How much of this could have been avoided if Harry Reid and President Obama had not derailed the Yucca Mountain project? And if groups like Greenpeace weren't so effective in opposing solutions to nuclear waste storage? They cheered the end of the Yucca Mountain project and called its supporters morons. Where are we now?
Blocking content from people using certain browsers might be bad business, but I don't see any reason why the law should deign to notice. Your property, your equipment, your configuration, your rights.
What is the difference between martial arts and martial science? Do you perform double-blind experiments to see which stance is more effective for self-defense? What types of measurements do you use? Hey, I bet you have those high-speed cameras like on Mythbusters so you can really study the movements of your karate.
That's right. Wal*Mart has nothing to offer but shit. In fact, I bought my Genuine Nintendo Wii there and it was absolute junk compared to the one my friend bought at GameStop. And the games my neighbor bought were more fun--even his copy of Zelda was more fun than mine. Dang Wal*Mart.
This is a dumb idea. It took a nice, warm shower for me to realize it.
An idea like this could not happen without a global governing body to tax every person and machine on earth that uses the internet.
An idea like this could not happen within a territory without fracturing interoperability.
The only way this idea could work is if an alternative "premium" email standard emerged that ran parallel to the current email system. The "central authority" would be a corporation that certified legitimate email servers and provided some type of authentication for each email.
This is the genuine market solution to the problem. Each email has a value that should be easy enough for the sender to quantify. Sending bulk snail mail costs what,.15 to.20 cents per item? Even if email were to cost $.001 to $.005 per 100KB, collected as a tax by the government and earmarked for propagating technology to the under-served, then the amount of spam would drop by a ton.
The current email landscape is a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem where spammers are rewarded for their behavior because they disproportionately consume a public good (internet bandwidth).
Actually, it might be good to meter ALL bandwidth usage so that the heaviest users pay a proportionate amount of the costs of maintaining the networks.
Yes, just imagine. There'd be no grits in any pants, no petrified Natalie Portman erotica, no subversive links to goatse or tubgirl. There'd be no shills for different companies trying to influence Slashdot users...
As technology continues to improve, crates and boxes in video games keep looking better and better. I can't wait to pick up this game so that I can go through it and break dozens of those gorgeous crates.
I was disappointed that Disgaea didn't find a spot on the list.
I'm not typically a compulsive videogame buyer. I don't have a lot of free time, so I like to read reviews and learn more about the game before I buy it. However, the first time I saw someone playing Disgaea, I knew that I immediately had to own it and play it.
The visuals are wonderful, the story is humourous and endearing, the music is some of the best I've heard in a videogame, and the gameplay is fantastic. It's my favourite game for the PS2, by a large margin.
Thanks for calling earlier. I wish I could have made you aware of my shop before hand. I wish I could have been open this weekend to meet you. If you come down to Inconjunction this weekend remind me about this post and I'll pop you an extra discount.
I did read it. I've addressed these points more or less in my other posts.
I would love--*LOVE*--to sell anime DVDs at $10-$15 a pop. I would have to sell below my cost by $7-$12 to do so.
Regarding atmosphere--I never had pokemon stuff in my store. I did have Yugioh tournaments, and they were good money makers, but the store wasn't dedicated to that property. I loved to shoot the shit with my customers about what they were watching or reading. I'm an anime fan myself. I was able to make informed recomendations and I hardly ever had someone come back to say that they didn't like something I pitched.
I'm convinced fansubs would have hurt my business. I had people bring fansubs in from time to time and the conversations would usually turn to discusions on how to download anime from bittorrent.
You are the exception, not the rule: An exception that I would love to have as a customer. Unfortunately most people aren't as diligent as you are about buying what they download.
Yes, the anime was priced too high. I couldn't help it though: I have to sell it for more than I paid for it.
"Stuff doesn't sell, therefore it must be because of piracy"
Yes, that's true in part. Maybe if you sat where I do and heard people tell you, "I'd buy that but I've already downloaded it" you would understand the impact of piracy.
It's incredibly common for my customers to download and watch an anime series and then come in to my shop and buy a related manga or toy. Sure, I get some business by people being aware of the property, but I also lose the business I would have had by selling the DVDs.
