Eh? I fly into Australia and New Zealand all the time on multiple carriers, and I regularly carry spirits on-board without any issues. I've done so for over a decade now.
How's that for timing? PALGN just interviewed Eric Kaltman, cataloger at the Stanford University library about his role in cataloging game-related material and the challenges that DRM and MMOs present. Stanford's part of the "preserving virtual worlds" project, along with the University of Illinois mentioned in the article. He's also the guy who writes on the How They Got Game blog, where he documents his findings.
It's an interesting field. Far more challenging than I would have thought.
What does internal tech support produce that the company sells? What do the developers of internal HR / Pay / Billing systems produce that the company sells? It's the same principle.
You could argue that the billing system is a 'saleable asset', but by that token, so are all the pricing decisions made by finance.
I think that's a little simplistic. For example, accountants very much do 'production work', as do many internal analysts (marketing or otherwise). And, the CIO and their direct reports are very much responsible for managing the company, at least in an internal sense. Almost all true IT managers spend far more time managing budgets, headcount, and teams than they do working on Linux.
There may very well be a management vs. labour conflict (even though it's a bit of a dated idea), but I don't think it's analogous to IT vs. Business.
IMHO, it's for a few reasons. Within the relationship, both sides use heavy amounts of jargon. IT comes across as being condescending and confusing, which can irritate the business. IT also doesn't have as detailed a knowledge of the business's operations, and so can get frustrated when the business becomes impatient and / or misses things when describing their processes and activities.
If you look at it from the business's perspective, people who don't have anything to do with the business problem are getting to make the decision about what to use. That can be extremely irritating when the business has already made up their mind (rightly or wrongly) about what their preferred approach is.
And, if you look at it from IT's perspective, it's can be extremely irritating that the business just doesn't understand or care about all the other things that are needed, such as maintainability, architectural integration, and so on.
The other side is that IT is almost always a cost centre, while many lines of business are profit centres. This really dictates a certain culture - cost centres tend to focus on cost minimisation while profit centres focus on opportunities and growth. There's an inevitable cultural clash right there, but it's not limited to IT - it also happens with the accountants in finance and the sales team, for example.
There's plenty of other reasons, but those come to the top of my mind.
Officeworks had a standard retail offer of $580 for the Premium with Forza 2 during their recent sale. However, they also offer 5% off to shareholders and it's fairly easy to get a 10% off for family and friends voucher if you have a look around online and keep your eyes open. I'll admit I got a potentially atypical deal because of the voucher, but most places definitely aren't selling the Premium at retail - they're well under, especially when they bundle a game. But, on the same note, it's not like I'm unique - it's fairly easy to get one at around $530 - $550 if you really want to. I can't think of any competitive retail outlet that's selling it without a game for $650 - a five minute shop-around will get you a 360 with a game for around $590 with minimal effort.
Have a look through here for current deals. The pick of the litter at the moment is probably JB, with the 360 + DoA4 / PGR3 / Forza 2 for $639. Or, you can buy the Pro on its own for $537, equivalent to US$414 after subtracting GST (only US$14 higher than US RRP). Personally, I just think most people aren't aware of the level of discounting available at market prices in Australia - they think RRP is normal.
Europe, Australia and New Zealand (and others) are more than aware of the typical 'rape'* tax applied to electronic items from the states, we've grown used to it but the consoles have been especially nasty of late
(Example hard disks and CPU's - around 15% more expensive than the states AFTER conversion)
Don't forget that unlike US prices, Australian pricing has 10% Goods and Service Tax included in the quoted price. I paid AU$530 for my 360 Professional including Forza 2, equivalent to roughly US$450. Subtract the 10% GST we pay, and that's down to US$405 for the Pro version with a decent game. And, more importantly, that was before the announced price cut - from what I can see, I paid US$5 more than retail rates and got Forza 2 for free. I'd be curious to know what competitive US market rates are for the same deal - here in Australia, very few companies have been charging retail for the 360. At least, not the ones actually selling them with any success.
