The PS2 did very well for me, but the PSP has left me cold (and thus unpurchased). Looking at Metacritic, not a single game has cracked the 90+ ratings. Considering my time constraints, I don't usually bother with anything below 90 unless it is in a genre I like. That brings me to the genre problem: I loved my GBA because of the strong RPG and Strategy game showing... so far the showing has been especially weak in that regard on the PSP.)
I finally picked up a DS mostly because my GBA games work on it. Neither system has a strong game showing although I give the DS a very slight nod for my taste in portable games, such as Advanced Wars DS, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. My wife loves Nintendogs (the killer app for the DS if you ask me) and Animal Crossings. Meanwhile, the PSP is lacking in "cute" for her and strategy or RPG games for me. (Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade looked promising but was universally panned).
Chill. I was making a joke based on a presumed attitude of someone who would propose such a tax structure, not my opinion of abortion (which is that it should be available to those who want it without an overly intrusive government nanny).
Considering that in reality E3 is supposed to be an industry event (I have attended the seminars wearing my game programming hat) and yet recently it has become a giant circus similar to Comdex right before the collapse, I think this is a good move. The press day in particular will be helpful (more so that the clothing requirements): the poor people in the booths are besieged by loser fan boys while the real interviewers can be recognized by the desperate looks of someone under time pressure they wait for a bunch of store clerks to stop hassling their interview target. Or they just get pushy, which I don't blame them for.
Reducing the booth babe exposure (literally) won't prevent people from hiring pretty young women and placing them in the booths. I don't think that practice will ever end (check any other convention and see who is most prominently displayed in each booth: the best looking women of the company or some "spokeswoman" who they hired because the women at the company refused to be so exploited). It will hopefully reduce the circus like atmosphere and restore the event to something that industry actually interacts at.
(On the flip side of the coin, the private parties are even more outlandish than the show floor. Make of that what you will.)
An interesting idea, but the limited size (4GB) makes me wonder what the target market would be. More to the point, where would this solution be better than 4GB of RAM available to the platform? Yes, this thing has battery backup and sips power when the machine is off, so it acts somewhat like a drive, but I would have my doubts about trusting it with anything mission critical.
The performance tests show it did a great job as a high performance drive for simultanious requests for data on a web server, for example. But they didn't compare it to using the same 4GB onboard the server, which would be far more interesting... since the data is being "read" over a Serial ATA (which is puzzling since they are plugged into the bus), I can't imagine it being faster than using the memory to cache the data traditionally. The other examples, such as operating system boot time show that the operating system isn't read bound as much as one would think on boot.
I'm sure there are some specialist uses for this that will make sense, but I suspect most of them would be better served with 4GB of RAM disk or cache.
Good grief, I'm as big of a video game fan as anyone, but this isn't about video games but a scary way of thinking.
"I take the position that the Founding Fathers took: that the power to tax is the power to destroy. So our concept is that we need to tax things we don't want and you want to not tax things that you want to encourage.
Ah, there is the epitome of sustainable government taxation: tax things you want to destroy. Sometimes I wonder what powers these politicians... it sure isn't brains. See, if you succeed in destroying the taxed items, then you have no tax base. So destruction of the taxed items clearly can't be the goal in such a tax proposal: it would deny the government the monies it needs.
So if your goal isn't to destroy the "sin taxed" items (since under his model you only tax things you don't want) then the reality is that you want to encourage or sustain the sin taxed items to help raise funds. Ah, isn't that a great idea? Get elected by claiming that you will remove taxes from things ordinary good folk want, such as property, and shift the burden to evil gamers, loose women and sugar fiends. (Wow, has Texas really become so utopian that those were the worst they could find? My trip to the Dallas BoardGameGeek convention sure didn't make it seem that way.)
One wonders if the people are smart enough to realize that fully funding your government via sin taxes turns you into something similar to Las Vegas, where sin is fully encouraged as long as the taxes are collected. Of course, the prior story on politicians ignoring the facts probably explains this all away anyway.
I have an XBox, two PS2s and a game cube connected to my home LAN. Last round definately went to the PS2, with the XBox having superior technology (and Live was a great idea) but not as many games that I care about and the Nintendo having the best family/party games. (Checking my games, I have 34 PS2, 15 XBox and 12 Cube games on the shelf. I know I have traded in many more PS2 games than either of the others...)
This round I can't find interest in *any* of the new machines. The 360 is lacking a killer app: I'm not into the FPS on consoles (say hello to my mouse and keyboard noobs) and the rest of the offerings are pretty much nothing to write home about. The PS3 has backwards compatibility, which makes it more likely (screw you Microsoft for your choices of emulated games... my library of XBox games hates you) and the Revolution at least is *trying* to do something interesting while keeping costs down *and* including backward compatibility. I will probably pick up the Revolution when it comes out, wait for the PS3 to develop a library and flip Microsoft the bird since I will have to hang onto the massive box to finish up the games I have in the queue anyway.
Yes, I see how poorly Half Life 2 did. Sure there was some complaining, but the reality is that the consumer rolled over. Purchase a CD, install on PC and wait for the executable bits to download so you can play. I got my karma handed to me on a platter for suggesting that Steam was anything but a orgasmic experience here on Slashdot.
It's this creative diversity that makes the games industry so popular, and without sustained funding from new software sales, this could be at risk.
