I've been saying for a longtime that the PS3 isn't over priced relative to the PS2 since in Canada the launch price adjusted for inflation is within $50 of the PS2 launch price. Whats happened is the US's dollar has fallen. The relatively equal Japanese, European, Canadian price is close to the launch PS2 price. What Nintendo did was aim lower and what MS did was subsidize heavily. Which makes the PS3 relatively expensive compared to them. That is why the PS3 is doing well in markets outside the US.
Another way of looking at this is that the US dollar is in freefall against the Euro and other major currencies. The shift between the US and Canadian dollars reflects this new reality. That said, I suspect Forex traders are caught up in the euphoria of parity. The Canadian dollar might well dip significantly below $1 American again as the rush of breathless media attention dries up and currency traders take their profits and run. This certainly isn't good news for Canadian manufacturers - I run a little electronics company that sells 90% of our goods in the USA. We have raised some prices by as much as 30% over the past five years, just to maintain margins. However, our customers don't necessarily see it that way - they think we're getting greedy. To keep things from getting out of hand, we've moved some production to China and started to source North American components in the USA, rather than dealing with Canadian distributors. That's not good news for our economy.
Primary resources have been our #1 industry (Oil, Wood, uranium etc..). The increase in dollar values hurt manufacturing most as many of the primary resources we export are constantly in high demand and will not diminish in a linear relationship to price. It's a toss up at how the increased dollar will effect us. It may not be negative uniformly. It is detrimental to the manufacturing industry but that industry has always been secondary and heavily concentrated in Ontario. It might diminish prosperity in Ontario but it will increase prosperity in the west.
Somehow that seems like little comfort for us Canadians that realize the impact this has overall on our economy. Anyone that isn't into business or economics up here gets excited about the CDN dollar being stronger because it translates into better cross border shopping for a very small minority, cheaper vacations, and some discounted consumer items like Macs. But take a look at how this impacts the country as a whole and we don't have much to celebrate as an exporting nation.
Dont' over estimate the crunch on our export industry. A significant amount is via oil which is a commodity that does not reduce in demand linearly with price. Manufacturing etc... has been on a steady decline for the last 8 years as well as the dollar rose. That has hurt the eastern Ontario economy. At the same time sky high oil prices and an increase in demand world wide has lead to a super heated economy in the west. The west gains from this as our commodity is in demand and we are at capacity to provide. so a Price increase helps the western provinces while it hurts the eastern provinces. Our trade with the US is immense but it hasn't ever been about selling them large quantities of manufactured goods. There is also a time lag related to the effects as contracts signed when the dollar was weaker will remain for a while. So it'll be a while before we see how parity helps or hinder us. As a westerner I don't mind a big crunch in the eastern economic power block.
just wondering, but what happens if the stock bottoms out (hits $0.00000...) when you've shorted it?
You have an absolute floor of how much paper scraps are worth in your area if you have paper stock. If it was electronic then you may ask your broker to print your copies and then sell them for scrap.
This just means that Canadians will buy more American stuff. Is that supposed to bother me? Most of the trade is currently, we sell you gold, oil, diamonds, and wood. We use that money to buy stuff from china. So it doesn't mean all of sudden we'll be buying more US consumer goods. It means all of sudden we'll be charging more for your gold, oil, diamonds, and wood. Most of the imports from the US are agricultural and technology as the US isn't a manufacturing giant anymore. The currency swing has been going on for some time but I haven't read about a notable upswing in buying US goods although there is a definite upswing in Asian goods (HDTV, electronics, etc..).
The point is: currency values mean very little unless you trade them or are measuring inflation. Any more analysis is a discussion of macro-economic theory and world money supply. A topic best left to the economists.
Any instantaneous value doesn't mean much. But patterns mean more. The US greenback has been in a slide for sometime. Confidence in the currency is dropping among certain groups and thus it's being slaughtered by currency speculators. Over the last 8 years it's lost about 30%-50% of it's relative value against other western currencies. It happens to coincide with a strong Canadian economy which leads to the 50% gain the loonie has had over the greenback in the last year.
I agree it's meaning is very open to interpretations.
If the price is too high, it's called price gouging If the price is too low, it's called predatory pricing It the price is just the same, it's called price fixing
How convenient a system where anyone doing business is guilty:)
Relative to cost.
price > aggregated Cost x10 : gouging/premium market Price aggregated Cost : Predatory pricing Price of major competitor A == Price of all other major competitors : Price fixing
It's easy to tell market forces from monopoly powered gouging/undercutting/price fixing. They do not overlap all conditions and the common case aught not and does not fall within those bounds.
