1. I am a young, enterprising computer programmer. Joel knows why he cares, but I'll share it with you since you asked. His target market for the software FogCreek writes is my type. This is why his blog / writings target me as well. Joel cares because I may buy his software later, or help him write software in the future.
Prestigeous software is something that is hands down better than the competition, possibly even something that hasn't ever been done before. Prestigeous software is not something that could have an equally valid title of Yet Another Software Suite. The reason I say he should pursue something a little more ambititous is that it should put his word to the test. After all, his entire business is driven by prestige.
I don't think Joel presents himself as a software engineer. Unless you confuse engineering with management. They both have lots of numbers, but engineering's goal is a product, management's goal is dollars. That doesn't mean Joel's a bad person, it's just that he doesn't write about software engineering. I don't remember reading anything about how useful or not useful UML is among the worlds greatest programmers.
I appreciate Joel's stuff because he isn't Steve Jobs, and the world isn't Better With Apple. By this I mean that Joel has serious content and his company doesn't represent some wierd Californian lifestyle writ into a computer company. I don't appreciate that what I read is influenced by my spending habits, but every written word today is.
I want to agree with him, that the best coders are nessecary, but I don't quite trust the data. I can't seem to find the data he used. But I'm willing to chalk that up to my being lazy and his inside connections.
But even if the data is true, what does that prove? What you're looking for is people who can do things correctly, and do them correctly quickly. Time to market matters, folks. He esablishes that there isn't a great correlation, but if anything, we should recognize that the highest concentration of students in his plot are exactly in that low time / high score area. The lack of correlation isn't a proof of anything; maybe it's just random, and if they tried another experiment you'd all get the same patterns with totally different grades. For his theory to hold true, the statistics should show that there are people who can code quickly and correctly.
Finally, it's not like the iPod was awesome, and perfect in every way since the day it was made. They've been through several revisions, since the first one that made its own click noises without a speaker. More importantly, the original iPod was practically complete by the time Jonathon Ives got around to dicking with it. The GBASP is nearly as seemless, and you can still replace the rechargable battery with a little knowledge and a screwdriver. What propelled the 3rd gen iPod was a huge advertising campaign and a bigger drive.
In this case, we're simply listening to Joel preach on about how important Egos and Personalities are to the computers business. I might suggest that he's got some investment in that opinion that clouds his judgement.
Joel worked for microsoft on one of their only in house from the start projects: Excel. The spreadsheet features a lot of programability and I hear it even had its own compiler or something for a while. That's his biggest credential, it seems. Oh, and I think he worked for Juno, a competitor to AOL, for a while.
That said, you're exactly right. Joel takes that single fact, which could amount to perhaps one line in a resume or perhaps a single question in an interview, and basically writes a book about it. His self promoting writings usually border on fluff, especially you're already in possession of an MBA. But I think that there are times where what he writes speaks volumes to things that average techies don't know nearly enough about: selling software as a business.
I don't think there are ton's of engineers out there with MBA's, and probably fewer still that have the knowledge and experience to successfully sell software to people. Microsoft, the biggest software company out there is best described as a software trader, rather than software developer. Excel is an anolmoly which serves Joel well. His articles at least give one the appearance of real world data and justification, with good explainations of simple business concepts to boot.
But to really gain any standing with me, FogCreek really needs to create something of prestige, instead of building trivial software out of what appears to be the small financial empire of a former Microsoftie. Also, it might help if they didn't spell their bug tracking system with a Z.
At least for Ubuntu, yes, it overwrites the MBR, but it still lets you boot Windows. As I recall, windows habitually copies the bootloader to the first sector of its partition. So Ubuntu will find this, and create a working entry in your grub configuration. It's not perfect, but if you're running something vastly non-standard (like some triple boot scheme with win32/linux/qnx) you've at least got the tools on hand to get the job done without resorting to a hex editor and an overzelous familiarity with the boot loader ASM.
On the other hand, Apple treats developers somewhere between equally bad as MS and worse. Think of all the nifty features in OSX, and most of them started life as third party products that Apple decided to reimplement and give away with the next version of OSX. At least Microsoft has the benevolence of buying somebody out for their new features.
