Nintendo drops DS game prices to $20 when sales slow. Offhand the first Kirby DS game and Metroid Pinball dropped to $20 quite a while ago, as did Meteos and Trace Memory (both are which were published by Nintendo, although not developed by them).
Look at Bear Stearns' recent bond report. One bond is now worth $0 on the dollar (yes, $0 on the dollar, their official statement). Another bond is now worth 9 cents on the dollar. These are billion dollar bonds, now worthless. Yet many of these bond issues are diversified through CDOs, which are increasingly becoming dangerous. We're talking possibly $1 trillion in CDOs that are in danger of collapse - yet the average person has no clue about it. Things could go from bad to horrific in very short order, affecting markets unrelated to the bond issues quickly.
A few CDO Bonds being worth near nothing isn't something to be alarmed about, but rather something to be expected. The purpose of CDO and CMBS deals is to pile together a large number of mortgage loans or other risky investments into a pool and then redistribute the risk. A CDO/CMBS will have a 10-20 or so bonds as a part of it. The higher tier bonds receive priority on principal payments, and the lower tier bonds take the losses first. Accordingly, the higher tier bonds have low interest rates whereas the lower tier bonds can get rather high interest rates.
Now, for the technicalities. The average interest rate for the entire deal cannot be higher than the average interest rate of the sub investments that make up the deal. So to give the lower tier bonds a high return on investment, they will have an interest rate in the same ballpark as the higher tier bonds, but will be initially sold for something like 80 cents on the dollar.
Now, follow this logic out. The bottom tiers start at $.80 per $1. You've got a hundred mortgages or other investments making up the overall deal. As payments are missed on those investments, the bottom tier bonds don't get their principal payments. They're going to sell for even less than they started out at. You do not buy these bonds expecting to see your principal back. You buy them hoping to make a profit from the interest before the bond bottoms out. They're called junk bonds for a reason.
When Thunderbird was first created, it was called Minotaur. I think they changed it at the same time as the Phoenix -> Firebird change just to get similar names, then didn't bother changing again.
Try the spectacular failures of the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn that preceded it. They dug themselves into a giant hole - both financially and in the minds of gamers - that was damn near impossible to dig out of.
How does it differentiate between a slow server side script and a slow network easily.
Unless you're dynamically ALL of the content, some things will load faster than others. Odds are most of your images are static, so when your 10 KB HTML page takes longer to transfer than your 30 KB images, you blame the server side scripting. If you design a site in ColdFusion, it won't send any page data until the script finishes running. In scenarios like that, the delay before receiving data is an indication that something is wrong on the server side scripting, if you didn't have similar delays on the images.
Isn't he the dipshit who yammered about the superiority of the N64's cartridge format and dismissed Final Fantasy 7 as a slow and tedious game nobody would want to play?
To be fair, outside of Japan very few RPGs sell very well. That comment is how the general public feels about 99% of RPGs. Final Fantasy 7 obviously turned out to be one of the most glaring exceptions to that rule. It was popular mainly because of the presentation, not the gameplay though.
As for the cartridge format, yeah it's horrible if you're trying to do an FMV extravaganza like FF7. But the 2x CDROM's of the day were terrible for the open ended exploration games Nintendo liked to make at the time.
How can you say MS can't afford to develop their own kernel? They've been getting along just fine for decades with that approach. They even developed two different kernels (9x and NT) at the same time for good chunk of time. They obviously have the ability to do it.
And for the cost aspect, Windows makes them incredible amounts of money. Enough so that it, combined with Office, subsidizes everything else the company does. They make enough that they can lose a billion dollars a year from the Xbox division and not even blink.
Again though, the kernel is by far the best part of the Windows codebase. Why would they scrap that and keep the rest?
You care how many sales a given system has because it determines what games get made for it. It also determines the quality of the games you get. On multi-console games, generally the system with the highest userbase gets the best development team on it.
I'm thinking they might use the Sun plugin under some special licensing deal that alows them to more closely refine the standards they are implementing.
I believe they tried that exact idea once before. I also remember it ending in a nasty lawsuit...
You can always tell a Java program on Windows because it breaks every paradigm that a windows user is used to. The buttons look different, act different. Menus look weird and act weird. Nothing does what you expect.
Are you trying to say that IE 7 was written in Java?
You're thinking of Win16 tasks. Win16 programs expected cooperative multitasking, whereas Win32 programs expected preemptive. To avoid breaking the interactions between Win16 programs, they were all run under one process, which internally handled the cooperative multitasking.
The Compact Disk logo is missing from almost all retail CD's nowdays.
Even before CDs started having DRM issues, a lot of CDs didn't have the logo, or if they did, it was inside the case. Generally speaking, the more elaborate the album art is, the less likely you are to find the CD logo on it.
I mearly was trying to illistrate that his time and skill are worth something.
