Brick retail will always have a place in the industry. Most the gamers I know, when they get the money to buy a game they're excited about, they're playing it by the end of the day. In fact, the only time my friends and I buy games online is when there's some rare game on Ebay that we really want.
The reason for the decrease in sales, as stated, was because people are holding back on game purchases until the new consol is actually available. That makes sense, thats what pleanty of people are duing and I can see that easily causing a 25% drop in sales.
Dumping the business would be a sad loss of one of the few privately owned game stores still around, and I'm not convinced the reasons for doing so are sound.
Yes, environment is important so don't shoot me.
But seriously. First it was El-Nino, then La Nina (or however that stuffs spelled). Bad snow, bad heat, hurricanes, no hurricanes, hurricanes again.
We already have a word for this. I like to call it weather.
Microsoft has alot of employees to feed large salaries to. The teams of developers, designers, programers, PR guys.. They're still giving support and updates to an OS that's coming on 8 years old, on top of all their new product.
Now, I can't say for certain, but I imagine that means that every time they release a new OS, their support staff grows bigger, whether in house or contracted out (I'm not sure how MS handles it).
This is ALOT of people folks.
So, you're in charge of keeping MS a growing profitable company. Does it make sence to focus your time on patch after patch after patch, which does nothing but tie up your employees with aditional support and coding while in no way contributing to the effor of actually paying them? Do you focus on pushing out the new OS, forswearing support of a decades worth of previous OS's, Office, and other programs (I'm not going to venture a guess at what they're still supporting... and how many questions they have to field about things they're not still supporting, and how many questions they get for, I dunno... any program that was ever made for PC that people have trouble making run out of the box.."
Smaller companies don't have tis problem. For most of them, all they need is a relatively short testing period to make sure itruns on Windows. Microsoft has the reverse problem : to make sure ANY legitimate programs, however poorly implimented, run out of the box whilte at the same time distinguishing between those and malicious unwanted programs. They can't cater to the smart people either. Linux has less bugs, but lets face it; even the easy to instal builds are a brain job for newbies, and impossible for most grandmothers.
So yeah, Microsoft has a full plate, and as ugly as it sounds, I doubt its economically fesable for them to fix everything. They have to prioritize. New features= new money. New patches = no money + continued expenses.
Conspiricy theories aside, does anyone really think they *like* having a reputation for buggy software?
Actually, it makes perfect sence for them to regester it. Specifically, companies often do things like that simply to prevent other people from using that domain. I imagine Google wouldn't like seeing a porn page with their name attatched.
I can only respond that every google service I use is excellent. And I don't know what you're talking about when you call gmail crap. Its still beta and yet I've never had any issues with it.
First, sorry for my sarcastic response. It's a bad habit of mine that I'm trying to tone down on.
To get to the meat of your statement, you're saying that "working to get wilderness lands into the hands of private groups" is government intervention and therefore against the stated libertarian objective.
The truth is, Libertarians are not anarchists. They believee in government. They simply believe that government is best when its stripped to its essentials. The act of relinquishing lands isn't intervention. It seems to me to be the opposite.
Uh.. how is it more government interventiont to give the land to private groups than it is for the government to hold it themselves? Please, enlighten me..
Actually, his statement is quite valid if you take a step back and look at what the parties USED to be. Just as a quick example, there was a time when the only party you'd hear seriously discussing a constitutional amendment would be the democrats.
The truth is, there is alot of mixing in the parties now. I know republicans that support abortion, and democrats that dont. I know republicans that support more taxes and democrats that want to cut them. I know republicans that hate the war in Iraq and democrats that support it.
You have to remember, those in charge of the democratic and republican parties have the most to gain in attempting to show some massive difference between the two. in reality though, there isnt much of one. In fact, the whole war on terror wasnt even a serious divider until a couple years ago. Sure there were really vocal protesters, but it was a vocal minority.
Mostly though I think the point he was making was that while both parties may clame different ideals, their methods have become the same. Both support stronger federal legeslation to secure their ends.
Your post was so insanely hard to read that I skipped through most of it. Mostly though I want to ask you... You actually went and watchied a movie called "Sky Captain And The World Of Tomarrow" expecting a solid plot?