Here is how we will see the proliferation of "activation servers" and the like systems where purchasing a "used" copy of a game simply buys you a coaster. Copyrighted materials (in the US at least, and from the article the EC) are covered under the doctrine of first sale: once a work in "fixed form" is sold, that fixed form is transferable to anyone else by any method desired. The used book, CD and game industries survive only because of this doctrine.
Activation servers add an additional wrinkle to the mix: you can still legally sell the bits, but the activation code isn't going to work when you take it home. When you complain to the company, they will (correctly) tell you that the code has already been used. Thus, the idea of used games will be a thing of the past. Of course, so will be the idea of tossing an old CD into your machine and expecting it to do anything but say "activation server could not be reached".
All this will be couched in terms of "the benefit of the consumer" while in reality kicking them in the teeth.
That's nifty for him, but I did give it more than a passing thought. My comment wasn't a knee-jerk response to reading the article five seconds prior, but due to percolating thoughts that had been caused by reading and considering what he had to say a full week earlier. I was composing an item on the subjects he raised for my own site when Slashdot for it.
He makes some valid points: independently. However, the way that he bundled them makes no sense at all. His point that people are information grazers is already well understood. Most people *do* use search engines as "answer" engines. An extreme example of this is my use of "define: term" in the search box. When used like that, Google takes answers from a variety of sites and presents them directly. Normally, I don't need to even click the link. This *does* deny advertising dollars, so I hope that some other compensation has been negotiated for that feature.
However, he then tries to use information grazing as a negative in the context of commerce sites. Now again, I will grant that if all you want is a quick price, Froogle will get that for you without visiting the site (with the proviso being that the lowest price is probably some consumer nightmare, but that is a different topic). However, to actually purchase something, a visit to the site is necessary, at which point your ads, promotions and incentives are front and center. So information grazing only applies prior to attempting the sale. Which ironically was an opportunity derived from search engine use.
He goes even further though and assumes you are entering via a sponsored link that costs 99% of your net profits. That assumption appears to come from the idea that you must spend every dollar of profit to promote your site or someone else will and you will lose. If sites only showed the top one advertisement, then I guess he has a point. I know that I personally rarely click the sponsored link on top: I click the one that appears *appropriate*. Then again, people buy from spam e-mails products of questionable repute. Perhaps I'm an outlier.
His ideas of having alternative avenues for advertising then are presented as some kind of earth-shattering change where any real company will already have *many* avenues already in place. On top of that, his only "linked to more info" ideas are "spam the customer", "spam the customer some more" and "annoy the customer". These articles end up being mostly self promotion.
I'm sure there is *some* company out there that provides information that people graze and yet they don't actually intend on being an information provider (oops) and instead pin their hopes on "BtoB conversions". I call that company a dot com bubble dinosaur that managed to survive into the age of mammals and wouldn't invest heavily though. Meanwhile, Mr. Neilsen's best ideas appear to be behind him, and he just comes across as a cranky blogger with self promotion needs.
You make a good point; he was looking at a single transaction and not considering such things as long term repeat business nor the real reason for most advertising: brand recognition. A customer who arrives and looks around but does not purchase is not *necessarly* a write off. If they visit again they will be more favorably inclined to the site when the do so, even if it is a second trip through the search engine.
With these factored in though, I think the advertising expenditures realistically are defined by more than ".01 less than what I earned" no matter what the earning formula is (long or short term). However, this may be a realistic expectation if your assumption is there will be no repeat business (which is why I made the toner joke).
The other odd thing is that he brings up the idea that people are using search engines to find "answers" and not using the sites themselves. If your site provides answers, I suspect your best model for those pages is one with advertising revenue on the page itself, not an attempt to slam them into buying unwanted goods. His suggested solution is forcing "membership" and then spamming the collected e-mail addesses. Grrr. Anyway, how does any of that relate back to B to B e-commerce sites, which seemed to be his focus?
He seems to want to complain about the information seeking actions of non-client users (which should be driving ad revenue, not limiting it) and also complain about conversion rates in B to B (which probably shouldn't have public information stores anyway, but if they do they should be supported by ad revenue) all at the same time. Wisky tango foxtrot was my reaction to that melding of concepts. I can't really picture the site this guy is talking about.
I was going to respond, but with "Fuck him. What difference would it make if he just died?" it is quite clear where you stand. In your original post you proposed that people being nice was the answer, and yet you make it clear that the help your have given has turned to venomous distain for how people have reacted to that help. Newsflash: societal drains don't have to be disabled (just ask my brother in law and my parents).
No, I suspect placing an auditory clue on intersections that helps the blind avoid being off course would be "too much" help. Creating median islands with walk buttons in large intersections for slow walkers and wheelchairs is just a burden that can't be contemplated. "Fuck [them]. What difference would it make if [they] just died?" seems to be my towns attitude already: are you our civic planner?
I read this article when it went high on the del.icio.us/popular list. Long story short: this guy is complaining about *advertising* links in a search engine. Then he goes and compares a bunch of apples to oranges and concludes the sky is falling (yes, I meant to mix metaphors, as this is what this guy does in his complaint).
If you look at his analysis, he is coming from this from a perspective that most of the Internet can't really related to: a business to business commerce site that uses no advertising revenue and pays a high "click-through" cost for each visitor from a search engine.
After all of those constraints are in place, he further comes up with the idea that by making $4 per visitor (after COGS and conversion rates) "the site can pay $3.99 per click". Well, I guess if you really are hellbent on giving your profits away you could...