It isn't selling faster than the PS2. At least, not according to Sony's official figures. By this long after launch, Sony had shipped (and sold) around 2m units of the Playstation 2. They've only shipped 1.2 million units of the Playstation 3.
Interestingly enough, The Elements of Style seem not to mind using "but" or "and" at the start of a sentence:
Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.
...
And would you write "The worst tennis player around here is I" or "The worst tennis player around here is me"? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment although the me might not do in all contexts.
...
"But," you may ask, "what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness - the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.
The horrific voice over scared me more than anything in the game.
Seriously though, it was an excellent example of why games aren't taken more seriously. Most people still think of games being as cheesy as Sanitarium simply because of the very poorly acted voice dialog. It's painfully obvious how low the production standards of most games are when you compare them against something with decent overall production standards (such as The Longest Journey or Dreamfall).
Try a better country. The oligopoly situation in e.g. Australia and New Zealand, combined with the limited bandwidth on and off the continent, has allowed residential "broadband" providers to get away with billing per megabyte over the first 3000 in a month.
I don't know what the situation is in NZ, but that's definitely not the situation in Australia any more. Maybe three years ago. There's plenty of choice now, and I'm not even sure if any ISP still charges you for going over the limit.
We still don't have true unlimited plans, but I'm on a 1.5mb plan for $70 AUD a month and I can download 60 gig before I get slowed down. I could drop that down to $50 if I were willing to drop to 21 gig a month. I'm really not worried about the Wii eating up all my bandwidth, and I can't believe anyone I know will be.
As with everywhere, bad plans do exist. Plans with high prices and low features. However, the people who are signed up to them have only got themselves to blame. If you buy a car from the first car yard you go into, you deserve to get screwed. Same with pretty much everything else. It's not like there's only one ISP in town, and it's not like the resources don't exist to browse almost every plan in Australia in one place.
One thing that you have to realize, is that the XBox today can handle Half Life 2.
An XBox today is not rendering Half-life 2 at 1280x1024 with 8x anti-aliasing at full detail. It may be able to handle the physics engine, but it's compromising massively on the resolution. The PS3 is competing directly against PC resolutions, so it'll be interesting to see how well it performs compared to PC ports (or vice versa). For once, we'll probably be actually able to benchmark it against a directly comparable platform, given the commonality of engines and resolutions.
The basic problem is that, as with any worthwhile CS question, doing it well is hard. It is very easy to come up with false connections between data. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in any kind of automated or even semi-automated fashion, OTOH, is an enormous challenge.
I'll respectfully disagree. There's a very large number of organisations that are using predicitive modelling through data mining to conduct various forms of customer scoring and analytical CRM activities. These are being used in a production sense, where they run totally hands-off and are used as inputs into the sales or customer maintenance process. This stuff has been going on in the financial services industry for at least a decade, and is very mature.
What I think you may be talking about is machine-driven data mining, where little to no human interaction occurs during the model formulation stage. This is still very much a frontier. Conceptually (and technically, in some cases), it's possible to automate in certain set of well understood circumstances (such as within forecasting, credit scoring, and other pretty well understood fields), but there's a limited set of products out there that provide the flexibility and automation to do so. They do exist, however.
Analogies like this are always dangerous, but I'd say data mining now is about where language development was in the mid-1950's, when FORTRAN was first being developed. IOW, we have a set of tools that kind of work, most of the time, for certain applications -- but we can pretty much guarantee that they're not the best possible tools, and that we will build better ones.
Within best of breed applications (and I'm not including anything from the originally pure-play DB vendors here), data mining tools have matured to the point where the incremental returns (measured through accuracy improvements) from version releases are trailing off. They're still there, and each additional model provides greater breadth within a tournament, but in a business sense, the incremental returns are falling. The next big steps will involve improved background model validation, automation, model lifecycle management, and seamless integration with business support systems. That's why everyone is pushing back towards the "platform" architecture - it's not only how you build your models that's important, it's what you do with them once they've been built.