Whats so wrong about checking the legitimacy of your software before allowing an upgrade? I mean really, if you had a company and you had a service that was free, where people who purchased your software legaly could upgrade it.... would you want all these 'pirates' sapping your bandwidth with upgrades as well?
Heck, shareware's done similar thgings to this forever. You want the full version of the game, you had to phisically mail them the cahs, and then theid mail you the full version. In some aspects this is simply a far more convinient version of that.
The difference is that people who recieved their software illigally, who somehow also feel entitled to getting free upgrades for it, could be left out in the cold some time in the near future.
The reason they want to be called LEGO bricks is the same reason Klenex wants to be called Klenex facial tissues.. so they can keep their brand name. If they're simply called legos, then other companies can create their own legos and argue that its a generic term (i dont know the exact legal terms here so forgive me). If they call then LEGO bricks, then they've covered their tail.
Re:I don't get the spoiler anger
on
They Killed Ken!
·
· Score: 1
1) Even if Slashdot didn't report on it, other news sites have already reported it.
Sooo?
2) Even if Slashdot had a "WARNING: Spoiler re: Jeopardy" you could limit the story contents to two possibilities: He loses or the Jeopardy set ignites spontaneously.
No, actually. He could have lost tomarrow. Or next week. Or the post could be saying that he somehow managed to make it another season without losses.
3) Since interest in him is now mainstream americana, you'd hear about it at the water cooler from someone at work who likes to be the first to break the pop culture/gossip stories or from a family member/friend that does the same.
Only from the folks that read it on slashdot and decided to spoil it for you. if i was at the water cooler and someone spoiled a movie for me I'd be ticked too. As it is, most the people I know have the basic courtisy not to. The others are called 'jerks'.
4) Even if Slashdot DIDN'T post the story, there'd be a group of trolls posting spoilers about the day he loses at +1 over and over to get the info out.
For today's slashdot news visit goatse! Seriously, trolls arent the best example to follow. If its something that troll swould use to tick people off, perhaps its not front page material, no?
Should Slashdot now be marked with spoiler tags?:P
on
They Killed Ken!
·
· Score: 1
Well.. this just killed the next month of Jeopardy watching for me.
A condensed version of the article.
Trek Today reports that someone on its message board says that the MGM grand Hotel showed a comercial for enterprises 4th season that mentioned a guest appearence by Shatner.
How is this any more info than we had in the last slashdot article?
Well, the problem I have withthe taxes is, its a compulsory tax on a group of people that didn't vote for it. In my mid, either make smoking Aillegal, or keep it legal, but dont milk the smokers for revenew simply because it annoys the nonsmokers.
I'm a nonsmoker by the way.
A class is not going to teach right and wrong. You know right and wrong. You dont care about someone elses version of right and wrong, you have your own. And whether you choose to do what they consider wrong or what you consiter wrong anyway isn't going to be decided in an ethics class.
Business owners that engage in shady deals aren't sociopaths- they know that what they're doing is 'wrong'. They simply don't care. Business Ethics classes won't give a criminal a bleeding heart and convert him to charitable donations.
Likewise, teaching copyright law wont do a convert evil file sharers into saints. If a person believes its wrong, they'll either do it anyway or they wont. If they believe its alright and the laws are screwed up, they'll likewise do it anyway or they wont.
The only good you could hope to get from classes teaching copyright law, sponsered by the music industry, is to scare kids into compliance at an early age. Make sure they understand that sharing a single MP3 in this day and age could potentially screw them over more than say, unprotected sex or smoking.
The class isnt there to teach people to be more 'moral'. It's to scare them into complacence. It's to get it into their heads that this is the LAW, so that from this point on, noone will question it just as noone questions cigarette taxes (another societal evil that no one questions because smoking's undesirable and it doesn't affect the nonsmokers that voted for it).
Slashdot Mirror
The customer who brings in 10 useless games to rtade had to have gotten them from somewhere, yes?
Brick retail will always have a place in the industry. Most the gamers I know, when they get the money to buy a game they're excited about, they're playing it by the end of the day. In fact, the only time my friends and I buy games online is when there's some rare game on Ebay that we really want.