He tries to justify this by saying that "if you don't pay this, other sites can outbid you". He justifies this by saying that others will use his sites methods to improve conversion rates and therefore they will outbid you with the increased revenue. Well, maybe, or maybe they will keep some of the profit.
This commentary is not applicable to those with advertising supported models, nor those who are willing to differentiate themselves by more than hyper-competition in search engine optimization. Which means pretty much most web sites are *not* going to see the results that are predicted here. The ones that *will* see this are those that don't have a differentiator and live and die by the converted sale. I think I will cry now... [sniff]... poor toner refill sites.
His solution: #1, spam the user. #2, notification spam. #4, multi level marketing.
But the point is that government should guide the majority, not inconvenience everybody.
So you are part of the "majority wins, minorities eat it" crowd? I hate to break reality to you, but while you seem willing to help and employ people with disabilities, not everyone is so kind hearted. Such as the time I saw a blind man attempting to cross a street and got off course and just about killed when the light changed and instead of someone assisting the man, they just raced off the line taking the *cane* out of his hand when they clipped it. Or the many horn honking engine revving idiots when a wheelchair isn't getting out of the intersection in time... while pedestrians walk right by the struggling chair user.
Inside buildings it isn't much better, with people stampede out of elevator shafts and showing *none* of the concern for the blind potential passenger. I say potential because after they stampede out, a stampede goes in, leaving the blind man in the dust.
Perhaps these problems are unique to our snowbird + college student landscape here and you live somewhere that has fluffy bunnies and rainbows are forever in the sky. Or perhaps you simply choose to see your kindness as all encompassing. It isn't, and I get so infuriated with the way people treat others that it hurts. Yet... you suggest that the things that help the disabled be *self sufficient* (when clearly the people around them aren't interested in bearing the burden of even a second's courtesy) should not exist because "it inconveniences everyone".
So, when you figure out how the heck to form a "better society", could you notify the rest of the world so they could suddenly take others into consideration instead of existing in their self absorbed world? In the meantime, could you *stop* attempting to pretend that a few bumps on a sign somehow injures you? The blind that *I* knew in the college environment were *very* dependent upon the accommodations that were made, and when they had to enter a legacy building without such accommodations they had great difficulty making it to classes: to the point where they would cancel the class and hope it would be rescheduled somewhere they could get. Because the classmates had better things to do than "walk the gimp" (actual quote) to class.
I wish the expected failure curves were documented because of that exact problem: averages can mask a large standard of deviation or a small one. The post I buzzed *did* assume a massive one (a "flat" curve) but I don't think I have ever seen a flat failure curve. As described, you have manufacturing defects (the spike of failures in the short run) the useful life (a flat period where failures are rare) and finally the fatigue point where the curve spikes again.
With a documented failure curve, a manufacturer could assure me that they have burned a product in sufficiently that I can expect to be using the device during the useful life, and thus allow hot spare planning to be much easier. However, the reality is that I have received "bad batches" of devices which all fail in the short run because of a defect, leaving my hot spares insufficient to handle the failure rate. Nothing reassures people *more* than having to scramble for more units because the devices are still in the burn in period when we get them.
If they only got 600,000 units in the hands of gamers during the most brisk console buying period, 2-2.5 million would be a more reasonable prediction for June. I'm a huge game buyer (X-Box, Game Cube and two PS2 in the house now) and I couldn't be more unimpressed with the 360. Its all in the *games* guys... and so far the delivery of good games just hasn't happened. I only picked up the X-Box because of Steel Battalions, and then *tried* to find games for it since I had it in the back room where I could keep the volume up late at night. So... what did I play over the holidays? Ratchet, Sly 3, God of War and Need for Speed Underground. All on the second PS2 I bought so I actually *wanted* to play games on the back room TV... a TV I bought *for* the X-Box. That isn't to say I haven't played anything on the X-Box (Splinter Cell co-op was cool) but it gets ¼ the play time the PS2 does.
I'll check back in when the lineup doesn't look like a wannabe PC solution, because first person shooters are *still* better on the PC. The most amusing part: I'm supposed to be impressed by Live Arcade so I can play games I can play for free in Flash online. Bah... I'm far *more* interested in the retro gaming option on the Revolution, thanks.
*BZZZT* If the *MEAN* time between failures is 500,000 hours it indicates that given a sampling of devices you will find the arithmetic mean lifespan to be 500,000 hours. If you expect 1 drive in 500 to fail in 1000 hours, then you must have the expectation that at the other end you have a near immortal drive. Considering that the failure curve for most electronics follows the "burning, lifespan, fatigue" curve (lots of failures up front which can be tested to remove prior to market, a long period with low failure rates and finally a spike when the materials give up the ghost at "end of life") if they are doing adequate burn in you can shift the MTBF experienced by customers to the far end quite well.
While I would agree that 57 years seems a bit optimistic, we *are* talking about a device with no moving parts, known rewrite schedule and error correcting algorithms. Also, realize that the rewrite schedule is doing wear balancing, reliability testing and retirement of potentially unreliable blocks. In this situation, an *expected* MTBF of 57 years may be possible, but you may exhaust your block rewrites before then... I suspect that isn't considered a "failure" since the device operates to spec and the data is still readable.
We use both Windows and Linux in our environment, so I agree that the "UNIX philosophy" is usually a favorable choice for speed of patches and such. However, I have run into instances where someone coded to "buggy behaviour". If you build an app that makes a call and it doesn't work, sometimes you notice "oh, it did X, it just needs Y to work". A better solution would be addressing the flawed component, but when the component is in C and the programmer works in something else, the workaround is often implemented instead due to the knowledge level of the programmer.
