Must be that spidy makes good games, does anyone else recall the old Atari (perhaps Intellivison, too) Spider-Man game? You web climbed buildings, and at the top fought the green goblin, it was great.
I remember having all of 20 mp3s on my tiny hard drive and how much space they took up, they were a pain to go find too, and meet ratios. I don't remember which was the first one I downloaded, but the first I encoded was a bad rip/encode that Cardigan's song (the video had them all in a submarine, maybe) that had a recurring tick. I had to learn all about l3enc and l3dnc to get it fixed. That and Quake II or Command & Conquer networked games in class, only the ROTC profs would let you get away with it, they really didn't care.
That's a great idea, it's an easy crossover from computers to RPG/mini/CCGs and product sales are a great secondary revenue source that doesn't require a ton of investment, in addition to table rental.
They want to replace the flag raising symbol, but the rules specify that it can not contain the daemon. I guess I don't really see the difference between this and not blatently serving meat around vegitarians, or pork around Jews or Muslems, or beef to Indians. I might not agree that that is the right way to live, but I'm certainly going to provide an option for them to live within their beliefs. It seems like common courtesy would be to show some understanding that those around you have different opinions about things that are ok for you but not to someone else. Especially when the use/development of your project depends almost entirely on goodwill.
The contract expired because Pixar gave Disney a sweet deal on their first five or six films to get exposure. Now that they have established a solid name for themselves, they want a better cut. Since Pixar is now widely viewed as a can't go wrong hitmaker, they can pretty much name their terms to a distributor on the next contract, and Disney must accept them. Because TimeWarner, Vivendi/Universal, or any other distributor will be happy to get a little cut and branding out of the deal. In order to buy the current owners have to want to sell. Notice the % held by insiders is well above 50%. The company is largely owned by Steve Jobs (54%) It's not availible at Yahoo, check a recent proxy (at the SEC). Poor Steve, he needs Apple to keep paying for that expensive V. Just because a company is public doesn't mean that it is majority owned by outsiders, however most are. Disney can not buy the company without Steve wanting to sell it. They could make such a sweet offer that the remaining shareholders sue Steve to compel him to take the offer (or pay significant damages).
I think the bigger reason is that 3d animation is cheaper, render farm vs lots of expensive animators, which only added to the perceived customer preference.
I know I listen to AM radio while I surf, I didn't think about NPR either it makes sense, I was surprised that I wasn't the only one. The only other surprise to me was the big increase in very conservative users this year (2001-2002 12%-23%), odd that it would be the only real change and would happen so quickly, possibly sept 11 related, depending on the timing of the studies.
How much more popular radio was with experinced users than non users, in almost every case, radio was much more commonly used, more important to older (been online a long time not age) interent users than noobs. Either the old guard loves Rush, or it's just something that doesn't require eyes, but that is odd. Who'd have thought that an older technology would benefit from the rapid adoption of a newer one leaving the middle tech aced out.
It seesm like a ton of Information Resources are utilized at businesses, and as the resident business geek, I get tons of questions regarding how some accounting proceedures work (journaling, account closing, payroll). So I'd suggest that technical IT curriculum, not those who will be doing research into CS theory but those who will be the day to day practitioners of it, get a few accounting classes. For starters I think the average IT student would benefit from a Principles of Accounting (100 level class) and a managerial finance (how to use accounting to make business decisions type of 200 level class) almost all colleges and technical schools offer them and they would probably do more than any other thing to improve the productivity of a graduate than anything else I can imagine. As a bonus it would be quite useful for anyone planning to start a business. Finally, the thinking behind accounting is very similar to the data manipulation that I've seen in beginning programming classes. Later, a personal finance class and principles of economics class would be more marginal improvments.
The investigation regarding Take-Two is about a fairly obscure bit of accounting, although it's common to the game industry. You have to understand that in the game industry retail stores are allowed to return unsold merchandise (or get a credit to mark them down). Well more than half the years sales occur in the months of November and December, and game makers would rather have some unsold merchandise returned than run out halfway though black friday. As a result, when game makers book a sale to the store, they are required to estimate how much product will be returned (and subtract that amount from the sales the just recorded. ie 100million copies of Madded 2004 go out, we figure that 5 million will come back, and so we shiped 100 million copies, but only record as sold 95 million copies. As you can guess this is still pretty much a black art, but there are some guidlines (how much got returned last year). Since the product is not returned until January (into the next quarter) a tactic that some companies use to appear to sell more than they really have is to under reserve, in the above example book 97 or even 100 million copies as sold. Then take the hit in March long after anyone cares, or you ship that really cool game that was late, so no one notices, or something else. However the wheels of justice turn slowly, I believe this case dates back to revenues recorded in the PS1 cycle.