The only real reason Apple doesn't have to treat its customers like thieves is that you already paid them through your own asshole for the hardware. I'm not sure what else the Infineon chip is good for aside from preventing operating systems not on the Palladium congress from running.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you weren't intentionally misleading. Maybe you just missed the last twenty years. The US industrial sector has been on a serious decline for a long time. Just ask Pittsburgh. The only signficant US exports are software, entertainment and food, and food isn't a guarentee if we continue to reduce subsidies and tarriffs.
Ford, GM and other American auto companies are doing poorly. They've been having to give out record incentives (ie five thousand dollars cash back) just to get people in. GM's widely imitated 'you pay what we pay' trick wasn't enough to put them in the black last quarter. There's an old joke about it: "losing money on every sale and making up for it in volume."
Scarcity is a fact, but Intellectual Property creates an artificial scarcity. In a totally free market, it wouldn't be illegal to copy software. I'm pretty sure you know what would happen to the price households pay. Society strikes a deal with a narrow group of people capable of creating software because it thinks the free market alone cannot meet the public's needs for software (or because the special interest has persuaded the majority of 535 significant people in DC).
I agree that economic terrorism is a hyperbole for anything short of China placing satellites in orbit broadcasting software codes 24 hours a day.
I think you're putting far too much faith into the system. Two weeks after arrival it becomes a contest to see who can imbibe the MOST in a 24 hour period, with all time high scores.
This is simply another step in the chain of Linux evolution. The old way of doing things was simply cumbersome and probably cost Linux some stability and features by inefficiently wasting developers time. Backporting a feature like a VM to an older kernel like 2.4 wasn't a simple task.
It may be decided in the future that the new system can't handle radical new changes the way the old system can. This is the most likely scenario for going back.
The only really great novel of his I've enjoyed was Ender's Game, and even that has had it's criticisms (Apology for Hitler, etc). As usual, I think he has a generally correct point, but his details are somehow flawed.
The man suggests that concentrating on a 19 inch screen (monitor or your average TV) somehow increases peripheral vision. If that was somehow part of the study's conclusions, then at the very least Card should be explaining why this occurs.
And I can't say that I agree with the statement that obediance to the law in all cases is an American principle. Card's opinion here seems to be mostly a Brigham Young dictator and prophet worshipping culture that surrounds Utah. The America I read about was founded by people who asserted a inherant moral right to rise against unfair laws. But this was basically an aside, put forth to remind people that he's a mormon, because a personal blog is a great place to make a political statement.
Card also suggests that the majority of games are non-violent. That might be true, but the most popular games, the most widely played games are. At any given point in time, there's more people playing Halflife shooters than all of Yahoo! games in the US. Strategy games, the kind that involve recognizing a situation, coming up with a solution, and analysing the results to repeat the process, all revolve around violence and war. I've yet to see a fascinating game on the exploits of serial entrepeneurs. Strategy games first and foremost are an abstraction of war. Unfortunately it hurts his argument to describe the truth here. At least, with people who aren't convinced that games are beneficial. Even the study used a violent game: Medal of Honor. Another ww2 themed first person shooter.
But generally, yea, games are social tools. Many people will discount games without a multiplayer option, and some even go so far as to say that single player games are more accurately labelled "puzzles".
Well, Nintendo's been on about the overall decline of gaming in Japan for a while now, and they've been promoting their DS as a solution to the problem. I haven't been able to find anything on Nintendo's earnings report to verify, but my traditional sources are US centric.
Without being able to read the fine details, the decline probably revolves around a lot. This quarter was relatively empty on the Gamecube; this is traditional among game makers, their big hits come in the Christmas gift-giving season. The DS really only had one big game for them: Nintendogs. While it did sell quite well, and broke into many non-traditional demographic groups, a single game can't really carry em. And while the DS is supposed to be the 3rd pillar of Nintendo gaming, it seems to truly be the replacement for the GBA, which is in decline and appears to be throwing a last hurrah this Thanksgiving. Another thing is that Nintendo traditionally invests a good part of their short term savings in US dollars, and a lot of their operations work in dollars. So when the price falls, they lose Yen, and everything costs them more. Overall, I think the strategy has helped them overcome the various problems the Yen and Japanese economy had over the past ten years, but it can crop up in times like this.