However, I have found such instances are very infrequent (but ask anyone about Readline updates and I'm sure you will get a few stories).
Interesting: I found playing MMO with my wife *limited* the time in the game world. We only adventured together, so only when both of us were available did it get played. That meant an hour or so in the evening and maybe a longer session once during the weekend. I guess it depends on the dynamics in play.
The DevTeam is asked that question frequently, and thus it is the FAQ. There are graphical multiplayer "spiritual" descendants (http://crossfire.real-time.com/, for example), but no telnet games that use the grid and have multi-play that I know of. This is a shame, because the "graphics" in the multiplayer games are, um, lacking.
The real enduring beauty of Nethack though is the turn based nature, which translates poorly into multi-play and the character set "graphics" which engage the imagination far more than the "graphics" mentioned above.
To heck with getting her back: introduce her to the world of MMORPGs or even MUDs, if the command line is her thing. Or try the Champions of Norrath/Baldurs Gate multiplayer slashemups for the consoles. Find a Diablo collector's chest for the PC. My wife and I had a lot of fun in all of the above, before she went back to finish her PhD (she is now restricted to 15 minute doses of Nintendogs for her gaming fix during the week and we get in some Champions of Norrath: Return to Arms on weekends along with my son.
Trying to reject the fantasy adventure bug is just silly... use it as a point of common interest. If you insist on allowing her to continue adventuring alone, my wife loves the Heros of Might and Magic/Age of Magic type games on her laptop when traveling. I think you would be ill advised to get between your girlfriend and her enjoyment though. It will be far *more* damaging to *your* enjoyment than just going with the flow.
I was expecting to find a scathing review of the patch process, but instead found a fairly reasonable assessment of the realities of issuing security patches: disclosed vulnerabilities get patched faster in an attempt to cover the users from the most probable exploit vectors whereas undisclosed vulnerabilities give the breathing room to do more testing and attempt to repair related flaws that are discovered in the process.
That doesn't make me happy with the current situation, but it does make sense to react quickly (even if it puts the reaction at risk of being a problem itself) when something is actively being exploited. More quality assurance can be placed on patches that are not actively exploited (although each day increases the chance it will be exploited) and even more quality assurance can be placed on patched for flaws that are unlikely vectors.
Being responsible for very high reliability networks (our customer facing web and their support servers), high reliability networks (the corporate network, where I can apologize to someone's face if it blows up) and low reliability networks (my own internal network where I can fire anyone who complains) I have different thresholds for pain in the patching process depending on the network involved.
I'm far more willing to just slap a patch on my internal network: after all, it is my testing ground and it affects me far more than anyone else if it dies. After I have assured myself it isn't total bunk, I will patch our corporate network. Finally, our high reliability network is patched only after the corporate network's servers and clients have given us confidence in the patch. Of course, that means our high reliability network has to be far more insulated (URL scanning proxies in another operating system, tightly controlled trust relationships, intrusion detection, etc) but it is worth the extra effort and cost to avoid a "bum" patch bringing down the show.
Microsoft may not be reacting perfectly, but I think they are trying to balance corporate stability with the realities of exploitation. It sounds like they do need to throw some more resources to the departments involved to shorten the critical path, but with a system this complex, test cycles are going to be long and involved.
I have been around here for a while and over time I have had to boost the comment threshold quite a bit to drown out the whiners and trolls. However, reading at a high threshold gives a peaceful and interesting view of the comments. So much so, I was *unaware* of this "problem".
The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago, so there isn't much I can do about that.
I *literally* don't see the problem. Those who read at lower levels may, but I thought that was the point behind making that choice. I don't want to see whiners and trolls, they do. While you might think that meta stories are going to help get recommendations, the reality is you will get nothing but the same whines and trolls you were trying to avoid... promoted to "5". Oh, yay.
It seems that any "valuable operating system" would be sufficiently backed up in non-attackable media. So while it probably could create a lot of hassle, I'd have a hard time seeing this worm bringing down companies.
I changed that one quoted term to make a point: if we aren't going to be concerned here, why be concerned about all those other worms. Oh, I know... perhaps because having your servers in an unusable state while performing recovery is a bad thing which can cause serious financial and reputation difficulties for a company.
While you might say "but Oracle admins are smarter than windows admins" and I would have to agree, you seriously overestimate how seriously many Oracle admins take threats, including data loss. My experience has been that they are an order of magnitude better than the typical windows OS admin about backups (actually, most DBAs are) and yet I continue to visit companies where they haven't *tested* the recovery procedures in over a year nor do they implement off-site backups. In more extreme cases, the Oracle system was installed by a DBA who was later downsized and so the duties were transfered to the main IT group... who wouldn't know how to restore the database on a dare.
While I doubt an Oracle worm would be anywhere as bad as the SQL Slammer (which mostly preyed on MSDE [i.e., unadminstered] and poorly administered SQL Standard installs) in terms of disruption I could see it being significant. More significant than the repuation of Oracle admins would indicate.
Although I know you are joking, that is the default "failure" sound of TortoiseCVS. Makes me jump *every* time. My wife hates it too, freaks her out because she thinks I dropped something.