The reason for the decrease in sales, as stated, was because people are holding back on game purchases until the new consol is actually available. That makes sense, thats what pleanty of people are duing and I can see that easily causing a 25% drop in sales.
Dumping the business would be a sad loss of one of the few privately owned game stores still around, and I'm not convinced the reasons for doing so are sound.
Yes, environment is important so don't shoot me. But seriously. First it was El-Nino, then La Nina (or however that stuffs spelled). Bad snow, bad heat, hurricanes, no hurricanes, hurricanes again. We already have a word for this. I like to call it weather.
Microsoft has alot of employees to feed large salaries to. The teams of developers, designers, programers, PR guys.. They're still giving support and updates to an OS that's coming on 8 years old, on top of all their new product.
Now, I can't say for certain, but I imagine that means that every time they release a new OS, their support staff grows bigger, whether in house or contracted out (I'm not sure how MS handles it).
This is ALOT of people folks.
So, you're in charge of keeping MS a growing profitable company. Does it make sence to focus your time on patch after patch after patch, which does nothing but tie up your employees with aditional support and coding while in no way contributing to the effor of actually paying them? Do you focus on pushing out the new OS, forswearing support of a decades worth of previous OS's, Office, and other programs (I'm not going to venture a guess at what they're still supporting... and how many questions they have to field about things they're not still supporting, and how many questions they get for, I dunno... any program that was ever made for PC that people have trouble making run out of the box.."
Smaller companies don't have tis problem. For most of them, all they need is a relatively short testing period to make sure itruns on Windows. Microsoft has the reverse problem : to make sure ANY legitimate programs, however poorly implimented, run out of the box whilte at the same time distinguishing between those and malicious unwanted programs. They can't cater to the smart people either. Linux has less bugs, but lets face it; even the easy to instal builds are a brain job for newbies, and impossible for most grandmothers.
So yeah, Microsoft has a full plate, and as ugly as it sounds, I doubt its economically fesable for them to fix everything. They have to prioritize. New features= new money. New patches = no money + continued expenses.
Conspiricy theories aside, does anyone really think they *like* having a reputation for buggy software?
We have that now with the internet... But they probably use Google so we're still screwed.
Actually, it makes perfect sence for them to regester it. Specifically, companies often do things like that simply to prevent other people from using that domain. I imagine Google wouldn't like seeing a porn page with their name attatched.
You sure you dont mean chronobreak? :)
chronocrusade being an entirely unrelated, yet stil enjoyable, anime)
I can only respond that every google service I use is excellent. And I don't know what you're talking about when you call gmail crap. Its still beta and yet I've never had any issues with it.
First, sorry for my sarcastic response. It's a bad habit of mine that I'm trying to tone down on.
To get to the meat of your statement, you're saying that "working to get wilderness lands into the hands of private groups" is government intervention and therefore against the stated libertarian objective.
The truth is, Libertarians are not anarchists. They believee in government. They simply believe that government is best when its stripped to its essentials. The act of relinquishing lands isn't intervention. It seems to me to be the opposite.
Franklin said it best.
"Democracy is 2 wolves and a lamb voting on what's for dinner.
Freedom is the lamb with a gunm, contesting the vote."
You cannot have purely popular vote, else you have tyrany of the people.
Uh.. how is it more government interventiont to give the land to private groups than it is for the government to hold it themselves? Please, enlighten me..
Actually, his statement is quite valid if you take a step back and look at what the parties USED to be. Just as a quick example, there was a time when the only party you'd hear seriously discussing a constitutional amendment would be the democrats.
The truth is, there is alot of mixing in the parties now. I know republicans that support abortion, and democrats that dont. I know republicans that support more taxes and democrats that want to cut them. I know republicans that hate the war in Iraq and democrats that support it.
You have to remember, those in charge of the democratic and republican parties have the most to gain in attempting to show some massive difference between the two. in reality though, there isnt much of one. In fact, the whole war on terror wasnt even a serious divider until a couple years ago. Sure there were really vocal protesters, but it was a vocal minority.
Mostly though I think the point he was making was that while both parties may clame different ideals, their methods have become the same. Both support stronger federal legeslation to secure their ends.