The good news is that they're on track for an excellent quarter. Twilight Princess should break some records and move some more Cubes. August appears to be the day in which the DS will explode onto the US mainstream with both Nintendogs and DS Wars on the same day. Now that's a back to school special. Jump Superstars is already looking to be a rather big hit in Japan for the DS, judging by preorders. It could also well be that Nintendo is paying forward a lot of money for advertising in the near future for all these big hits. Finally, remember that they're still making money, just not as much as the last quarter, which saw the sale of a couple million Dual Screens and games. Given that the market is up on their stock at the moment, you might expect next quarter to really take off if their plans succeed.
It's just a summer slowdown, probably happens nearly every year, only less pronounced when they aren't also launching a new handheld the previous quarter.
Some of the nifty new features of Vista that might not go over so well with gamers: 1. Restricted user mode. This is already available on XP, Vista just makes the transition easier. The problem is that virtually every game makes this useless. Thanks to the incredible distrust of their market, PC game makers require players to allow their games to run as Admin, and don't apologize when remote exploits in their netcode appear two days after release. So basically, this is worthless.
2. New shiny interface. The shine lasts for all of about 30 seconds while you're not playing games. After that, every game out there takes the whole screen and re-invents the entire user interface. I'd wager that a number of gamers may simply attempt to turn back the wheels of time, back to the generally familiar win98 style, as they did for XP.
3. 64bit. I hope the fundamental reason for this change is a long ways off. The largest hurdle is owning a 64 bit processor. Despite AMD having a 64bit line promoted as a gamer's system for some time, Intel's (much larger) side has only just begun. The other big hurdle is device driver support. When switching to 64bit for the performance, you need your drivers to have the extra 32 bits as well. To make matters worse, some games don't work well on a 64bit OS, or sometimes copy protection kicks in when it shouldn't.
4. DirectX 10. Not sure what extras they plan to add, but it will probably include me buying a new video card. Sucky.
While one and three are largely the fault of game makers, part of Microsoft's task here is to reign them in, however possible. Aside from increased performance for free, the one thing I think gamers everywhere could appreciate is an enforced security model that finally curbs the tide of spyware and popups. Nothing like missing a sniper shot because some dipshit program would really like to let you know about online degrees from the university of phoenix!
More importantly, what people are upset about is content that you'd still have to actively pursue in order to find. It's not like a very much more legitimate complaint about nine year olds doing a report on the White House and finding themselves innundated with the sort of graphic pornography. Granted, Whitehouse.com no longer exhibits this, but I can only imagine there's others involved.
I digress. There's a difference between shielding children from a very devolved representation of sexuality and keeping it away from people who actively seek it. Those who are calling for the destruction of R* fail to make that important distinction, possibly because they see no value whatsoever in pornography itself.
Clearly there's some spin going on. I think I'll just wait a few more years on that purchase, just like I waited on that DVD burner when the standards were crazy and dual was a four letter word (as in dual layer).
If you're trying to demonstrate the advantages of OSS over the rest to the ordinary office person, you've picked a challenge. The benefit of OSS is that anyone can examine and alter the source. The traditional OSS development model also builds a community of people who develop and share ideas related to that source.
Your challenge is to make looking at source code and changing it fun for people who may not nessecarily have the skills to do so. It may very well be that although OSS is beneficial to a company, it is not of direct use to many of the people you serve. Several people have suggested FrozenBubble, but in as much as you demonstrate Open Source principles, you might as well have used Snood.
Whatever you do, there should be a take-away that the accountants and everyone else you assist can observe in action in your demo. Perhaps you can intro a game, ask for some quick suggested changes, and introduce them into the game. If you can't, then you're just highlighting that your company isn't capable of utilizing OSS to its full capacity.
