I don't disagree, but why go to an arcade to play a video game? You must admit that arcades aren't the profitable crowd getters that they used to be, mostly because of the proliferation of equal-quality home video game systems.
Methinks, for an arcade to return to profitability, it must provide something not found in a typical home game system. VR systems is one thing, Pinball another. VR systems take up gobs of space and often require an operator to man them all the time. Pinball requires high maintenance.
Maybe the arcade scene is really dead and hopeless then. I hope not.
Arcades are dying. They aren't the great places they were in the 70/80s when I was young because, hell, all those great video games are playable in your house. Why blow a lot of quarters?
So arcades are turning more and more floor space over to those stupid games of chance. They are also trying to move to bigger and bigger video games to try to get people more involved in the game (sitting inside, bad VR implementations, etc...)
Arcades should go back to pinball. Pinball is something one can't enjoy in the home without great expense. Computer pinball simulators don't quite cut it (although I gotta admit the vpin implementation of black night 2000 comes damn close). An arcade must offer the customer something they can't get at home. Pinball fits the bill.
All they need to do is do some maintenance on the things. The arcade I used to go to in Christiana Mall in Delaware started out with an entire two walls of pinball games, about 40. Now it's mostly 10 year olds playing "flip to win" and a few fighting games that one can play at home....
Then maybe when Stern starts selling a lot of games, they'll hire better designers and/or some better competition will start back up...
I'm still in disbelief that AOL was able to purchase TimeWarner and not the other way around.
Smart move by AOL, buy into a traditional company at the peak of your worth in the dot-com boom.
I remember when I read that Priceline.com could have bought a major airline when their stock was at its peak. Imagine if they had done that? They'd not only still be in business, they'd be getting billions in aid from the feds right now... *
AOL is in the position to buy companies still soley because it's diversified and hence able to ride out the doc-com bust.
* - sonofabitch, i just checked priceline.com on a hunch. Seems they still are in business. Oh well, the point is still valid.
Electronics devices usually have a very high R&D and fabrication cost. The marginal cost to produce each unit is very low.
So the economic bean counters have to decide how to recover the cost of R&D and fabrication. They can either try to recoup it early or spread that sunk cost over many units and time.
My position is Apple chooses the former method. Their rationale is quite logical. Intel knows, for example, that it is pretty much assured of selling a hundred million or so processors and hence have little risk of spreading out the sunk costs over time. Apple, on the other hand, can't count on a lot of sales to fall back on, so if they spread their sunk costs out over time too much, they may get screwed if the units don't sell as well as they expected.
Apple also knows they have some rabid loyalist that will pay a large premium for their new products.
So I'm not disagreeing that early adopters get hit with higher costs. I'm saying that the early apple adopters tend to get hit with a higher penalty for buying early.
I bought my first mac (128K) in April of 1984 for $2500. I also bought the fat mac upgrade soon as it came out for $1000, a brand new Mac Plus, a Mac SE, etc...
I found a clear pattern of "soak the loyal" early on, then quickly drop the price to reasonable levels.
Now I know new tech costs more and then slowly drops, but most of these new products were just natural progressions of the line. I bailed from the scene before following the later paths to being soaked. Remember the Newton? The first iMac, while cool, had marginal hardware at the time and within a few months, they were upgrading it at the same cost.
There's a high cost to being a Mac loyalist.
However, with all that said and after being anti-Mac for the past 10 years (I gave up when system 7 had as many stupid bombs as earlier revs), I'm buying a new iMac for the living room for casual use. (It only does 1024x768 so I can't do anything too serious with it...)
I played with OS X a bit in the store and was blown away. Slick, nice user interface, on top of Unix of all things. Being able to open up a terminal window and run emacs was just too much for me.
So, I'm going to get the high end iMac next week and I bet you, within 3 months, they'll come out with a new model with a flock()ing 18.1" LCD display and I'll be really ticked off again.
You saying OS security isn't good unless it's purchased from a third party? I have a counter argument. If anti-virus protection was provided by Microsoft, it would be an overhead (eat into profits) and hence encourage them to design their OS to stop situations which allow viruses to spread. What I find improper is the idea that a third party can profit from the insecurity of Microsoft. It sounds like a protection racket to me. And you have to keep paying to get updates or else you'll become vulnerable again. Whose to say that some big virii aren't coded by anti-virus companies themselves? They certainly love to hype each big virus that hits...
As for the anti-trust thing, still makes no sense. They bundled a browser, media player, and now instant messenger. That killed (or is killing) third party vendors. If they had to choose a market to innovate and wipe out, why not the AV industry instead? I guess they just don't feel threatened by that industry currently.