Incidently, manga and comics piracy is really starting to take off too...
I had art classes for quite a while but I had trouble finding regular teachers and after a year let the classes peter out.
I also had rentals for the first 18 months but I heard from my customers many times that they hated to drive all the way out to my store to return the videos. I tried increasing the rental period to 7 days but it wasn't enough to spark regular rental business. Take a $30 disc--that probably costs me about $18. To make a profit renting it (at $5 a pop), it needs to turn around 3 times before I drop it on my used rack. Some titles (like Fruits Basket and Ninja Scroll) are very popular and would turn around pretty well. Others (like Z-Mind or DNA2) would just sit there sadly waiting for someone to pick it up.
It's awesome that those methods work for some anime stores. My shop wasn't in the best location to leverage those ideas though.
You should walk a mile in my shoes before slamming me.
I floated on the dot-com balloon and invest all my savings into my shop. I also put my own sweat and labor into it. The first year that I was open I took about 10 days off (including Thanksgiving and Christmas)--that's 10 days off over 12 months. If you hear violins behind me maybe it's because I feel entitled to a little self pity on the day that the curtains fall on all I've worked on. I won't get to see my best and favorite people each week; I won't have the day-to-day pleasure of running my own shop. If you've never dedicated your entire life to a risky project only to never see it succeed the way you imagined it, you'll never understand what I'm feeling.
I'm not "blaming my customers" as you put it, although I do feel some bitterness. I blame myself for not being able to better judge how badly piracy would harm my business. It's not the number one factor of my shop closing, but it's a very close two. If you want to, you can stick your head in the sand and insist that piracy doesn't hurt business--but it does. And it's something that many of my most loyal customers do. They don't do it to be malicious--it's just that anime is very expensive and it doesn't come out in America fast enough to suit their wants.
So, what do you think the anime producers could have done to change the effects of piracy
In my opinion anime publishers needed (and still need) to do four things:
1. Release anime at a much better price point. I hated having to sell anime at $29.99 a disc, but considering some of the margins I had to work with I didn't have much wiggle room. Multiply that by 6 or 8 and you end up paying up to (or over) $200 for a series. In my opinion they need to charge about $3-$5 dollar an episode and pack 4-5 episodes on each disc. Currently, publishers like Geneon frequently charge up to $10 an episode (3 on a $30 disc). It's just too expensive.
2. Add value to the disc with extras like posters, stickers, lapel pins, pencil boards, and other collectibles. Those really appeal to collectors and can't be digitally duplicated.
3. Add value to the translations. ADV has done a nice job with some of their releases such as Excel Saga. The Japanese and English audio are there, but what's really excellent are the multiple subtitle modes which illustrate sign names, pop up information about puns or Japanese idioms, and generally inform the viewer on why the producers have added those elements to the show.
4. *CRACK DOWN ON PIRACY* A search on Ebay on any popular anime series will bring back dozens of hits for illegal pirate copies. I have had dozens of "customers" who want to buy Cowboy Bebop, DBZ, or other popular box sets and only expect to pay $25 like they would on Ebay. As a small store owner I have no power to crack down on the pirates myself. I've tried to call ADV, Geneon and Central Park to find out what their anti-pirate strategies are but I've never received a return phone call.
Maybe I should ask a different way: what worked?
1: Manga, especially in 2004. That was a huge year for me. However Barnes & Noble and Borders began to really stock their manga sections and that put a knife in the belly of my business.
2: Character goods like toys and t-shirts
3: Used anime. I didn't do a lot of business in it, but the margins are fat, fat, fat.
Truly I'm not being disingenuous--My convention business will only be part time and I'm eliminating all DVDs from my inventory. Likewise, I will no longer stock anime music CDs. At one point 40% of my inventory was in DVDs. I can't wait until it becomes 0%.
Taking my show on the road will be part-time work for me. I'll probably make between 6-8k a year as a convention exhibitor which makes it a profitabble side venture but not anything I can rely on to pay all my bills. Yes, that means I'll be taking a part time job (I'll be taking university classes too).
Of course my home page puts the best spin on it as possible. I'm currently working on an 'autopsy report' to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how to best approach the business in the future.