While I can appreciate someone who is fond of ye olde Nintendo, there is a counter argument. SC2 sold well to the cube audience, but if you consider SC3 to be a product that caters more to the audience on the ps2 that didn't buy last time might make the franchise more popular overall. As for the exclusity, I can only imagine that they expect the sales boost from the other two franchises to not be worth the extra cost. Or hats of money, but that seems a bit silly.
Basically, you have no sense of business. Follow the money. The games industry is an industry first, an art a distant second.
and you took CS as a minor, then they don't trust your institution. They are giving a clear signal that they don't trust your grades, degree and accreditation of that degree to indicate your aptitude for their program. I would think twice.
It's the wifi part thats the problem. Writing open source drivers is usually terribly difficult without the proper specs on the hardware. Just ask that guy trying to write an OSS atheros driver.
Remember that KC has a stupid electric system, rivaled by that of California. Only more expensive. When people were bitching about the price hike, they were still paying half of what we pay.
The whole article hinges on the financial and economic theory that cost (ie price) is an indicator of worth. The difference between the two is called consumer surplus, and in theory businesses attempt to "capture" that surplus by attempting to charge you more for it. In markets where we can't charge specific customers exactly what they're willing to pay, the price is simply the one that maximizes revenue. Not that there's any way to really know which price maximizes revenue.
Also, consider your alternative: hiring an outside accountant to handle your books. Surely he would cost less than the worth you're implying. And surely he costs more than 230 pounds plus the headaches of managing an emulator and finances by yourself.
I suspect that there's several things that you couldn't do your business without. The article's point is that they all come together, and you can't say that each one is equal in value to the revenue you make.
Of course, software generally does break one of the foundational rules of economics: scarcity. At least, on the margin, software is essentially not scarce. Or at least, not 30 percent margins like they earn. Copyright law drives the high margins on software. Whether this is good or bad seems to depend a great deal on whether you're an american or not. I suspect an even stronger indicator would be whether you own stock in MS or Oracle or IBM or not.
I believe the problem with Microsoft wasn't that it was giving away software for free, but that it was rolling in software with it's OS, effectively bundling their new software with new computers and leveraging their enourmous monopoly. In contrast, Google is competing on a level playing field; at any moment someone could introduce a similar product based on advertising and cut into their game, unless you wish to claim that Google has a monopoly on advertising and has been leveraging that monopoly.
or at least over my willingness to think hard on a saturday evening. But when you consider arbitrage of software and support contracts, isn't there a problem, that the support is worthless without the software? When you buy a "score" you're paying for a revenue stream, and when you buy the "prime," you're getting the right to vote at stockholder meetings. I don't pretend to know who gets what in case of a liquidation and return to investors. I suspect the prime gets the money in that case.
But my point is that both of these have some value. What can a person who doesn't have a Mac do with an applecare contract? Nothing, except sell it to another Mac user. In this case, I would expect the sum to be greater than the parts, because the support contract value depends on whether you possess the software or not. I think this should nix the informal poll on the value of software without support, though I could be wrong. I'd imagine that if you polled the same community about the value of support without price, and added up the totals, you'd come out way short of any reasonable market prices, and reason is simply because support is only valuable with software added in.
The only good thing here is that OSS generally pushes the price of software down to zero, by forcing you to allow competitors. But few companies attempt to do anything close to the kinds of equivilence arbitrage requires. Redhat doesn't offer a free version of Redhat Enterprise without support, and they don't sell support for Fedora Core.
Certainly, pricing is a delicate subject that can't be made in a four hour period for a TV show about entrepeneurs.
I subscribe to a couple monthly mailing lists that could probably be considered spam, in the advertising products for sale at an online store sense. What works about it is it's opt-in, and the opt out works perfectly.
As for administrating such a list, just make sure that a) the people on the list might want the things you're advertising. this is basically up to the agency, not you. Its doubtful that if you feel something isn't going to work you can persuade anyone. b) the list should keep people's addresses private, as in no bulk mailtos. simple common sense, that's probably already in place c) replies should probably get forwarded to somewhere where your client can access and review them. remember that you're not just concerned about the potential customers, but the client as well.