*shatter*
I guess I *could* change it, but there is some preverse amusement left in it to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
The PS2 did very well for me, but the PSP has left me cold (and thus unpurchased). Looking at Metacritic, not a single game has cracked the 90+ ratings. Considering my time constraints, I don't usually bother with anything below 90 unless it is in a genre I like. That brings me to the genre problem: I loved my GBA because of the strong RPG and Strategy game showing... so far the showing has been especially weak in that regard on the PSP.)
I finally picked up a DS mostly because my GBA games work on it. Neither system has a strong game showing although I give the DS a very slight nod for my taste in portable games, such as Advanced Wars DS, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. My wife loves Nintendogs (the killer app for the DS if you ask me) and Animal Crossings. Meanwhile, the PSP is lacking in "cute" for her and strategy or RPG games for me. (Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade looked promising but was universally panned).
Chill. I was making a joke based on a presumed attitude of someone who would propose such a tax structure, not my opinion of abortion (which is that it should be available to those who want it without an overly intrusive government nanny).
Considering that in reality E3 is supposed to be an industry event (I have attended the seminars wearing my game programming hat) and yet recently it has become a giant circus similar to Comdex right before the collapse, I think this is a good move. The press day in particular will be helpful (more so that the clothing requirements): the poor people in the booths are besieged by loser fan boys while the real interviewers can be recognized by the desperate looks of someone under time pressure they wait for a bunch of store clerks to stop hassling their interview target. Or they just get pushy, which I don't blame them for.
Reducing the booth babe exposure (literally) won't prevent people from hiring pretty young women and placing them in the booths. I don't think that practice will ever end (check any other convention and see who is most prominently displayed in each booth: the best looking women of the company or some "spokeswoman" who they hired because the women at the company refused to be so exploited). It will hopefully reduce the circus like atmosphere and restore the event to something that industry actually interacts at.
(On the flip side of the coin, the private parties are even more outlandish than the show floor. Make of that what you will.)
An interesting idea, but the limited size (4GB) makes me wonder what the target market would be. More to the point, where would this solution be better than 4GB of RAM available to the platform? Yes, this thing has battery backup and sips power when the machine is off, so it acts somewhat like a drive, but I would have my doubts about trusting it with anything mission critical.
The performance tests show it did a great job as a high performance drive for simultanious requests for data on a web server, for example. But they didn't compare it to using the same 4GB onboard the server, which would be far more interesting... since the data is being "read" over a Serial ATA (which is puzzling since they are plugged into the bus), I can't imagine it being faster than using the memory to cache the data traditionally. The other examples, such as operating system boot time show that the operating system isn't read bound as much as one would think on boot.
I'm sure there are some specialist uses for this that will make sense, but I suspect most of them would be better served with 4GB of RAM disk or cache.
Ah, there is the epitome of sustainable government taxation: tax things you want to destroy. Sometimes I wonder what powers these politicians... it sure isn't brains. See, if you succeed in destroying the taxed items, then you have no tax base. So destruction of the taxed items clearly can't be the goal in such a tax proposal: it would deny the government the monies it needs.
So if your goal isn't to destroy the "sin taxed" items (since under his model you only tax things you don't want) then the reality is that you want to encourage or sustain the sin taxed items to help raise funds. Ah, isn't that a great idea? Get elected by claiming that you will remove taxes from things ordinary good folk want, such as property, and shift the burden to evil gamers, loose women and sugar fiends. (Wow, has Texas really become so utopian that those were the worst they could find? My trip to the Dallas BoardGameGeek convention sure didn't make it seem that way.)
One wonders if the people are smart enough to realize that fully funding your government via sin taxes turns you into something similar to Las Vegas, where sin is fully encouraged as long as the taxes are collected. Of course, the prior story on politicians ignoring the facts probably explains this all away anyway.
I have an XBox, two PS2s and a game cube connected to my home LAN. Last round definately went to the PS2, with the XBox having superior technology (and Live was a great idea) but not as many games that I care about and the Nintendo having the best family/party games. (Checking my games, I have 34 PS2, 15 XBox and 12 Cube games on the shelf. I know I have traded in many more PS2 games than either of the others...)
This round I can't find interest in *any* of the new machines. The 360 is lacking a killer app: I'm not into the FPS on consoles (say hello to my mouse and keyboard noobs) and the rest of the offerings are pretty much nothing to write home about. The PS3 has backwards compatibility, which makes it more likely (screw you Microsoft for your choices of emulated games... my library of XBox games hates you) and the Revolution at least is *trying* to do something interesting while keeping costs down *and* including backward compatibility. I will probably pick up the Revolution when it comes out, wait for the PS3 to develop a library and flip Microsoft the bird since I will have to hang onto the massive box to finish up the games I have in the queue anyway.
Yes, I see how poorly Half Life 2 did. Sure there was some complaining, but the reality is that the consumer rolled over. Purchase a CD, install on PC and wait for the executable bits to download so you can play. I got my karma handed to me on a platter for suggesting that Steam was anything but a orgasmic experience here on Slashdot.
It's this creative diversity that makes the games industry so popular, and without sustained funding from new software sales, this could be at risk.
Here is how we will see the proliferation of "activation servers" and the like systems where purchasing a "used" copy of a game simply buys you a coaster. Copyrighted materials (in the US at least, and from the article the EC) are covered under the doctrine of first sale: once a work in "fixed form" is sold, that fixed form is transferable to anyone else by any method desired. The used book, CD and game industries survive only because of this doctrine.