But the simple fact is that once you have enough data available, you can "mine" any result you want! Datamining is not about letting the data lead you to certain conclusions. It's all about trying to find things in the data that "hidden" - things that really aren't there when the data are properly analyzed.
Depends what you mean by "data mining". As the other reply has already said, bad statistics is bad statistics, regardless of the name. There's plenty of techniques in use to prevent spurious or misleading results through data mining - the use of hold-out samples, test cases, and random sampling checks are all ways of keeping the systems or results "honest" and accurate.
Sure, you can get any results you want through data mining. But, if it doesn't hold up in the real world, it's useless. So, you test it before you implement it, just as with any other rigorous field.
Datamining is, generally, bunk science. (It should not, however, be confused with proper data analysis techiques, which are extremely useful and popular even today.)
You say potaeto, I say potahto. Good data mining uses good data analysis techniques. Bad data analysis is bad data analysis, no matter which way you slice it, and it isn't limited to data mining.
The "price deflation" is the natural increase in technology. A pharoh couldn't buy a car(let alone a flushing toilet) even though he had more wealth than any of us will ever see, but his purchasing power was limited to the current technology of his time.
It's still an increase in purchasing power. The reason why it's happening is interesting, but irrelevant in this case - it still contributes to an increase in our standard of living without incurring additional cost. Even though our inflation adjusted income has only gone up by around 6%, our ability to buy goods with that 6% has increased disproportionately.
Doing good, folks. Lets see if we can't make it 6% in another quarter-century.
That doesn't take into account the price deflation that's been occuring at the same time. Price a 1980 family sized vehicle with ABS, a full suite of airbags, a six stack CD player with MP3 capabilities, and tiptronic automatic gears and adjust that price for inflation to find out what it'd cost today. Now do the same for a computer with specifications equivalent to a dual core AMD with 2 gig of RAM. Compare those prices to what we actually pay.
Our purchasing power has increased astronomically since then, even after taking into account the increase in purchasing power from increases in inflation adjusted income.
The PSP isn't nearly as impressive to me as the GameBoy DS for gaming.
Call me a pedant, but it's the Nintendo DS, not GameBoy DS - Nintendo's been very pedantic about saying that it's not a GameBoy and that it's a brand in its own right (the "third pillar"). They're likely to launch a new GameBoy in the next year or two, and it'll sell in parallel with the DS (and more likely that not won't run any DS games, just as the DS won't run the new GameBoy's games).
I have to say the greatest tragedy of your post is the de facto assumption that presidential elections are binomial problems...
Rightly or wrongly, most pollsters frame the questions as binomial and ignore the marginals. So, if you're in the US, it's Republican vs. Democrat. If you're in Australia, it's Labor vs. Liberal. It's funny that you point it out though - I didn't even pick that up. I just thought of the easiest real-world example I could think of. It's a bit of a sad comment on our electoral process, isn't it.
You obviously haven't studied statistics. We predict presidential elections by surveying 400 people in a country of 280 million. This is far less complex, and there are far fewer variables.
Well, if you're measuring one variable (time in this case), you need roughly 30 samples to approach a representative distribution. The variance may still be pretty high, but you're at least approaching the true population mean once you're past 30. Close enough to work with for this example, anyway.
Presidential elections are a binomial problem and typically one where the outcome is extremely close and important. So, you want to increase the power of the test as much as possible, hence the (relatively) large sample size. When you're talking about a margin of error of less than +-2% ideally, you're talking pretty large sample sizes. FWIW, a sample of 400 on yes/no question will give you a margin of error in the order of +-5% on the response distribution. To get to +-2% (assuming representative stratified sampling), you need to sample approximately 2,000 people.
The FMVs fit on one CD on the PC version. They were spread across all four, but separated out on their own, they filled a single CD. I don't know why the game was so big though - poor compression I assume
No government help, no tax breaks... and Australia is not going to benefit from it:
I'd blame that on a lack of research ability. I know of three different government sponsorship schemes off the top of my head (federal and state) that are designed for non-equity based seed funding. And, I'm not an expert in the area. If done correctly and if successful, you can generate somewhere in the order of a few hundred thousand a year and have the opportunity to re-apply when the funding period runs out (a few years, from memory).