Today is the last day that my anime store, Otakurama, will be open. I've felt pressure from many directions over the years, but the two biggest factors working against my business are 1: competition from mass market retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and 2: piracy.
Number 2 is a big one--I would guess that at least half of my customers download anime from bittorrent. I've had hundreds of people tell me, "oh that series is great!" before it's even come out. Of course, once they download it they don't want to buy it.
The only anime that sells in my shop are the most popular titles. Anything cool but unusual just sits and rots on my shelf.
A smaller (but important) factor is that anime publishers change the prices of their products so quickly that discs 'expire' while sitting on my shelf waiting for a buyer. Six months after the last disc of a series comes out they release the entire box set for 50%-66% off. That causes orphans to clutter up my inventory.
What the heck is this guy von Tetzchner smoking? Doesn't he realize yet that nobody cares about the technical details? People (web developers, plugin writers, users) only care about the big numbers. They don't want to think about the results, they only want to know: who is first, and by how much? Is the second place browser big enough to notice?
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
"I certainly wouldn't be at this company doing what I'm doing if I wasn't absolutely sure that we're going to launch a product."
If you're still working for the company, obviously you're waiting for the payoff. Having this type of confidence in your employers doesn't translate into real-world guarantees that the business is going to launch the product.
This is modern American workplace's version of Stockholm Syndrome. Good luck, kiddo.
You're right. It's been so long that I'd forgotten. I remember after it changed names I refused to believe it was named after a stinky Clint Eastwood movie and so my brain somehow wanted to call it Foxfire instead. Looks like my brain let me down one more time.
Well, the truth is that I was using f06f143 back in 1998 when it was just a series of hex codes, but it wasn't as stable as Internet Explorer so I just had to wait for it to cook a while longer.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of this could have been avoided if Harry Reid and President Obama had not derailed the Yucca Mountain project? And if groups like Greenpeace weren't so effective in opposing solutions to nuclear waste storage? They cheered the end of the Yucca Mountain project and called its supporters morons. Where are we now?
I completely agree with you.
Blocking content from people using certain browsers might be bad business, but I don't see any reason why the law should deign to notice. Your property, your equipment, your configuration, your rights.
What is the difference between martial arts and martial science? Do you perform double-blind experiments to see which stance is more effective for self-defense? What types of measurements do you use? Hey, I bet you have those high-speed cameras like on Mythbusters so you can really study the movements of your karate.
That's right. Wal*Mart has nothing to offer but shit. In fact, I bought my Genuine Nintendo Wii there and it was absolute junk compared to the one my friend bought at GameStop. And the games my neighbor bought were more fun--even his copy of Zelda was more fun than mine. Dang Wal*Mart.
This is a dumb idea. It took a nice, warm shower for me to realize it.
An idea like this could not happen without a global governing body to tax every person and machine on earth that uses the internet.
An idea like this could not happen within a territory without fracturing interoperability.
The only way this idea could work is if an alternative "premium" email standard emerged that ran parallel to the current email system. The "central authority" would be a corporation that certified legitimate email servers and provided some type of authentication for each email.
This is the genuine market solution to the problem. Each email has a value that should be easy enough for the sender to quantify. Sending bulk snail mail costs what, .15 to .20 cents per item? Even if email were to cost $.001 to $.005 per 100KB, collected as a tax by the government and earmarked for propagating technology to the under-served, then the amount of spam would drop by a ton.
The current email landscape is a classic "tragedy of the commons" problem where spammers are rewarded for their behavior because they disproportionately consume a public good (internet bandwidth).
Actually, it might be good to meter ALL bandwidth usage so that the heaviest users pay a proportionate amount of the costs of maintaining the networks.
Yes, just imagine. There'd be no grits in any pants, no petrified Natalie Portman erotica, no subversive links to goatse or tubgirl. There'd be no shills for different companies trying to influence Slashdot users...
Hey... I think you might be onto something.
When I saw this article being posted, I let out a little peep.
The future of alcoholism just got brighter.
Now if only they could get rid of the part of alcohol that makes people act like assholes.