Your time and skill are only worth something if you have someone willing to pay you for it. It's not like the guy took unpaid leave from his job to do this instead. He used time he wasn't going to get paid for anyway.
Enjoyment and education have little to do with the equation; I enjoy and learn while I'm at my job all day, yet I'm still paid the same rate if I don't.
But we're not talking about work time here. We're talking about his free time. Do you never read books, watch movies, or play games because you don't get paid to do it?
So how much do you normally get paid an hour? Unless its $10 or less, you've spent more money writing it yourself than if you just paid $20.
You're assuming that he's paid hourly and had the option of working additional hours if he chose to. Unless both of those conditions are true, your attempt to value his time is meaningless.
You're also assuming that he got no enjoyment and/or educational value out of doing the coding, which also throws of the valuation.
Why is it considered a given that Nintendo will not enter into this price war?
Companies drop prices to increase sales. Since launch, Wiis have been selling as fast as Nintendo can make them, with no signs of that letting up. Lowering the price would just mean less profit for Nintendo.
Nintendo has re-released Super Mario Bros a lot of times, with it selling well each time. There was the original NES release, Super Mario All Stars on the SNES, Super Mario Bros + Lost Levels on GB or GBC (not sure which), NES Collector's Series on GBA, and now it's one of the top selling games on Virtual Console. You don't have to keep your NES around to play this game. You're almost guarenteed to be able to buy it for a current system at any point in time.
Flash hasn't been ported to x86_64 because the 32-bit version runs fine. Even if you are running Linux with the x86_64 version of Firefox there's a wrapper tool to let it use the 32-bit flash plugin.
Flash hasn't been ported because Flash code is compiled into native code at runtime, just like Java.
Lowering the manufacturing cost doesn't make a huge difference on the price marketing sets, but it makes a huge difference on what the engineering team does.
The engineering team is given target transistor count based on expected manufacturing costs, which affects the cache size and feature set.
Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo drops DS game prices to $20 when sales slow. Offhand the first Kirby DS game and Metroid Pinball dropped to $20 quite a while ago, as did Meteos and Trace Memory (both are which were published by Nintendo, although not developed by them).
Look at Bear Stearns' recent bond report. One bond is now worth $0 on the dollar (yes, $0 on the dollar, their official statement). Another bond is now worth 9 cents on the dollar. These are billion dollar bonds, now worthless. Yet many of these bond issues are diversified through CDOs, which are increasingly becoming dangerous. We're talking possibly $1 trillion in CDOs that are in danger of collapse - yet the average person has no clue about it. Things could go from bad to horrific in very short order, affecting markets unrelated to the bond issues quickly.
A few CDO Bonds being worth near nothing isn't something to be alarmed about, but rather something to be expected. The purpose of CDO and CMBS deals is to pile together a large number of mortgage loans or other risky investments into a pool and then redistribute the risk. A CDO/CMBS will have a 10-20 or so bonds as a part of it. The higher tier bonds receive priority on principal payments, and the lower tier bonds take the losses first. Accordingly, the higher tier bonds have low interest rates whereas the lower tier bonds can get rather high interest rates.
Now, for the technicalities. The average interest rate for the entire deal cannot be higher than the average interest rate of the sub investments that make up the deal. So to give the lower tier bonds a high return on investment, they will have an interest rate in the same ballpark as the higher tier bonds, but will be initially sold for something like 80 cents on the dollar.
Now, follow this logic out. The bottom tiers start at $.80 per $1. You've got a hundred mortgages or other investments making up the overall deal. As payments are missed on those investments, the bottom tier bonds don't get their principal payments. They're going to sell for even less than they started out at. You do not buy these bonds expecting to see your principal back. You buy them hoping to make a profit from the interest before the bond bottoms out. They're called junk bonds for a reason.
When Thunderbird was first created, it was called Minotaur. I think they changed it at the same time as the Phoenix -> Firebird change just to get similar names, then didn't bother changing again.
Would you buy a car that had it's hood locked shut so that only authorized dealerships could open it?
No I wouldn't, but I also wouldn't insist the dealer give me the specifications so that I could make my own identical engine from scratch.
Try the spectacular failures of the SegaCD, 32X, and Saturn that preceded it. They dug themselves into a giant hole - both financially and in the minds of gamers - that was damn near impossible to dig out of.
How does it differentiate between a slow server side script and a slow network easily.
Unless you're dynamically ALL of the content, some things will load faster than others. Odds are most of your images are static, so when your 10 KB HTML page takes longer to transfer than your 30 KB images, you blame the server side scripting. If you design a site in ColdFusion, it won't send any page data until the script finishes running. In scenarios like that, the delay before receiving data is an indication that something is wrong on the server side scripting, if you didn't have similar delays on the images.
The specs say it can support up to 1GB of RAM. That's enough for most people, but some people will find it limiting.
