upside to this is that decreased development costs is good for the bottom line, which would decrease the likelihood that any given game publisher will go out of business, seeing as how they seem to die off with alarming regularity. And the upshot of this is that longer-lived publishers tend to increase the quality of their products over time thanks to experience.
Or maybe they'll just blow the money on ale and whores.
I'm not so surprised that O'Reilly has published a manual for Google. What surprises me is that they got 224 pages out of it.
224 pages! My god, the style guide and word processing manual here at work, toegther, don't even come to 224 pages.
What in the name of the Eversmiling Buddha could possibly fill those pages? "You may type 'AND' between search terms. To type the word 'AND', do not use the apostrophes. Find your keyboard. Locate the 'A' key..."?
...because two screens are clearly superior to one screen. Logically, this machine must be exactly twice as much fun as a handheld game with only one screen.
I can barely control my excitement, because it is a given that Nintendo will eventually release the QS with four screens. That amount of fun is sure to explode the heads of children and the elderly.
I've been playing City of Heroes, but to be honest, it's getting repetitive and boring, much like every other such game I've played. I don't want to pay $14.95 a month for it -- but I'd definitely pay fifty cents an hour, metered, to play it.
Sadly, that's not an option, so I'm going to end up canceling my subscription entirely rather than pay fifteen bucks a month on a game that I'm not going to play every day.
Much of the rationalization (not from this case, but speakign generally) against mod-chipping game consoles and DVD players is to protect regionalization. That is, to enure that only Japanese PS2 owners can play Japanese-only games and that European DVD owners can only play European region DVDs.
The salient argument to me appears to be: what has ethical precedence? The right of the company to sell two boxes to one person who wants to use media from different regions, or the right of the consumer to make modifications to an object that he or he owns?
Y'know, honestly? So few people are going to mod their machines and this ruling is going to prevent so few people from modding their machines that I have no problem siding with the patentholders.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the day where you have to pay a license fee for each element in your toaster. Who needs to toast more than one slice of bread at a time, right?
And that's where you and I disagree. I maintain that because a company is beholden to its shareholders by civil law, that the copany is *required* to be unethical in order to maximize value.
One can always make more money unethically than ethically. I think that's axiomatic.
Of course, re: ethics, the consumer base has shown repeatedly that it really doesn't care about how companies act. Sure, there are a few anti-Exxon/Microsoft/Union Carbide folks out there, but those companies jst keep making money hand over fist.
The Psych profile page appears to indicate that there were only four games surveyed. While those games may make up a great percentage of players, I'm not so sure that it is repreentative of a reaonably wide player base. This, to me, makes the study suspect.
In addition, of course, the survey sample is not random; it's an 'opt-in' survey where people who are interested in participating do so.
It is to do so by any legal means necessary, because failure to do so could set up the CEO and the Board as the defendants in a civil suit by the shareholders.
One can be unethical and still remain within the law; my point stands.
Because the defining purpose of any public corporation is to maximize profit for the shareholders, then by definition all public corporations behave unethically.
It doesn't make sense (to me) for a company to sit on top of massive cash reserves which represent, essentially, profit made by from the investment of stock buyers.
But on the other hand, it wouldn't make sense for them to blow all of their reserves on dividends and buybacks. After all, not even Microsoft could be so arrogant as to blithely assume that they're going to keep making the kinds of profits they have been until the end of time.
I just got my paycheque. My income tax deduction was 20.097%, and I have extra taken off to ensure that I won't owe at the end of the year.
I'm a technical worker, and my income is higher than the median income, nationally.
Even if I paid GST and PST on every dollar I spent, my total tax rate could not be higher than 34.597%, logically, given 7% GST and 7.5% GST. Sure, there are those hidden taxes, such as on gas or liquour, but I think it all balances out. My tax rate is not more than 35%.
I have read that in Norway it is possible to be taxed at a rate that is higher than your income, so I suspect that their median tax rate is hgiher than Canada's.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn. A lame flame attempt by an anonymous coward.
Your figures are meaningless. They show only growth and decline. They don't show sales numbers.
[If the XBOX is easily clobbering the Gamecube in America]
Easily clobbering? Outpacing by a fraction, 8.6 million to 7.46 million in 2003 in North America.
XBox sales numbers are well-known to be the lowest of the three major consoles, and with the highest production costs, and therefore the lowest profit per unit.
It's nothing like Oracle and PeopleSoft. We know that Oracle is the Big Boy and their products are the best sellers. In the console world, Microsoft is the little guy and their products are the worst sellers.
Because we know this, this story is indicative not of an attempt to monopolize the market (if it were, the Microsoft would try to buy Sony) but of an attempt to stay in the market at all.
I own neither a Gamecube nor an XBox. I'm not big on console gaming.
Whenever I go to a newspaper or other media site to read an article and they demand registration, the odds are really good that someone has already registered a 'shill' account with some predictable username and password. Often [site]user@[site].com, with the password [site].
One day, the time will come when they'll start comparing IP addresses against the registrar of any given account, but until then, I don't bother with my own accounts anymore. To be frank, I can't even remember what I used to sign up (once upon a time) for the LA Times.
No, I read the five-lin blurb. This is Slashdot. Nobody RTFAs. You must be new here.
Hell, K-Mart probably sells search engines for $6.99. That doesn't mean that anyone uses them.