What I don't understand is why Microsoft doesn't bundle some sort of Anti-Virus solution into their OS with free updates to signatures.
Think about it. Viruses spread due to flaws in design or weaknesses inherent in that design. Why shouldn't a facility to protect against those weaknesses be a part of the OS?
Why does Microsoft feel the need to bundle and integrate a browser, media player, and instant messaging into the OS to "innovate" yet continue to not take steps to protect their core OS from virus threats?
What about Apple? Are we forgetting the fact that the original Mac was relatively secure for over a decade, despite granting full root access to whoever?
Apple blew out of the water what used to be the truth. You can't get a virus unless you intentionally run some unknown application (just like we used to say you can't get a virus from reading your e-mail).
The culprit was the ability to place custom code inside a windows resource. A virus exploited this and then all of a sudden you could spread a virus just by inserting an infected floppy disk and not running a damn thing.
laws have a funny way of not going in our favor, don't they?
Agreed, but on the flip side, I'd certainly like to see a law that says any ISP, employer, or individual has a right to block any e-mails that they do not wish to receive. Spammers sometimes throw out empty threats like "I'm going to sue you for blocking interstate commerce" or some crap. Look at what happend to the various voluntary black hole lists. At a lot of companies, if anyone even mentions a lawsuit, whether serious or not, the sys admin must stop all communications and immediately notify corporate legal. Then they start asking lots of questions and start poking around in the operation.
Basically, affirm my right (as provider or customer) to block unwanted e-mail, and then technical solutions are possible...
That's really the beauty of the free enterprise system. As long as their is competition the customer gets what they want at the lowest possible price. Of course, in reality sometimes it's more miss than hit.
Works, except for mega corps. If Phillips was like Sony, for example, and made CD players *and* owned a record label, you can bet this would have never happened...
Anyone who has something on their site that they don't want the FBI knowing about will just block northern light's spider at their router or better yet, use apache rewrite rules to serve only "safe" pages to the spider...
Pretty stupid if you ask me. I doubt they are then intelligent enough to change the spider agent string and route the spider through various innocent proxies to disquise it is the FBI spider...
I mean, what does the FBI do? Enter in "warez" into a search engine and go out and bust heads depending on the results returned?
You know what I really thin@~.~.~.~.~.~~~..~~#~~
NO CARRIER
Exactly. If this kind of thing didn't matter, then Microsoft wouldn't have cared if anyone voted for.NET or not. They obviously DO care so there must be something to the polls in people's minds...
Stupid decisions like paying 6 billion dollars for a portal company. 6 billion bucks would buy a helluva lot of decent systems engineers, phone techs, and backbone.
This is not a troll. I just don't know Macs. I am seriously thinking of buying one. I have several machines in my house, connected together via cat-5 networking to a cable modem and a w2k server for doc storage, user home dirs, authentication etc...(active directory). I'd like to put it into the living room. The fact it runs Unix is a big plus.
Can OS X work? Is smbclient an option? Does it have any apple OS native support for SMB shares? Does OS 9.2 (besides Dave)? Could I print to my wife's USB HP inkjet through a windows share?
Does it have an X-server? Do open source programs compile readily on it?
I have alterior motives too. I'd like to judge how well it might work inside our 99.5% windows shop at work. If it works well, maybe we'll lift our ban on Macs, support wise....
(I'm in charge of tech support. We currently have 1,400 PCs and they are a real PITA...)
It may be 17" viewable, but it's only 1024x768. I don't know if I could step down that far. I'm used to a lot of screen real estate (1600x1200 on a 19" CRT).
I'd feel like I'm looking at the world thru my old 532x320 original mac display again, where one had to turn off all toolbars and other crap just to be able to see more than a paragraph of text in my doc.
Still, I'm seriously thinking of buying one. It'd look real good in the living room. A perfect recreational machine.
I see that message a lot. But in addition to it saying that windows was not shut down properly, it says "To avoid seeing this message in the future, always shut down Windows properly." It certainly more than implies it is your fault and you have the means to prevent it from occuring through your own practices.
Businesses who expect crushes of calls occasionally, like radio stations and ticket companies, are SUPPOSED to get a number within a "choke exchange."
These exchanges are specifically designed to communicate back to other COs when a crush of calls happen. Those COs back off and return busy to everyone in the CO trying to get that number for a period of time to prevent the end-point CO from going down. ie, they don't even attempt to complete the call.
Ever wonder why all the radio station contest lines are all in the same exchange in your area?!
I suspect the spice girl ticket number was not on a choke exchange like it was supposed to be.