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1. I am a young, enterprising computer programmer. Joel knows why he cares, but I'll share it with you since you asked. His target market for the software FogCreek writes is my type. This is why his blog / writings target me as well. Joel cares because I may buy his software later, or help him write software in the future.
Prestigeous software is something that is hands down better than the competition, possibly even something that hasn't ever been done before. Prestigeous software is not something that could have an equally valid title of Yet Another Software Suite. The reason I say he should pursue something a little more ambititous is that it should put his word to the test. After all, his entire business is driven by prestige.
I don't think Joel presents himself as a software engineer. Unless you confuse engineering with management. They both have lots of numbers, but engineering's goal is a product, management's goal is dollars. That doesn't mean Joel's a bad person, it's just that he doesn't write about software engineering. I don't remember reading anything about how useful or not useful UML is among the worlds greatest programmers.
I appreciate Joel's stuff because he isn't Steve Jobs, and the world isn't Better With Apple. By this I mean that Joel has serious content and his company doesn't represent some wierd Californian lifestyle writ into a computer company. I don't appreciate that what I read is influenced by my spending habits, but every written word today is.
I want to agree with him, that the best coders are nessecary, but I don't quite trust the data. I can't seem to find the data he used. But I'm willing to chalk that up to my being lazy and his inside connections.
But even if the data is true, what does that prove? What you're looking for is people who can do things correctly, and do them correctly quickly. Time to market matters, folks. He esablishes that there isn't a great correlation, but if anything, we should recognize that the highest concentration of students in his plot are exactly in that low time / high score area. The lack of correlation isn't a proof of anything; maybe it's just random, and if they tried another experiment you'd all get the same patterns with totally different grades. For his theory to hold true, the statistics should show that there are people who can code quickly and correctly.
Finally, it's not like the iPod was awesome, and perfect in every way since the day it was made. They've been through several revisions, since the first one that made its own click noises without a speaker. More importantly, the original iPod was practically complete by the time Jonathon Ives got around to dicking with it. The GBASP is nearly as seemless, and you can still replace the rechargable battery with a little knowledge and a screwdriver. What propelled the 3rd gen iPod
was a huge advertising campaign and a bigger drive.
In this case, we're simply listening to Joel preach on about how important Egos and Personalities are to the computers business. I might suggest that he's got some investment in that opinion that clouds his judgement.
Joel worked for microsoft on one of their only in house from the start projects: Excel. The spreadsheet features a lot of programability and I hear it even had its own compiler or something for a while. That's his biggest credential, it seems. Oh, and I think he worked for Juno, a competitor to AOL, for a while.
That said, you're exactly right. Joel takes that single fact, which could amount to perhaps one line in a resume or perhaps a single question in an interview, and basically writes a book about it. His self promoting writings usually border on fluff, especially you're already in possession of an MBA. But I think that there are times where what he writes speaks volumes to things that average techies don't know nearly enough about: selling software as a business.
I don't think there are ton's of engineers out there with MBA's, and probably fewer still that have the knowledge and experience to successfully sell software to people. Microsoft, the biggest software company out there is best described as a software trader, rather than software developer. Excel is an anolmoly which serves Joel well. His articles at least give one the appearance of real world data and justification, with good explainations of simple business concepts to boot.
But to really gain any standing with me, FogCreek really needs to create something of prestige, instead of building trivial software out of what appears to be the small financial empire of a former Microsoftie. Also, it might help if they didn't spell their bug tracking system with a Z.
At least for Ubuntu, yes, it overwrites the MBR, but it still lets you boot Windows. As I recall, windows habitually copies the bootloader to the first sector of its partition. So Ubuntu will find this, and create a working entry in your grub configuration. It's not perfect, but if you're running something vastly non-standard (like some triple boot scheme with win32/linux/qnx) you've at least got the tools on hand to get the job done without resorting to a hex editor and an overzelous familiarity with the boot loader ASM.
On the other hand, Apple treats developers somewhere between equally bad as MS and worse. Think of all the nifty features in OSX, and most of them started life as third party products that Apple decided to reimplement and give away with the next version of OSX. At least Microsoft has the benevolence of buying somebody out for their new features.