Currently just a few cents under parity. Wait a year and you may be looking at 1.25 greenbacks per loonie. As the trend has gone that way. We went from ~0.69 greenbacks per loonies to 0.98 greenbacks per loonie.
The vendor is under zero obligation to enable unlocking.
That really depends on which jurisdiction you live in. In the UK the vendor must release unlocking info if the phone is not on a contract. Bought outright without subsidy. perhaps they'll just limit it to contract only. In Belgium vendor locked phones of any kind are illegal. In various other places you can pay to get the unlock codes. So if they wish for one model for multiple nations it must be unlockable in some way. If they want a separate version for various places then they can eliminate all unlocking options.
Us people in the know have been very harsh on Sony about Heavenly Sword's length, but you know what, all the common video game consumer friends I have with a PS3 have called me up to ask if I absolutely loved the game as much as them... and when I tried to explain that it was great but short, most of them told me in a matter of fact way that the game was like an epic movie that you got to play, and that being short made sense to them because it kicked ass in the short time it played and it didn't have tons of filler, which they didn't want.
Yeah I would have preferred halo trimmed by about 50% since thats how much filler you had to go through to play the unique or interesting parts. Most modern games could be trimmed in a similar way. I guess they add the filler to prevent from being "rental" material. If you blow your load in 6h with no foreplay then they have less incentive to buy it versus rent it. So a game that requires a lot of foreplay may convince someone to work harder for the same err.. nerdgasm.
Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?
Go server side for everything and have the installed game be nothing more than a dumb client?
Map hacking occurs because the enemy player position exists within ram. By removing a fog layer or dummying enemy position graphics on top of the fog. The onyl way to truly avoid this is to prevent your opponents position from being distributed until they come into view. But the problem is network latency, limited server side resources, etc.. keep it from being very practical. The best you can do is a shifting array of ram checksums, obsfucation, banning, and statistics. Unless you make the entire load server side. Which is possible these days and network latency isn't as much of a concern but it's not an easy problem to solve.
The primary motivation to buy the game was to PLAY it. If you pirated it, you could still PLAY it with your friends via several methods. The difference was that you couldn't use their "official" matchmaker service. The existence of BnetD had, at most, a negligible impact on the level of piracy.
They also didn't demand the key checker; they OFFERED to use whatever keychecker Blizzard was willing to give them access to.
It was a valid fair use case, killed off by venue-shopping.
Variants bnetD code runs a large percentages of the pirate battle net clones in Asia. I know first hand. There is hardly a legitimate copy in any place in china. I looked hard for one but the piracy makes any attempt to sell it moot. I played at Cafe's and at peoples house with fake copies with a different match making service while in china. It's the match making and ranking service that prompted the majority of my friends here in Canada to get a legit copy. Blizzard wanted to hedge possibility that the situation in most of Asia would happen here. Thus took an aggressive stanc eon it in NA. The argument that is was just fair use might be right but the argument it would diminish blizzards drawing power. Battlenet is a big reason war 3/diablo 2/SC etc still sell. Blizzard provided a free service that was adequate.
The obvious problem with bnetD verifying the copies is that they either need to provide the algorithm or the API to verify the keys both could be used again to pirate. So they opted to not have to mess with it and asked bnetD to stop.
The reason why there are few who have vehement anti-blizzard sentiment over this issue is most thought of BnetD as a piracy tool regardless of what it actually was. Actually most didn't care much either way. Blizzard generated a lot of good will in future decisions to compensate and the number who truly cared about bnetd were few. At this point it's sort of moot. BnetD is not dead but isn't as visible or actively developed openly.
I really hate JRPGs. I find them too linear and lacking in the "RPG" part. When I play a JRPG, it feels like it's just a movie with some interactive (but meaningless in the scope of the game) elements. Like someone developed a story and said "okay, let's throw in a few random fights and some minor and meaningless generic character stats stuff to break things up and stuff them between the scenes".