Sure, the government could be doing a hell of a lot more, but options do exist. Besides, tax is meaningless if you're looking at a startup - cash is king. Given that you're making year on year losses, you pay barely any tax anyway. The main thing you need is cashflow. When I used to do a bit of work in the area, it was actually surprising how few people took advantage of the government funding options.
With regards to the GP, it's all in who you know. Australia's a small place, and the salaries are very good when compared to the cost of living. If you're plugged in enough to know the people hiring. Advertised positions still go high enough to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle (especially when one considers vacation time in comparison to the US), but the real money comes through contacts.
Overqualified people not getting a job? Seems strange to me. Everyone I know who's qualified has few problems getting a new job within a few months. And, I personally believe know a pretty good spread of people. They range from C levels of major Australian companies everyone would recognise through to helpdesk support and graduates.
It's an interesting write-up, but I think the conclusions latif's come to aren't warranted. Firstly, all the speculation about Mindstorms price elasticity of demand are based on the assumption that strong consumer interest exists. Lego Mindstorms is competing against (read in the same price range) as Robosapien and the like. These toys are in a premium segment of the market - they're the "big gift" for Christmas and birthdays. Without having seen any sales figures, I'd be surprised if there were strong demand for Mindstorms - the price is just too high. It's anecdotal, but I've only ever seen a few (if any) mindstorm stock items on the shelves in any of the stores I've ever been into. And, they've typically been in electronics stores, not toy shops. That's not typically a characteristic of a high demand item.
To be honest, it looks like someone's just completed an economics course and decided to try applying their knowledge to a real-world problem. I mean, the only point in examining price elasticity of demand in this context would have been if one had already established that Lego was losing money and were interested in determining whether or not Lego could raise prices without sacrificing sales. Same goes for the piece cost analysis. Which doesn't take into account the complexity of unique parts, I might add - Lego can achieve some degree of economies of scale with their common parts (6x2 / 4x2 bricks, helmets, etc). Mindstorms has a large number of parts that are only relevant for the Mindstorms line (such as gears, IR sensors, pulleys, etc). Production costs are likely to be higher, and because they're not piggy-backing on a fad (like Harry Potter or Star Wars), sales are also probably going to be lower.
The assumption that Mindstorms is cannibalising sales is also a stretch, in my opinion. Far more likely that their association with movie brands such as Star Wars and Harry Potter creates substitutable products. Both those brands, as an example, are pitched at the same demographic. And, neither is strictly complementary, from a kid's perspective. Which would you rather - a complete line-up of Star Wars characters, vehicles, and environs, or a blend of HP and SW?
In my opinion, the simpler explanation is that Mindstorms appeals to a very small niche - kids who think with parents who are trying to encourage learning and are willing to spend the time with their kids. Far more likely that they never achieved the scale of sales they were expecting, but because of the sunk costs associated with R&D and brand development, they're unwilling to kill the line entirely. Whether or not that's the economically wise decision depends on their unit revenue and long-run average cost of production.
FWIW, have a look at the response I made just above, located here. I left "realism" a little too undefined, and I can see why some people are reading it as my saying that all games should be true to our reality. That's not quite what I meant...
These are first gen games, which were really made the hardware that is currently available (and lower).
I call shenanigans. Almost every other modern console launched historically has had a significant jump in image quality compared to the competition at launch. NES -> SNES -> N64 -> Gamecube. Master System -> Genesis -> Saturn -> Dreamcast. PlayStation -> PS2.
That the Xbox 360 doesn't would be concerning the hell out of me if I were a direct investor.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? I fly into Australia and New Zealand all the time on multiple carriers, and I regularly carry spirits on-board without any issues. I've done so for over a decade now.
I think you may have been misinformed.