The only real reason Apple doesn't have to treat its customers like thieves is that you already paid them through your own asshole for the hardware. I'm not sure what else the Infineon chip is good for aside from preventing operating systems not on the Palladium congress from running.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you weren't intentionally misleading. Maybe you just missed the last twenty years. The US industrial sector has been on a serious decline for a long time. Just ask Pittsburgh. The only signficant US exports are software, entertainment and food, and food isn't a guarentee if we continue to reduce subsidies and tarriffs.
Ford, GM and other American auto companies are doing poorly. They've been having to give out record incentives (ie five thousand dollars cash back) just to get people in. GM's widely imitated 'you pay what we pay' trick wasn't enough to put them in the black last quarter. There's an old joke about it: "losing money on every sale and making up for it in volume."
Scarcity is a fact, but Intellectual Property creates an artificial scarcity. In a totally free market, it wouldn't be illegal to copy software. I'm pretty sure you know what would happen to the price households pay. Society strikes a deal with a narrow group of people capable of creating software because it thinks the free market alone cannot meet the public's needs for software (or because the special interest has persuaded the majority of 535 significant people in DC).
I agree that economic terrorism is a hyperbole for anything short of China placing satellites in orbit broadcasting software codes 24 hours a day.
I think you're putting far too much faith into the system. Two weeks after arrival it becomes a contest to see who can imbibe the MOST in a 24 hour period, with all time high scores.
This is simply another step in the chain of Linux evolution. The old way of doing things was simply cumbersome and probably cost Linux some stability and features by inefficiently wasting developers time. Backporting a feature like a VM to an older kernel like 2.4 wasn't a simple task.
It may be decided in the future that the new system can't handle radical new changes the way the old system can. This is the most likely scenario for going back.
The only really great novel of his I've enjoyed was Ender's Game, and even that has had it's criticisms (Apology for Hitler, etc). As usual, I think he has a generally correct point, but his details are somehow flawed.
The man suggests that concentrating on a 19 inch screen (monitor or your average TV) somehow increases peripheral vision. If that was somehow part of the study's conclusions, then at the very least Card should be explaining why this occurs.
And I can't say that I agree with the statement that obediance to the law in all cases is an American principle. Card's opinion here seems to be mostly a Brigham Young dictator and prophet worshipping culture that surrounds Utah. The America I read about was founded by people who asserted a inherant moral right to rise against unfair laws. But this was basically an aside, put forth to remind people that he's a mormon, because a personal blog is a great place to make a political statement.
Card also suggests that the majority of games are non-violent. That might be true, but the most popular games, the most widely played games are. At any given point in time, there's more people playing Halflife shooters than all of Yahoo! games in the US. Strategy games, the kind that involve recognizing a situation, coming up with a solution, and analysing the results to repeat the process, all revolve around violence and war. I've yet to see a fascinating game on the exploits of serial entrepeneurs. Strategy games first and foremost are an abstraction of war. Unfortunately it hurts his argument to describe the truth here. At least, with people who aren't convinced that games are beneficial. Even the study used a violent game: Medal of Honor. Another ww2 themed first person shooter.
But generally, yea, games are social tools. Many people will discount games without a multiplayer option, and some even go so far as to say that single player games are more accurately labelled "puzzles".
Does anybody still play Hanafunda?
Well, Nintendo's been on about the overall decline of gaming in Japan for a while now, and they've been promoting their DS as a solution to the problem. I haven't been able to find anything on Nintendo's earnings report to verify, but my traditional sources are US centric.
Without being able to read the fine details, the decline probably revolves around a lot. This quarter was relatively empty on the Gamecube; this is traditional among game makers, their big hits come in the Christmas gift-giving season. The DS really only had one big game for them: Nintendogs. While it did sell quite well, and broke into many non-traditional demographic groups, a single game can't really carry em. And while the DS is supposed to be the 3rd pillar of Nintendo gaming, it seems to truly be the replacement for the GBA, which is in decline and appears to be throwing a last hurrah this Thanksgiving. Another thing is that Nintendo traditionally invests a good part of their short term savings in US dollars, and a lot of their operations work in dollars. So when the price falls, they lose Yen, and everything costs them more. Overall, I think the strategy has helped them overcome the various problems the Yen and Japanese economy had over the past ten years, but it can crop up in times like this.