Well, with a few exceptions western RPGs are semi-linear as well. The only option you get are either to have a "evil" ending or "good" ending (KOTOR). Rarely is there a truly open ended game. Being non linear means your often doing uninteresting fed ex quests instead of uninteresting "run to X place, kill Y monster" you find in jRPGs. For every truly good non linear game (Torment, Fallout) you get a dozen fed ex games (morrow wind, Icewindale, etc..). They each have their strong points. jRPGs usually have a more interesting story despite having no latitude in guiding that story. Their fun and the mechanics are varied. cRPGS often are ad&d clones. Some cRPGs have strong memorable stories. Most have fairly bland ones. For instance Oblivion has a dull story. The whole draw was the sand box not story or game mechanics.
I mean, it's probably great for someone in the industry to know, so I read it, but as a game player, I just don't care.
Blizzard lost all credibility as far as I am concerned with bnetd.
BnetD: Hey blizzard is it okay if we invent something to circumvent your primary motivation for people to buy your game? Blizzard: Ummm no. could you stop please. BnetD: no. We want to do this. Why don't you help us out and give us your verification algorithm. Blizzard: no please stop. BnetD: no. Fuck off. Blizzard: ahh well. Mr. lawyer can you ask him to stop. Mr. Lawyer: Please stop. BnetD: this is fascism.. fucking nazi's. I'm going to flame you on slashdot and then you'll be sorry.
BTW, all the good artists and devs in from the Diablo days are making Hellgate: London so uhh, the jury is still out on Diablo 3, if it ever even gets off the drawing board.
True enough, but a game takes a team. It's difficult to say what D1 or D2 would have been if Blizzard proper didn't have some influence on it. Being the mother studio/publisher they had a lot of influence. Many thought John Romero was the messiah of gaming and that he alone could inspire and design a awesome game. We got Daikatana. Turns out the other people at ID pushed and conspired with Romero into making the games they did. After he left ID games felt a little more shallow while Everything Romero did after felt slipshod and tacky. Sometimes no individual member or subset of a team can recreate what the team was in total. Who knows hellgate might be D3 on steroids. Or it might be Ropers, Schaefer, Schaefer and Breviks Daikatana.
Microsoft could embrace ODF. They could integrate it with Microsoft Office, eliminate.DOC, and produce the best ODF tools in the market and maintain their dominance, even in Government. Open Office, while great for the breadth of its tools, is a complicated beast and can be overwhelming for general office staff.
From past experience MS realize that fair competition isn't good for the ones competing. Google isn't really competing in the same way as the profit off of something independent of what office suit you use. Just as MS previously didn't care which Windows loaded PC you bought. While MS has a vested interest which office suite you use now. So having a open standard gives other companies a way in to crowd into MS's business model.
thats CAD, although these days their interchangeable. Head to any HMV or Music world in Canada. Look for old classic albums like Zeppelin IV, almost anything from NIN, Beattles etc.
That's true for the two immensely popular albums that you listed here.
However, the sales from those albums do something other than cover the production costs of PHM and TDS. They help cover the costs of the tons of unprofitable albums the labels produce.
If you want albums *that* cheap, you will have to live with the labels in question not signing and working for promising artists that will probably never be popular.
For every platinum album produced by a label, there are 100 albums that don't cover all their production costs.
That explanation doesn't fly. I know a bands that was signed. They were loaned ~50,000 which they proceeded to blow on recording a decent demo/record and promotion. They then tried to sell it and got no further funds or support from their label. Ending up with thousands in debt each because outside of my city they didn't promote them. They found out they were signed to shelve them as the same label backed a similar band in a bigger market. They legally owed this money back. Most of the charges were exaggerated studio fees, release party, and bloated "promotion" including 10,000 in merch they never authorized but were billed for. It was crates of merch but You could buy the same tacky garbage and put logos on it for half as much as they paid.
On paper the label risked 50,000 and around 30,000. In reality they got a band to work for free and theoretically pay them back 30,000 for the privilege of working for free. They likely made a profit off the CD's because the studio engineers didn't make even close to what the billed hourly rate was and rent isn't that expansive. Everything had a 200% mark up before the label sold it to the band. Who now has crates of merch, crushing debt, no future.
They have a perfectly good patent on how to extort money form large multi-national corporations. As well on how to run a legal pump and dump. If they can get the first one to work properly and the second one not to violate insider trading they will have a gold mine!
Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989. Somewhere in the past 18 years I'd imagine it recouped it's production costs. Could you imagine software made in 1989 being sold at original retail today? Not even retail, up to double retail on newer music. A CD would only be $19.95-$24.95 CAD.