How's that for timing? PALGN just interviewed Eric Kaltman, cataloger at the Stanford University library about his role in cataloging game-related material and the challenges that DRM and MMOs present. Stanford's part of the "preserving virtual worlds" project, along with the University of Illinois mentioned in the article. He's also the guy who writes on the How They Got Game blog, where he documents his findings.
It's an interesting field. Far more challenging than I would have thought.
What does internal tech support produce that the company sells? What do the developers of internal HR / Pay / Billing systems produce that the company sells? It's the same principle.
You could argue that the billing system is a 'saleable asset', but by that token, so are all the pricing decisions made by finance.
I think that's a little simplistic. For example, accountants very much do 'production work', as do many internal analysts (marketing or otherwise). And, the CIO and their direct reports are very much responsible for managing the company, at least in an internal sense. Almost all true IT managers spend far more time managing budgets, headcount, and teams than they do working on Linux.
There may very well be a management vs. labour conflict (even though it's a bit of a dated idea), but I don't think it's analogous to IT vs. Business.
IMHO, it's for a few reasons. Within the relationship, both sides use heavy amounts of jargon. IT comes across as being condescending and confusing, which can irritate the business. IT also doesn't have as detailed a knowledge of the business's operations, and so can get frustrated when the business becomes impatient and / or misses things when describing their processes and activities.
If you look at it from the business's perspective, people who don't have anything to do with the business problem are getting to make the decision about what to use. That can be extremely irritating when the business has already made up their mind (rightly or wrongly) about what their preferred approach is.
And, if you look at it from IT's perspective, it's can be extremely irritating that the business just doesn't understand or care about all the other things that are needed, such as maintainability, architectural integration, and so on.
The other side is that IT is almost always a cost centre, while many lines of business are profit centres. This really dictates a certain culture - cost centres tend to focus on cost minimisation while profit centres focus on opportunities and growth. There's an inevitable cultural clash right there, but it's not limited to IT - it also happens with the accountants in finance and the sales team, for example.
There's plenty of other reasons, but those come to the top of my mind.
Officeworks had a standard retail offer of $580 for the Premium with Forza 2 during their recent sale. However, they also offer 5% off to shareholders and it's fairly easy to get a 10% off for family and friends voucher if you have a look around online and keep your eyes open. I'll admit I got a potentially atypical deal because of the voucher, but most places definitely aren't selling the Premium at retail - they're well under, especially when they bundle a game. But, on the same note, it's not like I'm unique - it's fairly easy to get one at around $530 - $550 if you really want to. I can't think of any competitive retail outlet that's selling it without a game for $650 - a five minute shop-around will get you a 360 with a game for around $590 with minimal effort.
Have a look through here for current deals. The pick of the litter at the moment is probably JB, with the 360 + DoA4 / PGR3 / Forza 2 for $639. Or, you can buy the Pro on its own for $537, equivalent to US$414 after subtracting GST (only US$14 higher than US RRP). Personally, I just think most people aren't aware of the level of discounting available at market prices in Australia - they think RRP is normal.
Europe, Australia and New Zealand (and others) are more than aware of the typical 'rape'* tax applied to electronic items from the states, we've grown used to it but the consoles have been especially nasty of late (Example hard disks and CPU's - around 15% more expensive than the states AFTER conversion)
Don't forget that unlike US prices, Australian pricing has 10% Goods and Service Tax included in the quoted price. I paid AU$530 for my 360 Professional including Forza 2, equivalent to roughly US$450. Subtract the 10% GST we pay, and that's down to US$405 for the Pro version with a decent game. And, more importantly, that was before the announced price cut - from what I can see, I paid US$5 more than retail rates and got Forza 2 for free. I'd be curious to know what competitive US market rates are for the same deal - here in Australia, very few companies have been charging retail for the 360. At least, not the ones actually selling them with any success.
It isn't selling faster than the PS2. At least, not according to Sony's official figures. By this long after launch, Sony had shipped (and sold) around 2m units of the Playstation 2. They've only shipped 1.2 million units of the Playstation 3.