Activation servers add an additional wrinkle to the mix: you can still legally sell the bits, but the activation code isn't going to work when you take it home. When you complain to the company, they will (correctly) tell you that the code has already been used. Thus, the idea of used games will be a thing of the past. Of course, so will be the idea of tossing an old CD into your machine and expecting it to do anything but say "activation server could not be reached".
All this will be couched in terms of "the benefit of the consumer" while in reality kicking them in the teeth.
That's nifty for him, but I did give it more than a passing thought. My comment wasn't a knee-jerk response to reading the article five seconds prior, but due to percolating thoughts that had been caused by reading and considering what he had to say a full week earlier. I was composing an item on the subjects he raised for my own site when Slashdot for it.
He makes some valid points: independently. However, the way that he bundled them makes no sense at all. His point that people are information grazers is already well understood. Most people *do* use search engines as "answer" engines. An extreme example of this is my use of "define: term" in the search box. When used like that, Google takes answers from a variety of sites and presents them directly. Normally, I don't need to even click the link. This *does* deny advertising dollars, so I hope that some other compensation has been negotiated for that feature.
However, he then tries to use information grazing as a negative in the context of commerce sites. Now again, I will grant that if all you want is a quick price, Froogle will get that for you without visiting the site (with the proviso being that the lowest price is probably some consumer nightmare, but that is a different topic). However, to actually purchase something, a visit to the site is necessary, at which point your ads, promotions and incentives are front and center. So information grazing only applies prior to attempting the sale. Which ironically was an opportunity derived from search engine use.
He goes even further though and assumes you are entering via a sponsored link that costs 99% of your net profits. That assumption appears to come from the idea that you must spend every dollar of profit to promote your site or someone else will and you will lose. If sites only showed the top one advertisement, then I guess he has a point. I know that I personally rarely click the sponsored link on top: I click the one that appears *appropriate*. Then again, people buy from spam e-mails products of questionable repute. Perhaps I'm an outlier.
His ideas of having alternative avenues for advertising then are presented as some kind of earth-shattering change where any real company will already have *many* avenues already in place. On top of that, his only "linked to more info" ideas are "spam the customer", "spam the customer some more" and "annoy the customer". These articles end up being mostly self promotion.
I'm sure there is *some* company out there that provides information that people graze and yet they don't actually intend on being an information provider (oops) and instead pin their hopes on "BtoB conversions". I call that company a dot com bubble dinosaur that managed to survive into the age of mammals and wouldn't invest heavily though. Meanwhile, Mr. Neilsen's best ideas appear to be behind him, and he just comes across as a cranky blogger with self promotion needs.
You make a good point; he was looking at a single transaction and not considering such things as long term repeat business nor the real reason for most advertising: brand recognition. A customer who arrives and looks around but does not purchase is not *necessarly* a write off. If they visit again they will be more favorably inclined to the site when the do so, even if it is a second trip through the search engine.
With these factored in though, I think the advertising expenditures realistically are defined by more than ".01 less than what I earned" no matter what the earning formula is (long or short term). However, this may be a realistic expectation if your assumption is there will be no repeat business (which is why I made the toner joke).
The other odd thing is that he brings up the idea that people are using search engines to find "answers" and not using the sites themselves. If your site provides answers, I suspect your best model for those pages is one with advertising revenue on the page itself, not an attempt to slam them into buying unwanted goods. His suggested solution is forcing "membership" and then spamming the collected e-mail addesses. Grrr. Anyway, how does any of that relate back to B to B e-commerce sites, which seemed to be his focus?
He seems to want to complain about the information seeking actions of non-client users (which should be driving ad revenue, not limiting it) and also complain about conversion rates in B to B (which probably shouldn't have public information stores anyway, but if they do they should be supported by ad revenue) all at the same time. Wisky tango foxtrot was my reaction to that melding of concepts. I can't really picture the site this guy is talking about.
I was going to respond, but with "Fuck him. What difference would it make if he just died?" it is quite clear where you stand. In your original post you proposed that people being nice was the answer, and yet you make it clear that the help your have given has turned to venomous distain for how people have reacted to that help. Newsflash: societal drains don't have to be disabled (just ask my brother in law and my parents).
No, I suspect placing an auditory clue on intersections that helps the blind avoid being off course would be "too much" help. Creating median islands with walk buttons in large intersections for slow walkers and wheelchairs is just a burden that can't be contemplated. "Fuck [them]. What difference would it make if [they] just died?" seems to be my towns attitude already: are you our civic planner?
I read this article when it went high on the del.icio.us/popular list. Long story short: this guy is complaining about *advertising* links in a search engine. Then he goes and compares a bunch of apples to oranges and concludes the sky is falling (yes, I meant to mix metaphors, as this is what this guy does in his complaint).
If you look at his analysis, he is coming from this from a perspective that most of the Internet can't really related to: a business to business commerce site that uses no advertising revenue and pays a high "click-through" cost for each visitor from a search engine.
After all of those constraints are in place, he further comes up with the idea that by making $4 per visitor (after COGS and conversion rates) "the site can pay $3.99 per click". Well, I guess if you really are hellbent on giving your profits away you could...
He tries to justify this by saying that "if you don't pay this, other sites can outbid you". He justifies this by saying that others will use his sites methods to improve conversion rates and therefore they will outbid you with the increased revenue. Well, maybe, or maybe they will keep some of the profit.