As technology continues to improve, crates and boxes in video games keep looking better and better. I can't wait to pick up this game so that I can go through it and break dozens of those gorgeous crates.
Whoohoo! Crates!
I was disappointed that Disgaea didn't find a spot on the list.
I'm not typically a compulsive videogame buyer. I don't have a lot of free time, so I like to read reviews and learn more about the game before I buy it. However, the first time I saw someone playing Disgaea, I knew that I immediately had to own it and play it.
The visuals are wonderful, the story is humourous and endearing, the music is some of the best I've heard in a videogame, and the gameplay is fantastic. It's my favourite game for the PS2, by a large margin.
Please read this. You'll see that it's more complex than simple piracy.
Thanks for calling earlier. I wish I could have made you aware of my shop before hand. I wish I could have been open this weekend to meet you. If you come down to Inconjunction this weekend remind me about this post and I'll pop you an extra discount.
I did read it. I've addressed these points more or less in my other posts.
I would love--*LOVE*--to sell anime DVDs at $10-$15 a pop. I would have to sell below my cost by $7-$12 to do so.
Regarding atmosphere--I never had pokemon stuff in my store. I did have Yugioh tournaments, and they were good money makers, but the store wasn't dedicated to that property. I loved to shoot the shit with my customers about what they were watching or reading. I'm an anime fan myself. I was able to make informed recomendations and I hardly ever had someone come back to say that they didn't like something I pitched.
I'm convinced fansubs would have hurt my business. I had people bring fansubs in from time to time and the conversations would usually turn to discusions on how to download anime from bittorrent.
You are the exception, not the rule: An exception that I would love to have as a customer. Unfortunately most people aren't as diligent as you are about buying what they download.
Yes, the anime was priced too high. I couldn't help it though: I have to sell it for more than I paid for it.
"Stuff doesn't sell, therefore it must be because of piracy"
Yes, that's true in part. Maybe if you sat where I do and heard people tell you, "I'd buy that but I've already downloaded it" you would understand the impact of piracy.
It's incredibly common for my customers to download and watch an anime series and then come in to my shop and buy a related manga or toy. Sure, I get some business by people being aware of the property, but I also lose the business I would have had by selling the DVDs.
Incidently, manga and comics piracy is really starting to take off too...
Hi there,
I had art classes for quite a while but I had trouble finding regular teachers and after a year let the classes peter out.
I also had rentals for the first 18 months but I heard from my customers many times that they hated to drive all the way out to my store to return the videos. I tried increasing the rental period to 7 days but it wasn't enough to spark regular rental business. Take a $30 disc--that probably costs me about $18. To make a profit renting it (at $5 a pop), it needs to turn around 3 times before I drop it on my used rack. Some titles (like Fruits Basket and Ninja Scroll) are very popular and would turn around pretty well. Others (like Z-Mind or DNA2) would just sit there sadly waiting for someone to pick it up.
It's awesome that those methods work for some anime stores. My shop wasn't in the best location to leverage those ideas though.
You should walk a mile in my shoes before slamming me.
I floated on the dot-com balloon and invest all my savings into my shop. I also put my own sweat and labor into it. The first year that I was open I took about 10 days off (including Thanksgiving and Christmas)--that's 10 days off over 12 months. If you hear violins behind me maybe it's because I feel entitled to a little self pity on the day that the curtains fall on all I've worked on. I won't get to see my best and favorite people each week; I won't have the day-to-day pleasure of running my own shop. If you've never dedicated your entire life to a risky project only to never see it succeed the way you imagined it, you'll never understand what I'm feeling.
I'm not "blaming my customers" as you put it, although I do feel some bitterness. I blame myself for not being able to better judge how badly piracy would harm my business. It's not the number one factor of my shop closing, but it's a very close two. If you want to, you can stick your head in the sand and insist that piracy doesn't hurt business--but it does. And it's something that many of my most loyal customers do. They don't do it to be malicious--it's just that anime is very expensive and it doesn't come out in America fast enough to suit their wants.