The good news is that they're on track for an excellent quarter. Twilight Princess should break some records and move some more Cubes. August appears to be the day in which the DS will explode onto the US mainstream with both Nintendogs and DS Wars on the same day. Now that's a back to school special. Jump Superstars is already looking to be a rather big hit in Japan for the DS, judging by preorders. It could also well be that Nintendo is paying forward a lot of money for advertising in the near future for all these big hits. Finally, remember that they're still making money, just not as much as the last quarter, which saw the sale of a couple million Dual Screens and games. Given that the market is up on their stock at the moment, you might expect next quarter to really take off if their plans succeed.
It's just a summer slowdown, probably happens nearly every year, only less pronounced when they aren't also launching a new handheld the previous quarter.
Some of the nifty new features of Vista that might not go over so well with gamers:
1. Restricted user mode. This is already available on XP, Vista just makes the transition easier. The problem is that virtually every game makes this useless. Thanks to the incredible distrust of their market, PC game makers require players to allow their games to run as Admin, and don't apologize when remote exploits in their netcode appear two days after release. So basically, this is worthless.
2. New shiny interface. The shine lasts for all of about 30 seconds while you're not playing games. After that, every game out there takes the whole screen and re-invents the entire user interface. I'd wager that a number of gamers may simply attempt to turn back the wheels of time, back to the generally familiar win98 style, as they did for XP.
3. 64bit. I hope the fundamental reason for this change is a long ways off. The largest hurdle is owning a 64 bit processor. Despite AMD having a 64bit line promoted as a gamer's system for some time, Intel's (much larger) side has only just begun. The other big hurdle is device driver support. When switching to 64bit for the performance, you need your drivers to have the extra 32 bits as well. To make matters worse, some games don't work well on a 64bit OS, or sometimes copy protection kicks in when it shouldn't.
4. DirectX 10. Not sure what extras they plan to add, but it will probably include me buying a new video card. Sucky.
While one and three are largely the fault of game makers, part of Microsoft's task here is to reign them in, however possible. Aside from increased performance for free, the one thing I think gamers everywhere could appreciate is an enforced security model that finally curbs the tide of spyware and popups. Nothing like missing a sniper shot because some dipshit program would really like to let you know about online degrees from the university of phoenix!
More importantly, what people are upset about is content that you'd still have to actively pursue in order to find. It's not like a very much more legitimate complaint about nine year olds doing a report on the White House and finding themselves innundated with the sort of graphic pornography. Granted, Whitehouse.com no longer exhibits this, but I can only imagine there's others involved.
I digress. There's a difference between shielding children from a very devolved representation of sexuality and keeping it away from people who actively seek it. Those who are calling for the destruction of R* fail to make that important distinction, possibly because they see no value whatsoever in pornography itself.
Clearly there's some spin going on. I think I'll just wait a few more years on that purchase, just like I waited on that DVD burner when the standards were crazy and dual was a four letter word (as in dual layer).
Is that you, Seumas Blachley? Kudos on the XBox job!
If you're trying to demonstrate the advantages of OSS over the rest to the ordinary office person, you've picked a challenge. The benefit of OSS is that anyone can examine and alter the source. The traditional OSS development model also builds a community of people who develop and share ideas related to that source.
Your challenge is to make looking at source code and changing it fun for people who may not nessecarily have the skills to do so. It may very well be that although OSS is beneficial to a company, it is not of direct use to many of the people you serve. Several people have suggested FrozenBubble, but in as much as you demonstrate Open Source principles, you might as well have used Snood.
Whatever you do, there should be a take-away that the accountants and everyone else you assist can observe in action in your demo. Perhaps you can intro a game, ask for some quick suggested changes, and introduce them into the game. If you can't, then you're just highlighting that your company isn't capable of utilizing OSS to its full capacity.
Adventure gaming is dead. Editorialists speculate it killed itself.