Here's a tip. Next time you need to get a call through to a choke exchange number, get a friend from out-of-the-area to try it. If Philadelphia is having tickets go on sale for some big act at 9am, chances are there won't be people from Nebraska calling in. Their CO won't be "choked."
April 1, 2002, Wilmington, Delaware: The FBI's plans to install keyboard sniffing programs on "mobsters'" computers was dealt a serious setback last month when it was revealed that some old crotchity hacker named Zorch revealed he had a patent on "keyboard sniffers." The patent describes a program that covertly installs itself onto an unsuspecting individual's computer and records keystrokes for later examination.
Zorch released a statement two weeks ago saying that he was not interested in licensing his invention to the United States government at any cost.
Neither friends nor family have heard from Zorch for the past two weeks. His whereabouts are unknown.
It's a different issue altogether. With China, we don't mind granting full trading rights. If the Chinese government practices human rights abuses against their own citizens, it's their own internal business.
But if some foreign country's citizens cause a theoretical loss to a U.S. company, then that's an entirely different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
You have the phone number. Doesn't anyone have any clever social engineering skills anymore? Get the damn user to tell you their address....
Methinks, for an arcade to return to profitability, it must provide something not found in a typical home game system. VR systems is one thing, Pinball another. VR systems take up gobs of space and often require an operator to man them all the time. Pinball requires high maintenance.
Maybe the arcade scene is really dead and hopeless then. I hope not.
So arcades are turning more and more floor space over to those stupid games of chance. They are also trying to move to bigger and bigger video games to try to get people more involved in the game (sitting inside, bad VR implementations, etc...)
Arcades should go back to pinball. Pinball is something one can't enjoy in the home without great expense. Computer pinball simulators don't quite cut it (although I gotta admit the vpin implementation of black night 2000 comes damn close). An arcade must offer the customer something they can't get at home. Pinball fits the bill.
All they need to do is do some maintenance on the things. The arcade I used to go to in Christiana Mall in Delaware started out with an entire two walls of pinball games, about 40. Now it's mostly 10 year olds playing "flip to win" and a few fighting games that one can play at home....
Then maybe when Stern starts selling a lot of games, they'll hire better designers and/or some better competition will start back up...
Smart move by AOL, buy into a traditional company at the peak of your worth in the dot-com boom.
I remember when I read that Priceline.com could have bought a major airline when their stock was at its peak. Imagine if they had done that? They'd not only still be in business, they'd be getting billions in aid from the feds right now... *
AOL is in the position to buy companies still soley because it's diversified and hence able to ride out the doc-com bust.
* - sonofabitch, i just checked priceline.com on a hunch. Seems they still are in business. Oh well, the point is still valid.
Open source (well, free-beer open source) would be in good shape. 100 times zero is...
So the economic bean counters have to decide how to recover the cost of R&D and fabrication. They can either try to recoup it early or spread that sunk cost over many units and time.
My position is Apple chooses the former method. Their rationale is quite logical. Intel knows, for example, that it is pretty much assured of selling a hundred million or so processors and hence have little risk of spreading out the sunk costs over time. Apple, on the other hand, can't count on a lot of sales to fall back on, so if they spread their sunk costs out over time too much, they may get screwed if the units don't sell as well as they expected.
Apple also knows they have some rabid loyalist that will pay a large premium for their new products.
So I'm not disagreeing that early adopters get hit with higher costs. I'm saying that the early apple adopters tend to get hit with a higher penalty for buying early.
I found a clear pattern of "soak the loyal" early on, then quickly drop the price to reasonable levels.
Now I know new tech costs more and then slowly drops, but most of these new products were just natural progressions of the line. I bailed from the scene before following the later paths to being soaked. Remember the Newton? The first iMac, while cool, had marginal hardware at the time and within a few months, they were upgrading it at the same cost.
There's a high cost to being a Mac loyalist.
However, with all that said and after being anti-Mac for the past 10 years (I gave up when system 7 had as many stupid bombs as earlier revs), I'm buying a new iMac for the living room for casual use. (It only does 1024x768 so I can't do anything too serious with it...)
I played with OS X a bit in the store and was blown away. Slick, nice user interface, on top of Unix of all things. Being able to open up a terminal window and run emacs was just too much for me.
So, I'm going to get the high end iMac next week and I bet you, within 3 months, they'll come out with a new model with a flock()ing 18.1" LCD display and I'll be really ticked off again.
You saying OS security isn't good unless it's purchased from a third party? I have a counter argument. If anti-virus protection was provided by Microsoft, it would be an overhead (eat into profits) and hence encourage them to design their OS to stop situations which allow viruses to spread. What I find improper is the idea that a third party can profit from the insecurity of Microsoft. It sounds like a protection racket to me. And you have to keep paying to get updates or else you'll become vulnerable again. Whose to say that some big virii aren't coded by anti-virus companies themselves? They certainly love to hype each big virus that hits...