So imagine Windows Vista home: $199 Max OS X family: $199 Windows 98 SE: $399 Mac OS 8.0: $399
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying for a longtime that the PS3 isn't over priced relative to the PS2 since in Canada the launch price adjusted for inflation is within $50 of the PS2 launch price. Whats happened is the US's dollar has fallen. The relatively equal Japanese, European, Canadian price is close to the launch PS2 price. What Nintendo did was aim lower and what MS did was subsidize heavily. Which makes the PS3 relatively expensive compared to them. That is why the PS3 is doing well in markets outside the US.
Happy belated 375th birthday then.
And in response to the GP, we'll be thankfull that we've used up our oil and they no longer need to invade once the resource wars really flare up.
The middle east has a 40 year deadline. Canada has a reserve estimated to last 350+ years at current usage increase patterns.
Things in economics tend toward equilibrium in the long run.
Zero?
What will happen when we stop digging sand for oil to pipe to the US?
I'll be celebrating my 415th birthday.
Another way of looking at this is that the US dollar is in freefall against the Euro and other major currencies. The shift between the US and Canadian dollars reflects this new reality. That said, I suspect Forex traders are caught up in the euphoria of parity. The Canadian dollar might well dip significantly below $1 American again as the rush of breathless media attention dries up and currency traders take their profits and run. This certainly isn't good news for Canadian manufacturers - I run a little electronics company that sells 90% of our goods in the USA. We have raised some prices by as much as 30% over the past five years, just to maintain margins. However, our customers don't necessarily see it that way - they think we're getting greedy. To keep things from getting out of hand, we've moved some production to China and started to source North American components in the USA, rather than dealing with Canadian distributors. That's not good news for our economy.
Primary resources have been our #1 industry (Oil, Wood, uranium etc..). The increase in dollar values hurt manufacturing most as many of the primary resources we export are constantly in high demand and will not diminish in a linear relationship to price. It's a toss up at how the increased dollar will effect us. It may not be negative uniformly. It is detrimental to the manufacturing industry but that industry has always been secondary and heavily concentrated in Ontario. It might diminish prosperity in Ontario but it will increase prosperity in the west.
Somehow that seems like little comfort for us Canadians that realize the impact this has overall on our economy. Anyone that isn't into business or economics up here gets excited about the CDN dollar being stronger because it translates into better cross border shopping for a very small minority, cheaper vacations, and some discounted consumer items like Macs. But take a look at how this impacts the country as a whole and we don't have much to celebrate as an exporting nation.
Dont' over estimate the crunch on our export industry. A significant amount is via oil which is a commodity that does not reduce in demand linearly with price. Manufacturing etc... has been on a steady decline for the last 8 years as well as the dollar rose. That has hurt the eastern Ontario economy. At the same time sky high oil prices and an increase in demand world wide has lead to a super heated economy in the west. The west gains from this as our commodity is in demand and we are at capacity to provide. so a Price increase helps the western provinces while it hurts the eastern provinces. Our trade with the US is immense but it hasn't ever been about selling them large quantities of manufactured goods. There is also a time lag related to the effects as contracts signed when the dollar was weaker will remain for a while. So it'll be a while before we see how parity helps or hinder us. As a westerner I don't mind a big crunch in the eastern economic power block.
just wondering, but what happens if the stock bottoms out (hits $0.00000...) when you've shorted it?
You have an absolute floor of how much paper scraps are worth in your area if you have paper stock. If it was electronic then you may ask your broker to print your copies and then sell them for scrap.
The point is: currency values mean very little unless you trade them or are measuring inflation. Any more analysis is a discussion of macro-economic theory and world money supply. A topic best left to the economists.
Any instantaneous value doesn't mean much. But patterns mean more. The US greenback has been in a slide for sometime. Confidence in the currency is dropping among certain groups and thus it's being slaughtered by currency speculators. Over the last 8 years it's lost about 30%-50% of it's relative value against other western currencies. It happens to coincide with a strong Canadian economy which leads to the 50% gain the loonie has had over the greenback in the last year.
I agree it's meaning is very open to interpretations.
If the price is too high, it's called price gouging
:)
If the price is too low, it's called predatory pricing
It the price is just the same, it's called price fixing
How convenient a system where anyone doing business is guilty
Relative to cost.
price > aggregated Cost x10 : gouging/premium market
Price aggregated Cost : Predatory pricing
Price of major competitor A == Price of all other major competitors : Price fixing
It's easy to tell market forces from monopoly powered gouging/undercutting/price fixing. They do not overlap all conditions and the common case aught not and does not fall within those bounds.