Interestingly enough, The Elements of Style seem not to mind using "but" or "and" at the start of a sentence:
Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.
...
And would you write "The worst tennis player around here is I" or "The worst tennis player around here is me"? The first is good grammar, the second is good judgment although the me might not do in all contexts.
...
"But," you may ask, "what if it comes natural to me to experiment rather than conform? What if I am a pioneer, or even a genius?" Answer: then be one. But do not forget that what may seem like pioneering may be merely evasion, or laziness - the disinclination to submit to discipline. Writing good standard English is no cinch, and before you have managed it you will have encountered enough rough country to satisfy even the most adventurous spirit.
From here
The horrific voice over scared me more than anything in the game.
Seriously though, it was an excellent example of why games aren't taken more seriously. Most people still think of games being as cheesy as Sanitarium simply because of the very poorly acted voice dialog. It's painfully obvious how low the production standards of most games are when you compare them against something with decent overall production standards (such as The Longest Journey or Dreamfall).
Try a better country. The oligopoly situation in e.g. Australia and New Zealand, combined with the limited bandwidth on and off the continent, has allowed residential "broadband" providers to get away with billing per megabyte over the first 3000 in a month.
I don't know what the situation is in NZ, but that's definitely not the situation in Australia any more. Maybe three years ago. There's plenty of choice now, and I'm not even sure if any ISP still charges you for going over the limit.
We still don't have true unlimited plans, but I'm on a 1.5mb plan for $70 AUD a month and I can download 60 gig before I get slowed down. I could drop that down to $50 if I were willing to drop to 21 gig a month. I'm really not worried about the Wii eating up all my bandwidth, and I can't believe anyone I know will be.
As with everywhere, bad plans do exist. Plans with high prices and low features. However, the people who are signed up to them have only got themselves to blame. If you buy a car from the first car yard you go into, you deserve to get screwed. Same with pretty much everything else. It's not like there's only one ISP in town, and it's not like the resources don't exist to browse almost every plan in Australia in one place.
One thing that you have to realize, is that the XBox today can handle Half Life 2.
An XBox today is not rendering Half-life 2 at 1280x1024 with 8x anti-aliasing at full detail. It may be able to handle the physics engine, but it's compromising massively on the resolution. The PS3 is competing directly against PC resolutions, so it'll be interesting to see how well it performs compared to PC ports (or vice versa). For once, we'll probably be actually able to benchmark it against a directly comparable platform, given the commonality of engines and resolutions.
The basic problem is that, as with any worthwhile CS question, doing it well is hard. It is very easy to come up with false connections between data. Sorting the wheat from the chaff in any kind of automated or even semi-automated fashion, OTOH, is an enormous challenge.
I'll respectfully disagree. There's a very large number of organisations that are using predicitive modelling through data mining to conduct various forms of customer scoring and analytical CRM activities. These are being used in a production sense, where they run totally hands-off and are used as inputs into the sales or customer maintenance process. This stuff has been going on in the financial services industry for at least a decade, and is very mature.
What I think you may be talking about is machine-driven data mining, where little to no human interaction occurs during the model formulation stage. This is still very much a frontier. Conceptually (and technically, in some cases), it's possible to automate in certain set of well understood circumstances (such as within forecasting, credit scoring, and other pretty well understood fields), but there's a limited set of products out there that provide the flexibility and automation to do so. They do exist, however.
Analogies like this are always dangerous, but I'd say data mining now is about where language development was in the mid-1950's, when FORTRAN was first being developed. IOW, we have a set of tools that kind of work, most of the time, for certain applications -- but we can pretty much guarantee that they're not the best possible tools, and that we will build better ones.
Within best of breed applications (and I'm not including anything from the originally pure-play DB vendors here), data mining tools have matured to the point where the incremental returns (measured through accuracy improvements) from version releases are trailing off. They're still there, and each additional model provides greater breadth within a tournament, but in a business sense, the incremental returns are falling. The next big steps will involve improved background model validation, automation, model lifecycle management, and seamless integration with business support systems. That's why everyone is pushing back towards the "platform" architecture - it's not only how you build your models that's important, it's what you do with them once they've been built.