This commentary is not applicable to those with advertising supported models, nor those who are willing to differentiate themselves by more than hyper-competition in search engine optimization. Which means pretty much most web sites are *not* going to see the results that are predicted here. The ones that *will* see this are those that don't have a differentiator and live and die by the converted sale. I think I will cry now... [sniff]... poor toner refill sites.
His solution: #1, spam the user. #2, notification spam. #4, multi level marketing.
So you are part of the "majority wins, minorities eat it" crowd? I hate to break reality to you, but while you seem willing to help and employ people with disabilities, not everyone is so kind hearted. Such as the time I saw a blind man attempting to cross a street and got off course and just about killed when the light changed and instead of someone assisting the man, they just raced off the line taking the *cane* out of his hand when they clipped it. Or the many horn honking engine revving idiots when a wheelchair isn't getting out of the intersection in time... while pedestrians walk right by the struggling chair user.
Inside buildings it isn't much better, with people stampede out of elevator shafts and showing *none* of the concern for the blind potential passenger. I say potential because after they stampede out, a stampede goes in, leaving the blind man in the dust.
Perhaps these problems are unique to our snowbird + college student landscape here and you live somewhere that has fluffy bunnies and rainbows are forever in the sky. Or perhaps you simply choose to see your kindness as all encompassing. It isn't, and I get so infuriated with the way people treat others that it hurts. Yet... you suggest that the things that help the disabled be *self sufficient* (when clearly the people around them aren't interested in bearing the burden of even a second's courtesy) should not exist because "it inconveniences everyone".
So, when you figure out how the heck to form a "better society", could you notify the rest of the world so they could suddenly take others into consideration instead of existing in their self absorbed world? In the meantime, could you *stop* attempting to pretend that a few bumps on a sign somehow injures you? The blind that *I* knew in the college environment were *very* dependent upon the accommodations that were made, and when they had to enter a legacy building without such accommodations they had great difficulty making it to classes: to the point where they would cancel the class and hope it would be rescheduled somewhere they could get. Because the classmates had better things to do than "walk the gimp" (actual quote) to class.
I wish the expected failure curves were documented because of that exact problem: averages can mask a large standard of deviation or a small one. The post I buzzed *did* assume a massive one (a "flat" curve) but I don't think I have ever seen a flat failure curve. As described, you have manufacturing defects (the spike of failures in the short run) the useful life (a flat period where failures are rare) and finally the fatigue point where the curve spikes again.
With a documented failure curve, a manufacturer could assure me that they have burned a product in sufficiently that I can expect to be using the device during the useful life, and thus allow hot spare planning to be much easier. However, the reality is that I have received "bad batches" of devices which all fail in the short run because of a defect, leaving my hot spares insufficient to handle the failure rate. Nothing reassures people *more* than having to scramble for more units because the devices are still in the burn in period when we get them.
If they only got 600,000 units in the hands of gamers during the most brisk console buying period, 2-2.5 million would be a more reasonable prediction for June. I'm a huge game buyer (X-Box, Game Cube and two PS2 in the house now) and I couldn't be more unimpressed with the 360. Its all in the *games* guys... and so far the delivery of good games just hasn't happened. I only picked up the X-Box because of Steel Battalions, and then *tried* to find games for it since I had it in the back room where I could keep the volume up late at night. So... what did I play over the holidays? Ratchet, Sly 3, God of War and Need for Speed Underground. All on the second PS2 I bought so I actually *wanted* to play games on the back room TV... a TV I bought *for* the X-Box. That isn't to say I haven't played anything on the X-Box (Splinter Cell co-op was cool) but it gets ¼ the play time the PS2 does.
I'll check back in when the lineup doesn't look like a wannabe PC solution, because first person shooters are *still* better on the PC. The most amusing part: I'm supposed to be impressed by Live Arcade so I can play games I can play for free in Flash online. Bah... I'm far *more* interested in the retro gaming option on the Revolution, thanks.
*BZZZT* If the *MEAN* time between failures is 500,000 hours it indicates that given a sampling of devices you will find the arithmetic mean lifespan to be 500,000 hours. If you expect 1 drive in 500 to fail in 1000 hours, then you must have the expectation that at the other end you have a near immortal drive. Considering that the failure curve for most electronics follows the "burning, lifespan, fatigue" curve (lots of failures up front which can be tested to remove prior to market, a long period with low failure rates and finally a spike when the materials give up the ghost at "end of life") if they are doing adequate burn in you can shift the MTBF experienced by customers to the far end quite well.
While I would agree that 57 years seems a bit optimistic, we *are* talking about a device with no moving parts, known rewrite schedule and error correcting algorithms. Also, realize that the rewrite schedule is doing wear balancing, reliability testing and retirement of potentially unreliable blocks. In this situation, an *expected* MTBF of 57 years may be possible, but you may exhaust your block rewrites before then... I suspect that isn't considered a "failure" since the device operates to spec and the data is still readable.
We use both Windows and Linux in our environment, so I agree that the "UNIX philosophy" is usually a favorable choice for speed of patches and such. However, I have run into instances where someone coded to "buggy behaviour". If you build an app that makes a call and it doesn't work, sometimes you notice "oh, it did X, it just needs Y to work". A better solution would be addressing the flawed component, but when the component is in C and the programmer works in something else, the workaround is often implemented instead due to the knowledge level of the programmer.
However, I have found such instances are very infrequent (but ask anyone about Readline updates and I'm sure you will get a few stories).