So thats what... $5, $6 American?
Currently just a few cents under parity. Wait a year and you may be looking at 1.25 greenbacks per loonie. As the trend has gone that way. We went from ~0.69 greenbacks per loonies to 0.98 greenbacks per loonie.
Does Apple truly have much to lose from iPhone hackery?
Vendor support. They need carriers to push their products and to allow their products to connect. What good is a cell without a network?
The vendor is under zero obligation to enable unlocking.
That really depends on which jurisdiction you live in. In the UK the vendor must release unlocking info if the phone is not on a contract. Bought outright without subsidy. perhaps they'll just limit it to contract only. In Belgium vendor locked phones of any kind are illegal. In various other places you can pay to get the unlock codes. So if they wish for one model for multiple nations it must be unlockable in some way. If they want a separate version for various places then they can eliminate all unlocking options.
Us people in the know have been very harsh on Sony about Heavenly Sword's length, but you know what, all the common video game consumer friends I have with a PS3 have called me up to ask if I absolutely loved the game as much as them... and when I tried to explain that it was great but short, most of them told me in a matter of fact way that the game was like an epic movie that you got to play, and that being short made sense to them because it kicked ass in the short time it played and it didn't have tons of filler, which they didn't want.
Yeah I would have preferred halo trimmed by about 50% since thats how much filler you had to go through to play the unique or interesting parts. Most modern games could be trimmed in a similar way. I guess they add the filler to prevent from being "rental" material. If you blow your load in 6h with no foreplay then they have less incentive to buy it versus rent it. So a game that requires a lot of foreplay may convince someone to work harder for the same err.. nerdgasm.
Or maybe the game could just be secure and not allow map hacking at all?
Go server side for everything and have the installed game be nothing more than a dumb client?
Map hacking occurs because the enemy player position exists within ram. By removing a fog layer or dummying enemy position graphics on top of the fog. The onyl way to truly avoid this is to prevent your opponents position from being distributed until they come into view. But the problem is network latency, limited server side resources, etc.. keep it from being very practical. The best you can do is a shifting array of ram checksums, obsfucation, banning, and statistics. Unless you make the entire load server side. Which is possible these days and network latency isn't as much of a concern but it's not an easy problem to solve.
It was about control.
The primary motivation to buy the game was to PLAY it. If you pirated it, you could still PLAY it with your friends via several methods. The difference was that you couldn't use their "official" matchmaker service. The existence of BnetD had, at most, a negligible impact on the level of piracy.
They also didn't demand the key checker; they OFFERED to use whatever keychecker Blizzard was willing to give them access to.
It was a valid fair use case, killed off by venue-shopping.
Variants bnetD code runs a large percentages of the pirate battle net clones in Asia. I know first hand. There is hardly a legitimate copy in any place in china. I looked hard for one but the piracy makes any attempt to sell it moot. I played at Cafe's and at peoples house with fake copies with a different match making service while in china. It's the match making and ranking service that prompted the majority of my friends here in Canada to get a legit copy. Blizzard wanted to hedge possibility that the situation in most of Asia would happen here. Thus took an aggressive stanc eon it in NA. The argument that is was just fair use might be right but the argument it would diminish blizzards drawing power. Battlenet is a big reason war 3/diablo 2/SC etc still sell. Blizzard provided a free service that was adequate.
The obvious problem with bnetD verifying the copies is that they either need to provide the algorithm or the API to verify the keys both could be used again to pirate. So they opted to not have to mess with it and asked bnetD to stop.
The reason why there are few who have vehement anti-blizzard sentiment over this issue is most thought of BnetD as a piracy tool regardless of what it actually was. Actually most didn't care much either way. Blizzard generated a lot of good will in future decisions to compensate and the number who truly cared about bnetd were few. At this point it's sort of moot. BnetD is not dead but isn't as visible or actively developed openly.
I really hate JRPGs. I find them too linear and lacking in the "RPG" part. When I play a JRPG, it feels like it's just a movie with some interactive (but meaningless in the scope of the game) elements. Like someone developed a story and said "okay, let's throw in a few random fights and some minor and meaningless generic character stats stuff to break things up and stuff them between the scenes".