As for the anti-trust thing, still makes no sense. They bundled a browser, media player, and now instant messenger. That killed (or is killing) third party vendors. If they had to choose a market to innovate and wipe out, why not the AV industry instead? I guess they just don't feel threatened by that industry currently.
Think about it. Viruses spread due to flaws in design or weaknesses inherent in that design. Why shouldn't a facility to protect against those weaknesses be a part of the OS?
Why does Microsoft feel the need to bundle and integrate a browser, media player, and instant messaging into the OS to "innovate" yet continue to not take steps to protect their core OS from virus threats?
Apple blew out of the water what used to be the truth. You can't get a virus unless you intentionally run some unknown application (just like we used to say you can't get a virus from reading your e-mail).
The culprit was the ability to place custom code inside a windows resource. A virus exploited this and then all of a sudden you could spread a virus just by inserting an infected floppy disk and not running a damn thing.
We had big problems with that in the 80s.
Now that's really stupid...
Agreed, but on the flip side, I'd certainly like to see a law that says any ISP, employer, or individual has a right to block any e-mails that they do not wish to receive. Spammers sometimes throw out empty threats like "I'm going to sue you for blocking interstate commerce" or some crap. Look at what happend to the various voluntary black hole lists. At a lot of companies, if anyone even mentions a lawsuit, whether serious or not, the sys admin must stop all communications and immediately notify corporate legal. Then they start asking lots of questions and start poking around in the operation.
Basically, affirm my right (as provider or customer) to block unwanted e-mail, and then technical solutions are possible...
Works, except for mega corps. If Phillips was like Sony, for example, and made CD players *and* owned a record label, you can bet this would have never happened...
Pretty stupid if you ask me. I doubt they are then intelligent enough to change the spider agent string and route the spider through various innocent proxies to disquise it is the FBI spider...
I mean, what does the FBI do? Enter in "warez" into a search engine and go out and bust heads depending on the results returned?
You know what I really thin@~.~.~.~.~.~~~..~~#~~
NO CARRIER
Touche!
Exactly. If this kind of thing didn't matter, then Microsoft wouldn't have cared if anyone voted for .NET or not. They obviously DO care so there must be something to the polls in people's minds...
We need a new setting for our friend/foe lists...
Stupid decisions like paying 6 billion dollars for a portal company. 6 billion bucks would buy a helluva lot of decent systems engineers, phone techs, and backbone.
(Speaking of @home, if anyone is that clueless)
Can OS X work? Is smbclient an option? Does it have any apple OS native support for SMB shares? Does OS 9.2 (besides Dave)? Could I print to my wife's USB HP inkjet through a windows share?
Does it have an X-server? Do open source programs compile readily on it?
I have alterior motives too. I'd like to judge how well it might work inside our 99.5% windows shop at work. If it works well, maybe we'll lift our ban on Macs, support wise.... (I'm in charge of tech support. We currently have 1,400 PCs and they are a real PITA...)
I'd feel like I'm looking at the world thru my old 532x320 original mac display again, where one had to turn off all toolbars and other crap just to be able to see more than a paragraph of text in my doc.
Still, I'm seriously thinking of buying one. It'd look real good in the living room. A perfect recreational machine.
I see that message a lot. But in addition to it saying that windows was not shut down properly, it says "To avoid seeing this message in the future, always shut down Windows properly." It certainly more than implies it is your fault and you have the means to prevent it from occuring through your own practices.
These exchanges are specifically designed to communicate back to other COs when a crush of calls happen. Those COs back off and return busy to everyone in the CO trying to get that number for a period of time to prevent the end-point CO from going down. ie, they don't even attempt to complete the call.
Ever wonder why all the radio station contest lines are all in the same exchange in your area?!
I suspect the spice girl ticket number was not on a choke exchange like it was supposed to be.
Here's a tip. Next time you need to get a call through to a choke exchange number, get a friend from out-of-the-area to try it. If Philadelphia is having tickets go on sale for some big act at 9am, chances are there won't be people from Nebraska calling in. Their CO won't be "choked."
I'm waiting for the day when we look back and marvel at the thought that storage devices actually had moving parts in them at one time. How primitive!
Zorch released a statement two weeks ago saying that he was not interested in licensing his invention to the United States government at any cost.
Neither friends nor family have heard from Zorch for the past two weeks. His whereabouts are unknown.
But if some foreign country's citizens cause a theoretical loss to a U.S. company, then that's an entirely different matter.