If you need more than 1 GB of RAM, I would think you would be looking at a laptop that cost more than $150.
Isn't he the dipshit who yammered about the superiority of the N64's cartridge format and dismissed Final Fantasy 7 as a slow and tedious game nobody would want to play?
To be fair, outside of Japan very few RPGs sell very well. That comment is how the general public feels about 99% of RPGs. Final Fantasy 7 obviously turned out to be one of the most glaring exceptions to that rule. It was popular mainly because of the presentation, not the gameplay though.
As for the cartridge format, yeah it's horrible if you're trying to do an FMV extravaganza like FF7. But the 2x CDROM's of the day were terrible for the open ended exploration games Nintendo liked to make at the time.
You're right on Zelda, but Metroid is coming out next month. They did initially announce it as a launch title - maybe you've got your years mixed up?
How can you say MS can't afford to develop their own kernel? They've been getting along just fine for decades with that approach. They even developed two different kernels (9x and NT) at the same time for good chunk of time. They obviously have the ability to do it.
And for the cost aspect, Windows makes them incredible amounts of money. Enough so that it, combined with Office, subsidizes everything else the company does. They make enough that they can lose a billion dollars a year from the Xbox division and not even blink.
Again though, the kernel is by far the best part of the Windows codebase. Why would they scrap that and keep the rest?
Why would MS do that? The NT kernel is fine, it's the layers above it that's crap.
If they were going to use another kernel, they'd take one of the BSD kernels so that they could retain more control.
You care how many sales a given system has because it determines what games get made for it. It also determines the quality of the games you get. On multi-console games, generally the system with the highest userbase gets the best development team on it.
I somehow completely missed that last part of your comment. Sorry.
I'm thinking they might use the Sun plugin under some special licensing deal that alows them to more closely refine the standards they are implementing.
I believe they tried that exact idea once before. I also remember it ending in a nasty lawsuit...
You can always tell a Java program on Windows because it breaks every paradigm that a windows user is used to. The buttons look different, act different. Menus look weird and act weird. Nothing does what you expect.
Are you trying to say that IE 7 was written in Java?
You're thinking of Win16 tasks. Win16 programs expected cooperative multitasking, whereas Win32 programs expected preemptive. To avoid breaking the interactions between Win16 programs, they were all run under one process, which internally handled the cooperative multitasking.
The Compact Disk logo is missing from almost all retail CD's nowdays.
Even before CDs started having DRM issues, a lot of CDs didn't have the logo, or if they did, it was inside the case. Generally speaking, the more elaborate the album art is, the less likely you are to find the CD logo on it.
I mearly was trying to illistrate that his time and skill are worth something.
Your time and skill are only worth something if you have someone willing to pay you for it. It's not like the guy took unpaid leave from his job to do this instead. He used time he wasn't going to get paid for anyway.
Enjoyment and education have little to do with the equation; I enjoy and learn while I'm at my job all day, yet I'm still paid the same rate if I don't.
But we're not talking about work time here. We're talking about his free time. Do you never read books, watch movies, or play games because you don't get paid to do it?
Super Scope: 1 (six I guess, if you're the type of person who would count Wii Sports as 5 games).
Super Scope had at least 2 others. Yoshi's Safari and some robot battling game. Might've been more, but those were the interesting ones.
So how much do you normally get paid an hour? Unless its $10 or less, you've spent more money writing it yourself than if you just paid $20.
You're assuming that he's paid hourly and had the option of working additional hours if he chose to. Unless both of those conditions are true, your attempt to value his time is meaningless.
You're also assuming that he got no enjoyment and/or educational value out of doing the coding, which also throws of the valuation.
Why is it considered a given that Nintendo will not enter into this price war?
Companies drop prices to increase sales. Since launch, Wiis have been selling as fast as Nintendo can make them, with no signs of that letting up. Lowering the price would just mean less profit for Nintendo.
MMO-RPG's rake in the cash. Traditional RPGs do as well in Japan, but in the rest of the world, very few make much money.
Nintendo has re-released Super Mario Bros a lot of times, with it selling well each time. There was the original NES release, Super Mario All Stars on the SNES, Super Mario Bros + Lost Levels on GB or GBC (not sure which), NES Collector's Series on GBA, and now it's one of the top selling games on Virtual Console. You don't have to keep your NES around to play this game. You're almost guarenteed to be able to buy it for a current system at any point in time.
Flash hasn't been ported to x86_64 because the 32-bit version runs fine. Even if you are running Linux with the x86_64 version of Firefox there's a wrapper tool to let it use the 32-bit flash plugin.
Flash hasn't been ported because Flash code is compiled into native code at runtime, just like Java.
Lowering the manufacturing cost doesn't make a huge difference on the price marketing sets, but it makes a huge difference on what the engineering team does.
The engineering team is given target transistor count based on expected manufacturing costs, which affects the cache size and feature set.