I'm an end user. I don't read quarterly reports, or even quaterly ones. But when I hear that Gates wants to buy Nintendo, it makes me think twice about buying an XBox.
Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it's blogging. Tomorrow it'll be a search engine. Next week it'll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.
(I get the feeling that the most popular screen colour for these Japanese blogs will be blue, for some reason.)
Gates wanted to buy out Nintendo years ago; his failure to do so led directly to the decision to produce the XBox.
If Gates is interested again in buying Nintendo, this would seem to be to be a strong indication that the XBox is underperforming, and Microsoft is looking for a new way to compete with Sony in the console market.
If your employer controls what you think, does that mean that they also own what you think?
In CoH, it took me 29 days to go from "Wow, this is amazingly cool" to "This is nine shades of suck."
Every door mission is the same. Getting a group to stay together long enough to complete a Task Force is nearly impossible. At level 19, I've essentially run out of new power options.
Still, I got more play out of it than I did with Everquest or Ultima Online.
One of the major issues (or so I've read) about developing games for the PS1 and PS@ has been that they're difficult and expensive to develop for. Hopefully this will decrease development times with some form of cooperative graphics system, and thereby reduce costs and speed production.
The additional upside to this is that decreased development costs is good for the bottom line, which would decrease the likelihood that any given game publisher will go out of business, seeing as how they seem to die off with alarming regularity. And the upshot of this is that longer-lived publishers tend to increase the quality of their products over time thanks to experience.
Or maybe they'll just blow the money on ale and whores.
I'm not so surprised that O'Reilly has published a manual for Google. What surprises me is that they got 224 pages out of it.
224 pages! My god, the style guide and word processing manual here at work, toegther, don't even come to 224 pages.
What in the name of the Eversmiling Buddha could possibly fill those pages? "You may type 'AND' between search terms. To type the word 'AND', do not use the apostrophes. Find your keyboard. Locate the 'A' key..."?
...because two screens are clearly superior to one screen. Logically, this machine must be exactly twice as much fun as a handheld game with only one screen.
I can barely control my excitement, because it is a given that Nintendo will eventually release the QS with four screens. That amount of fun is sure to explode the heads of children and the elderly.
I've been playing City of Heroes, but to be honest, it's getting repetitive and boring, much like every other such game I've played. I don't want to pay $14.95 a month for it -- but I'd definitely pay fifty cents an hour, metered, to play it.
Sadly, that's not an option, so I'm going to end up canceling my subscription entirely rather than pay fifteen bucks a month on a game that I'm not going to play every day.
[...] "Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
It was a long time before anyone spoke. Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.
"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.
"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer [...]
Some days I wish someone would take my identity.
I'm saying no such thing. I'm not legally beholden to any shareholders.
Much of the rationalization (not from this case, but speakign generally) against mod-chipping game consoles and DVD players is to protect regionalization. That is, to enure that only Japanese PS2 owners can play Japanese-only games and that European DVD owners can only play European region DVDs.
The salient argument to me appears to be: what has ethical precedence? The right of the company to sell two boxes to one person who wants to use media from different regions, or the right of the consumer to make modifications to an object that he or he owns?
Y'know, honestly? So few people are going to mod their machines and this ruling is going to prevent so few people from modding their machines that I have no problem siding with the patentholders.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to the day where you have to pay a license fee for each element in your toaster. Who needs to toast more than one slice of bread at a time, right?
And that's where you and I disagree. I maintain that because a company is beholden to its shareholders by civil law, that the copany is *required* to be unethical in order to maximize value.
One can always make more money unethically than ethically. I think that's axiomatic.
Yes, good point re: value.
Of course, re: ethics, the consumer base has shown repeatedly that it really doesn't care about how companies act. Sure, there are a few anti-Exxon/Microsoft/Union Carbide folks out there, but those companies jst keep making money hand over fist.
The Psych profile page appears to indicate that there were only four games surveyed. While those games may make up a great percentage of players, I'm not so sure that it is repreentative of a reaonably wide player base. This, to me, makes the study suspect.
In addition, of course, the survey sample is not random; it's an 'opt-in' survey where people who are interested in participating do so.
As such, the data doesn't really appear useful.
It is to do so by any legal means necessary, because failure to do so could set up the CEO and the Board as the defendants in a civil suit by the shareholders.
One can be unethical and still remain within the law; my point stands.
Because the defining purpose of any public corporation is to maximize profit for the shareholders, then by definition all public corporations behave unethically.
It doesn't make sense (to me) for a company to sit on top of massive cash reserves which represent, essentially, profit made by from the investment of stock buyers.
But on the other hand, it wouldn't make sense for them to blow all of their reserves on dividends and buybacks. After all, not even Microsoft could be so arrogant as to blithely assume that they're going to keep making the kinds of profits they have been until the end of time.
Um. Never mind.
50%? Uh, no.
I just got my paycheque. My income tax deduction was 20.097%, and I have extra taken off to ensure that I won't owe at the end of the year.
I'm a technical worker, and my income is higher than the median income, nationally.
Even if I paid GST and PST on every dollar I spent, my total tax rate could not be higher than 34.597%, logically, given 7% GST and 7.5% GST. Sure, there are those hidden taxes, such as on gas or liquour, but I think it all balances out. My tax rate is not more than 35%.
I have read that in Norway it is possible to be taxed at a rate that is higher than your income, so I suspect that their median tax rate is hgiher than Canada's.