Interesting: I found playing MMO with my wife *limited* the time in the game world. We only adventured together, so only when both of us were available did it get played. That meant an hour or so in the evening and maybe a longer session once during the weekend. I guess it depends on the dynamics in play.
The DevTeam is asked that question frequently, and thus it is the FAQ. There are graphical multiplayer "spiritual" descendants (http://crossfire.real-time.com/, for example), but no telnet games that use the grid and have multi-play that I know of. This is a shame, because the "graphics" in the multiplayer games are, um, lacking.
The real enduring beauty of Nethack though is the turn based nature, which translates poorly into multi-play and the character set "graphics" which engage the imagination far more than the "graphics" mentioned above.
To heck with getting her back: introduce her to the world of MMORPGs or even MUDs, if the command line is her thing. Or try the Champions of Norrath/Baldurs Gate multiplayer slashemups for the consoles. Find a Diablo collector's chest for the PC. My wife and I had a lot of fun in all of the above, before she went back to finish her PhD (she is now restricted to 15 minute doses of Nintendogs for her gaming fix during the week and we get in some Champions of Norrath: Return to Arms on weekends along with my son.
Trying to reject the fantasy adventure bug is just silly... use it as a point of common interest. If you insist on allowing her to continue adventuring alone, my wife loves the Heros of Might and Magic/Age of Magic type games on her laptop when traveling. I think you would be ill advised to get between your girlfriend and her enjoyment though. It will be far *more* damaging to *your* enjoyment than just going with the flow.
I was expecting to find a scathing review of the patch process, but instead found a fairly reasonable assessment of the realities of issuing security patches: disclosed vulnerabilities get patched faster in an attempt to cover the users from the most probable exploit vectors whereas undisclosed vulnerabilities give the breathing room to do more testing and attempt to repair related flaws that are discovered in the process.
That doesn't make me happy with the current situation, but it does make sense to react quickly (even if it puts the reaction at risk of being a problem itself) when something is actively being exploited. More quality assurance can be placed on patches that are not actively exploited (although each day increases the chance it will be exploited) and even more quality assurance can be placed on patched for flaws that are unlikely vectors.
Being responsible for very high reliability networks (our customer facing web and their support servers), high reliability networks (the corporate network, where I can apologize to someone's face if it blows up) and low reliability networks (my own internal network where I can fire anyone who complains) I have different thresholds for pain in the patching process depending on the network involved.
I'm far more willing to just slap a patch on my internal network: after all, it is my testing ground and it affects me far more than anyone else if it dies. After I have assured myself it isn't total bunk, I will patch our corporate network. Finally, our high reliability network is patched only after the corporate network's servers and clients have given us confidence in the patch. Of course, that means our high reliability network has to be far more insulated (URL scanning proxies in another operating system, tightly controlled trust relationships, intrusion detection, etc) but it is worth the extra effort and cost to avoid a "bum" patch bringing down the show.
Microsoft may not be reacting perfectly, but I think they are trying to balance corporate stability with the realities of exploitation. It sounds like they do need to throw some more resources to the departments involved to shorten the critical path, but with a system this complex, test cycles are going to be long and involved.
I have been around here for a while and over time I have had to boost the comment threshold quite a bit to drown out the whiners and trolls. However, reading at a high threshold gives a peaceful and interesting view of the comments. So much so, I was *unaware* of this "problem".
The moderation system is doing the job it was meant to do: whiners and trolls get left at the bottom and content actually rises to the higher levels where I see it. Some days I feel like I'm sponging off those who have mod points, but I mysteriously lost my mod abilities years ago, so there isn't much I can do about that.
I *literally* don't see the problem. Those who read at lower levels may, but I thought that was the point behind making that choice. I don't want to see whiners and trolls, they do. While you might think that meta stories are going to help get recommendations, the reality is you will get nothing but the same whines and trolls you were trying to avoid... promoted to "5". Oh, yay.
It seems that any "valuable operating system" would be sufficiently backed up in non-attackable media. So while it probably could create a lot of hassle, I'd have a hard time seeing this worm bringing down companies.
I changed that one quoted term to make a point: if we aren't going to be concerned here, why be concerned about all those other worms. Oh, I know... perhaps because having your servers in an unusable state while performing recovery is a bad thing which can cause serious financial and reputation difficulties for a company.
While you might say "but Oracle admins are smarter than windows admins" and I would have to agree, you seriously overestimate how seriously many Oracle admins take threats, including data loss. My experience has been that they are an order of magnitude better than the typical windows OS admin about backups (actually, most DBAs are) and yet I continue to visit companies where they haven't *tested* the recovery procedures in over a year nor do they implement off-site backups. In more extreme cases, the Oracle system was installed by a DBA who was later downsized and so the duties were transfered to the main IT group... who wouldn't know how to restore the database on a dare.
While I doubt an Oracle worm would be anywhere as bad as the SQL Slammer (which mostly preyed on MSDE [i.e., unadminstered] and poorly administered SQL Standard installs) in terms of disruption I could see it being significant. More significant than the repuation of Oracle admins would indicate.
Although I know you are joking, that is the default "failure" sound of TortoiseCVS. Makes me jump *every* time. My wife hates it too, freaks her out because she thinks I dropped something.
*shatter*
I guess I *could* change it, but there is some preverse amusement left in it to this day.
"Big long"? I can only assume that error rate has increased as of late. (I will leave the comma addiction and "sentence" three alone for now.)