But the simple fact is that once you have enough data available, you can "mine" any result you want! Datamining is not about letting the data lead you to certain conclusions. It's all about trying to find things in the data that "hidden" - things that really aren't there when the data are properly analyzed.
Depends what you mean by "data mining". As the other reply has already said, bad statistics is bad statistics, regardless of the name. There's plenty of techniques in use to prevent spurious or misleading results through data mining - the use of hold-out samples, test cases, and random sampling checks are all ways of keeping the systems or results "honest" and accurate.
Sure, you can get any results you want through data mining. But, if it doesn't hold up in the real world, it's useless. So, you test it before you implement it, just as with any other rigorous field.
Datamining is, generally, bunk science. (It should not, however, be confused with proper data analysis techiques, which are extremely useful and popular even today.)
You say potaeto, I say potahto. Good data mining uses good data analysis techniques. Bad data analysis is bad data analysis, no matter which way you slice it, and it isn't limited to data mining.
The "price deflation" is the natural increase in technology. A pharoh couldn't buy a car(let alone a flushing toilet) even though he had more wealth than any of us will ever see, but his purchasing power was limited to the current technology of his time.
It's still an increase in purchasing power. The reason why it's happening is interesting, but irrelevant in this case - it still contributes to an increase in our standard of living without incurring additional cost. Even though our inflation adjusted income has only gone up by around 6%, our ability to buy goods with that 6% has increased disproportionately.
Doing good, folks. Lets see if we can't make it 6% in another quarter-century.
That doesn't take into account the price deflation that's been occuring at the same time. Price a 1980 family sized vehicle with ABS, a full suite of airbags, a six stack CD player with MP3 capabilities, and tiptronic automatic gears and adjust that price for inflation to find out what it'd cost today. Now do the same for a computer with specifications equivalent to a dual core AMD with 2 gig of RAM. Compare those prices to what we actually pay.
Our purchasing power has increased astronomically since then, even after taking into account the increase in purchasing power from increases in inflation adjusted income.
The PSP isn't nearly as impressive to me as the GameBoy DS for gaming.
Call me a pedant, but it's the Nintendo DS, not GameBoy DS - Nintendo's been very pedantic about saying that it's not a GameBoy and that it's a brand in its own right (the "third pillar"). They're likely to launch a new GameBoy in the next year or two, and it'll sell in parallel with the DS (and more likely that not won't run any DS games, just as the DS won't run the new GameBoy's games).
I have to say the greatest tragedy of your post is the de facto assumption that presidential elections are binomial problems...
Rightly or wrongly, most pollsters frame the questions as binomial and ignore the marginals. So, if you're in the US, it's Republican vs. Democrat. If you're in Australia, it's Labor vs. Liberal. It's funny that you point it out though - I didn't even pick that up. I just thought of the easiest real-world example I could think of. It's a bit of a sad comment on our electoral process, isn't it.
You obviously haven't studied statistics. We predict presidential elections by surveying 400 people in a country of 280 million. This is far less complex, and there are far fewer variables.
Well, if you're measuring one variable (time in this case), you need roughly 30 samples to approach a representative distribution. The variance may still be pretty high, but you're at least approaching the true population mean once you're past 30. Close enough to work with for this example, anyway.
Presidential elections are a binomial problem and typically one where the outcome is extremely close and important. So, you want to increase the power of the test as much as possible, hence the (relatively) large sample size. When you're talking about a margin of error of less than +-2% ideally, you're talking pretty large sample sizes. FWIW, a sample of 400 on yes/no question will give you a margin of error in the order of +-5% on the response distribution. To get to +-2% (assuming representative stratified sampling), you need to sample approximately 2,000 people.
The FMVs fit on one CD on the PC version. They were spread across all four, but separated out on their own, they filled a single CD. I don't know why the game was so big though - poor compression I assume
Close - Benjamin Disraeli.