Your post was so insanely hard to read that I skipped through most of it. Mostly though I want to ask you... You actually went and watchied a movie called "Sky Captain And The World Of Tomarrow" expecting a solid plot?
Whats so wrong about checking the legitimacy of your software before allowing an upgrade? I mean really, if you had a company and you had a service that was free, where people who purchased your software legaly could upgrade it.... would you want all these 'pirates' sapping your bandwidth with upgrades as well?
Heck, shareware's done similar thgings to this forever. You want the full version of the game, you had to phisically mail them the cahs, and then theid mail you the full version. In some aspects this is simply a far more convinient version of that.
The difference is that people who recieved their software illigally, who somehow also feel entitled to getting free upgrades for it, could be left out in the cold some time in the near future.
Whats so wrong with that?
I hope you're wearing your tinfoil hat, cause the government has its ears everywhere ...
What good will that do without wheels?
Eh, next we'll have the XBox - Revolutions
The reason they want to be called LEGO bricks is the same reason Klenex wants to be called Klenex facial tissues.. so they can keep their brand name. If they're simply called legos, then other companies can create their own legos and argue that its a generic term (i dont know the exact legal terms here so forgive me). If they call then LEGO bricks, then they've covered their tail.
1) Even if Slashdot didn't report on it, other news sites have already reported it.
Sooo?
2) Even if Slashdot had a "WARNING: Spoiler re: Jeopardy" you could limit the story contents to two possibilities: He loses or the Jeopardy set ignites spontaneously.
No, actually. He could have lost tomarrow. Or next week. Or the post could be saying that he somehow managed to make it another season without losses.
3) Since interest in him is now mainstream americana, you'd hear about it at the water cooler from someone at work who likes to be the first to break the pop culture/gossip stories or from a family member/friend that does the same.
Only from the folks that read it on slashdot and decided to spoil it for you. if i was at the water cooler and someone spoiled a movie for me I'd be ticked too. As it is, most the people I know have the basic courtisy not to. The others are called 'jerks'.
4) Even if Slashdot DIDN'T post the story, there'd be a group of trolls posting spoilers about the day he loses at +1 over and over to get the info out.
For today's slashdot news visit goatse! Seriously, trolls arent the best example to follow. If its something that troll swould use to tick people off, perhaps its not front page material, no?
Well.. this just killed the next month of Jeopardy watching for me.
A condensed version of the article. Trek Today reports that someone on its message board says that the MGM grand Hotel showed a comercial for enterprises 4th season that mentioned a guest appearence by Shatner. How is this any more info than we had in the last slashdot article?
Ah, but it doesnt sound the RIAA's problem of not wanting to give a real settlement.
Well, the problem I have withthe taxes is, its a compulsory tax on a group of people that didn't vote for it. In my mid, either make smoking Aillegal, or keep it legal, but dont milk the smokers for revenew simply because it annoys the nonsmokers. I'm a nonsmoker by the way.
Mod me down folks, I just couldn't resist :)
A class is not going to teach right and wrong. You know right and wrong. You dont care about someone elses version of right and wrong, you have your own. And whether you choose to do what they consider wrong or what you consiter wrong anyway isn't going to be decided in an ethics class.
Business owners that engage in shady deals aren't sociopaths- they know that what they're doing is 'wrong'. They simply don't care. Business Ethics classes won't give a criminal a bleeding heart and convert him to charitable donations.
Likewise, teaching copyright law wont do a convert evil file sharers into saints. If a person believes its wrong, they'll either do it anyway or they wont. If they believe its alright and the laws are screwed up, they'll likewise do it anyway or they wont.
The only good you could hope to get from classes teaching copyright law, sponsered by the music industry, is to scare kids into compliance at an early age. Make sure they understand that sharing a single MP3 in this day and age could potentially screw them over more than say, unprotected sex or smoking.
The class isnt there to teach people to be more 'moral'. It's to scare them into complacence. It's to get it into their heads that this is the LAW, so that from this point on, noone will question it just as noone questions cigarette taxes (another societal evil that no one questions because smoking's undesirable and it doesn't affect the nonsmokers that voted for it).