So, what do you think the anime producers could have done to change the effects of piracy
In my opinion anime publishers needed (and still need) to do four things:
1. Release anime at a much better price point. I hated having to sell anime at $29.99 a disc, but considering some of the margins I had to work with I didn't have much wiggle room. Multiply that by 6 or 8 and you end up paying up to (or over) $200 for a series. In my opinion they need to charge about $3-$5 dollar an episode and pack 4-5 episodes on each disc. Currently, publishers like Geneon frequently charge up to $10 an episode (3 on a $30 disc). It's just too expensive.
2. Add value to the disc with extras like posters, stickers, lapel pins, pencil boards, and other collectibles. Those really appeal to collectors and can't be digitally duplicated.
3. Add value to the translations. ADV has done a nice job with some of their releases such as Excel Saga. The Japanese and English audio are there, but what's really excellent are the multiple subtitle modes which illustrate sign names, pop up information about puns or Japanese idioms, and generally inform the viewer on why the producers have added those elements to the show.
4. *CRACK DOWN ON PIRACY* A search on Ebay on any popular anime series will bring back dozens of hits for illegal pirate copies. I have had dozens of "customers" who want to buy Cowboy Bebop, DBZ, or other popular box sets and only expect to pay $25 like they would on Ebay. As a small store owner I have no power to crack down on the pirates myself. I've tried to call ADV, Geneon and Central Park to find out what their anti-pirate strategies are but I've never received a return phone call.
Maybe I should ask a different way: what worked?
1: Manga, especially in 2004. That was a huge year for me. However Barnes & Noble and Borders began to really stock their manga sections and that put a knife in the belly of my business.
2: Character goods like toys and t-shirts
3: Used anime. I didn't do a lot of business in it, but the margins are fat, fat, fat.
Truly I'm not being disingenuous--My convention business will only be part time and I'm eliminating all DVDs from my inventory. Likewise, I will no longer stock anime music CDs. At one point 40% of my inventory was in DVDs. I can't wait until it becomes 0%.
Taking my show on the road will be part-time work for me. I'll probably make between 6-8k a year as a convention exhibitor which makes it a profitabble side venture but not anything I can rely on to pay all my bills. Yes, that means I'll be taking a part time job (I'll be taking university classes too).
Of course my home page puts the best spin on it as possible. I'm currently working on an 'autopsy report' to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and how to best approach the business in the future.
P.S. it's not sir
Today is the last day that my anime store, Otakurama, will be open. I've felt pressure from many directions over the years, but the two biggest factors working against my business are 1: competition from mass market retailers like Best Buy and Borders, and 2: piracy.
Number 2 is a big one--I would guess that at least half of my customers download anime from bittorrent. I've had hundreds of people tell me, "oh that series is great!" before it's even come out. Of course, once they download it they don't want to buy it.
The only anime that sells in my shop are the most popular titles. Anything cool but unusual just sits and rots on my shelf.
A smaller (but important) factor is that anime publishers change the prices of their products so quickly that discs 'expire' while sitting on my shelf waiting for a buyer. Six months after the last disc of a series comes out they release the entire box set for 50%-66% off. That causes orphans to clutter up my inventory.
*sigh*
Bye-bye, Otakurama
What the heck is this guy von Tetzchner smoking? Doesn't he realize yet that nobody cares about the technical details? People (web developers, plugin writers, users) only care about the big numbers. They don't want to think about the results, they only want to know: who is first, and by how much? Is the second place browser big enough to notice?
Opera is nice, but the Opera execs should realize already that they can't sell their browser when their customers can download a perfectly good one for free.
"I certainly wouldn't be at this company doing what I'm doing if I wasn't absolutely sure that we're going to launch a product."
If you're still working for the company, obviously you're waiting for the payoff. Having this type of confidence in your employers doesn't translate into real-world guarantees that the business is going to launch the product.
This is modern American workplace's version of Stockholm Syndrome. Good luck, kiddo.
You're right. It's been so long that I'd forgotten. I remember after it changed names I refused to believe it was named after a stinky Clint Eastwood movie and so my brain somehow wanted to call it Foxfire instead. Looks like my brain let me down one more time.
Stupid brain!
Well, the truth is that I was using f06f143 back in 1998 when it was just a series of hex codes, but it wasn't as stable as Internet Explorer so I just had to wait for it to cook a while longer.