While I can appreciate someone who is fond of ye olde Nintendo, there is a counter argument. SC2 sold well to the cube audience, but if you consider SC3 to be a product that caters more to the audience on the ps2 that didn't buy last time might make the franchise more popular overall. As for the exclusity, I can only imagine that they expect the sales boost from the other two franchises to not be worth the extra cost. Or hats of money, but that seems a bit silly.
Basically, you have no sense of business. Follow the money. The games industry is an industry first, an art a distant second.
and you took CS as a minor, then they don't trust your institution. They are giving a clear signal that they don't trust your grades, degree and accreditation of that degree to indicate your aptitude for their program. I would think twice.
It's the wifi part thats the problem. Writing open source drivers is usually terribly difficult without the proper specs on the hardware. Just ask that guy trying to write an OSS atheros driver.
Remember that KC has a stupid electric system, rivaled by that of California. Only more expensive. When people were bitching about the price hike, they were still paying half of what we pay.
The whole article hinges on the financial and economic theory that cost (ie price) is an indicator of worth. The difference between the two is called consumer surplus, and in theory businesses attempt to "capture" that surplus by attempting to charge you more for it. In markets where we can't charge specific customers exactly what they're willing to pay, the price is simply the one that maximizes revenue. Not that there's any way to really know which price maximizes revenue.
Also, consider your alternative: hiring an outside accountant to handle your books. Surely he would cost less than the worth you're implying. And surely he costs more than 230 pounds plus the headaches of managing an emulator and finances by yourself.
I suspect that there's several things that you couldn't do your business without. The article's point is that they all come together, and you can't say that each one is equal in value to the revenue you make.
Of course, software generally does break one of the foundational rules of economics: scarcity. At least, on the margin, software is essentially not scarce. Or at least, not 30 percent margins like they earn. Copyright law drives the high margins on software. Whether this is good or bad seems to depend a great deal on whether you're an american or not. I suspect an even stronger indicator would be whether you own stock in MS or Oracle or IBM or not.
I believe the problem with Microsoft wasn't that it was giving away software for free, but that it was rolling in software with it's OS, effectively bundling their new software with new computers and leveraging their enourmous monopoly. In contrast, Google is competing on a level playing field; at any moment someone could introduce a similar product based on advertising and cut into their game, unless you wish to claim that Google has a monopoly on advertising and has been leveraging that monopoly.
or at least over my willingness to think hard on a saturday evening. But when you consider arbitrage of software and support contracts, isn't there a problem, that the support is worthless without the software? When you buy a "score" you're paying for a revenue stream, and when you buy the "prime," you're getting the right to vote at stockholder meetings. I don't pretend to know who gets what in case of a liquidation and return to investors. I suspect the prime gets the money in that case.
But my point is that both of these have some value. What can a person who doesn't have a Mac do with an applecare contract? Nothing, except sell it to another Mac user. In this case, I would expect the sum to be greater than the parts, because the support contract value depends on whether you possess the software or not. I think this should nix the informal poll on the value of software without support, though I could be wrong. I'd imagine that if you polled the same community about the value of support without price, and added up the totals, you'd come out way short of any reasonable market prices, and reason is simply because support is only valuable with software added in.
The only good thing here is that OSS generally pushes the price of software down to zero, by forcing you to allow competitors. But few companies attempt to do anything close to the kinds of equivilence arbitrage requires. Redhat doesn't offer a free version of Redhat Enterprise without support, and they don't sell support for Fedora Core.
Certainly, pricing is a delicate subject that can't be made in a four hour period for a TV show about entrepeneurs.
I subscribe to a couple monthly mailing lists that could probably be considered spam, in the advertising products for sale at an online store sense. What works about it is it's opt-in, and the opt out works perfectly.
As for administrating such a list, just make sure that
a) the people on the list might want the things you're advertising. this is basically up to the agency, not you. Its doubtful that if you feel something isn't going to work you can persuade anyone.
b) the list should keep people's addresses private, as in no bulk mailtos. simple common sense, that's probably already in place
c) replies should probably get forwarded to somewhere where your client can access and review them. remember that you're not just concerned about the potential customers, but the client as well.