Well, with a few exceptions western RPGs are semi-linear as well. The only option you get are either to have a "evil" ending or "good" ending (KOTOR). Rarely is there a truly open ended game. Being non linear means your often doing uninteresting fed ex quests instead of uninteresting "run to X place, kill Y monster" you find in jRPGs. For every truly good non linear game (Torment, Fallout) you get a dozen fed ex games (morrow wind, Icewindale, etc..). They each have their strong points. jRPGs usually have a more interesting story despite having no latitude in guiding that story. Their fun and the mechanics are varied. cRPGS often are ad&d clones. Some cRPGs have strong memorable stories. Most have fairly bland ones. For instance Oblivion has a dull story. The whole draw was the sand box not story or game mechanics.
I mean, it's probably great for someone in the industry to know, so I read it, but as a game player, I just don't care.
Blizzard lost all credibility as far as I am concerned with bnetd.
BnetD: Hey blizzard is it okay if we invent something to circumvent your primary motivation for people to buy your game?
Blizzard: Ummm no. could you stop please.
BnetD: no. We want to do this. Why don't you help us out and give us your verification algorithm.
Blizzard: no please stop.
BnetD: no. Fuck off.
Blizzard: ahh well. Mr. lawyer can you ask him to stop.
Mr. Lawyer: Please stop.
BnetD: this is fascism.. fucking nazi's. I'm going to flame you on slashdot and then you'll be sorry.
BTW, all the good artists and devs in from the Diablo days are making Hellgate: London so uhh, the jury is still out on Diablo 3, if it ever even gets off the drawing board.
True enough, but a game takes a team. It's difficult to say what D1 or D2 would have been if Blizzard proper didn't have some influence on it. Being the mother studio/publisher they had a lot of influence. Many thought John Romero was the messiah of gaming and that he alone could inspire and design a awesome game. We got Daikatana. Turns out the other people at ID pushed and conspired with Romero into making the games they did. After he left ID games felt a little more shallow while Everything Romero did after felt slipshod and tacky. Sometimes no individual member or subset of a team can recreate what the team was in total. Who knows hellgate might be D3 on steroids. Or it might be Ropers, Schaefer, Schaefer and Breviks Daikatana.
Microsoft could embrace ODF. They could integrate it with Microsoft Office, eliminate .DOC, and produce the best ODF tools in the market and maintain their dominance, even in Government. Open Office, while great for the breadth of its tools, is a complicated beast and can be overwhelming for general office staff.
From past experience MS realize that fair competition isn't good for the ones competing. Google isn't really competing in the same way as the profit off of something independent of what office suit you use. Just as MS previously didn't care which Windows loaded PC you bought. While MS has a vested interest which office suite you use now. So having a open standard gives other companies a way in to crowd into MS's business model.
thats CAD, although these days their interchangeable. Head to any HMV or Music world in Canada. Look for old classic albums like Zeppelin IV, almost anything from NIN, Beattles etc.
That's true for the two immensely popular albums that you listed here.
However, the sales from those albums do something other than cover the production costs of PHM and TDS. They help cover the costs of the tons of unprofitable albums the labels produce.
If you want albums *that* cheap, you will have to live with the labels in question not signing and working for promising artists that will probably never be popular.
For every platinum album produced by a label, there are 100 albums that don't cover all their production costs.
That explanation doesn't fly. I know a bands that was signed. They were loaned ~50,000 which they proceeded to blow on recording a decent demo/record and promotion. They then tried to sell it and got no further funds or support from their label. Ending up with thousands in debt each because outside of my city they didn't promote them. They found out they were signed to shelve them as the same label backed a similar band in a bigger market. They legally owed this money back. Most of the charges were exaggerated studio fees, release party, and bloated "promotion" including 10,000 in merch they never authorized but were billed for. It was crates of merch but You could buy the same tacky garbage and put logos on it for half as much as they paid.
On paper the label risked 50,000 and around 30,000. In reality they got a band to work for free and theoretically pay them back 30,000 for the privilege of working for free. They likely made a profit off the CD's because the studio engineers didn't make even close to what the billed hourly rate was and rent isn't that expansive. Everything had a 200% mark up before the label sold it to the band. Who now has crates of merch, crushing debt, no future.
This story is not atypical.
What assets and ip?
Falcon
They have a perfectly good patent on how to extort money form large multi-national corporations. As well on how to run a legal pump and dump. If they can get the first one to work properly and the second one not to violate insider trading they will have a gold mine!
I stand corrected. It's only true in some places in europe and japan.
So imagine
Windows Vista home: $199
Max OS X family: $199
Windows 98 SE: $399
Mac OS 8.0: $399
It's silly.