No government help, no tax breaks... and Australia is not going to benefit from it:
I'd blame that on a lack of research ability. I know of three different government sponsorship schemes off the top of my head (federal and state) that are designed for non-equity based seed funding. And, I'm not an expert in the area. If done correctly and if successful, you can generate somewhere in the order of a few hundred thousand a year and have the opportunity to re-apply when the funding period runs out (a few years, from memory).
Sure, the government could be doing a hell of a lot more, but options do exist. Besides, tax is meaningless if you're looking at a startup - cash is king. Given that you're making year on year losses, you pay barely any tax anyway. The main thing you need is cashflow. When I used to do a bit of work in the area, it was actually surprising how few people took advantage of the government funding options.
With regards to the GP, it's all in who you know. Australia's a small place, and the salaries are very good when compared to the cost of living. If you're plugged in enough to know the people hiring. Advertised positions still go high enough to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle (especially when one considers vacation time in comparison to the US), but the real money comes through contacts.
Overqualified people not getting a job? Seems strange to me. Everyone I know who's qualified has few problems getting a new job within a few months. And, I personally believe know a pretty good spread of people. They range from C levels of major Australian companies everyone would recognise through to helpdesk support and graduates.
It's an interesting write-up, but I think the conclusions latif's come to aren't warranted. Firstly, all the speculation about Mindstorms price elasticity of demand are based on the assumption that strong consumer interest exists. Lego Mindstorms is competing against (read in the same price range) as Robosapien and the like. These toys are in a premium segment of the market - they're the "big gift" for Christmas and birthdays. Without having seen any sales figures, I'd be surprised if there were strong demand for Mindstorms - the price is just too high. It's anecdotal, but I've only ever seen a few (if any) mindstorm stock items on the shelves in any of the stores I've ever been into. And, they've typically been in electronics stores, not toy shops. That's not typically a characteristic of a high demand item.
To be honest, it looks like someone's just completed an economics course and decided to try applying their knowledge to a real-world problem. I mean, the only point in examining price elasticity of demand in this context would have been if one had already established that Lego was losing money and were interested in determining whether or not Lego could raise prices without sacrificing sales. Same goes for the piece cost analysis. Which doesn't take into account the complexity of unique parts, I might add - Lego can achieve some degree of economies of scale with their common parts (6x2 / 4x2 bricks, helmets, etc). Mindstorms has a large number of parts that are only relevant for the Mindstorms line (such as gears, IR sensors, pulleys, etc). Production costs are likely to be higher, and because they're not piggy-backing on a fad (like Harry Potter or Star Wars), sales are also probably going to be lower.
The assumption that Mindstorms is cannibalising sales is also a stretch, in my opinion. Far more likely that their association with movie brands such as Star Wars and Harry Potter creates substitutable products. Both those brands, as an example, are pitched at the same demographic. And, neither is strictly complementary, from a kid's perspective. Which would you rather - a complete line-up of Star Wars characters, vehicles, and environs, or a blend of HP and SW?
In my opinion, the simpler explanation is that Mindstorms appeals to a very small niche - kids who think with parents who are trying to encourage learning and are willing to spend the time with their kids. Far more likely that they never achieved the scale of sales they were expecting, but because of the sunk costs associated with R&D and brand development, they're unwilling to kill the line entirely. Whether or not that's the economically wise decision depends on their unit revenue and long-run average cost of production.
FWIW, have a look at the response I made just above, located here. I left "realism" a little too undefined, and I can see why some people are reading it as my saying that all games should be true to our reality. That's not quite what I meant ...
Mea culpa. :)
These are first gen games, which were really made the hardware that is currently available (and lower).
I call shenanigans. Almost every other modern console launched historically has had a significant jump in image quality compared to the competition at launch. NES -> SNES -> N64 -> Gamecube. Master System -> Genesis -> Saturn -> Dreamcast. PlayStation -> PS2.
That the Xbox 360 doesn't would be concerning the hell out of me if I were a direct investor.