Sure, but I would think there would be a better market if they switched the pricing structure around to lower initial cost and higher subscription costs. Assuming that there are flat variable network and server costs for each additional user (the 1,000,000 user costs the same amound as the 100,000th). Let's say its $5 in costs for support, bandwidth, servers, patch development etc. The company has two choices sell the game for $40 and charge $9.95/mo or sell the game for $20 (or even free) and charge $15/mo. It doesn't take too many months of use and you have more than made up for the lower initial price on the second plan. Imagine how much more interest there would be in a well developed and promoted MMORPG that was priced at the, "I'm bored, let's give this a try item". Look at how cellular phones are sold. Nokia gets an average of $150 per phone, and most consumers pay between $0 and $100 for their new phone. The phone companies are happy to reduce the initial costs if it means a subscriber, who is likely to stay for a decent amount of time.
Small amounts of platinum and palladium carry even more value than gold. I'm not sure I want a $100 coin the size of a dime though. It's also hard to move millions (or billions) if its not electronic. It seems like the current card market (credit or debit) are providing a pretty good substitute for digital cash. I don't think the market is big enough for people who want to be untracable to justify issuing "cash cards".
I think his point is that the companies should cut the price of the game to boost their subscriber rates. As an example, I got a cheap AO (downloaded copy I think they charged me about $20) and subscribed for a year. If the price had stayed around $40, I would have never subscribed, but thought it was worth checking out for $20. Later I realized I would have been better off, buying a copy off the shelf, you got a nice map, and a free month for the same $20.
No he probably loaned it to a friend, who loaned it to a friend, whose kid brother got it and uploaded it to the internet. The problem that the MPAA was trying to crack down on was not the kid brother (although I'm sure that they'd love to get him, too) it was the original loan. These are theoretically provided only to academy members for the purpose of ensuring that voters can vote an informed ballot, not so that Academy members can hook up their friends with a movie that was just released to theaters or will not be out on DVD for some time. It was entrusted to him. You remember the SUNRay cards that carried your login/account info and settings? Imagine if the one with your account info was used to root one of your company's machines. Your boss is not really going to car if you did it, since the person who did used the card they entrusted to you.
What I've never understood is why the Academy doesn't get out of the screener business, if a studio wants to risk piracy, but ensure coverage of their limited exposure film shouldn't that be their decision. Probably all the voting members of the academy saw LotR, if they didn't they probably would not vote for it anyway, but Y tu mama, Tambien (was that last year?) might not have gotten the same coverage so if the distribtion/production company wants to take the chance that their movie will be pirated in to ensure that academy voters see it, let em.
The problem with this is that while here, it's a pretty low value piracy. Most people will buy the DVD when it comes out. Other areas will be selling DVD copies for a few bucks, that's the part of the market the studios really care about, right now. After broadband becomes purvasive, then the market will have some serious transition issues.
You're both right, the ball (or nib if your old school) itself uses capillary action to move the ink to the page, however gravity ensures that there is ink available at the start of the tube. Writing upside down works until the capillary driven tube and ball have exhausted their supply and the ink is at the wrong end of the reservoir.
The athlon 64 is just a way to keep costs reasonable on the Opteron, this was a chip designed from the start to get the server world's attention. There is no money in the PC business for AMD, they can't match Intel's huge operations, and R&D budget. The company bet the farm on building a server chip, but has to keep selling them to consumers because there are a ton of fixed costs, and even if you sell them at breakeven, you lower your average chip cost and stay competitive. If you changed the consumer part, you can not take advantage of the huge unit demand (AMD sells 20 million dice a year) to keep you costs low in the server market.
The two noteworthy items so far have been Dell's continued refusal of the part, and SUNs acceptance. IBM still seems pretty agnostic about the whole thing, likely covering their bases, SUN will be promoting the daylights out of the thing in the coming months.
Count me in the latter group, I didn't ever buy it for the PC, but just got it for the X-Box, and I really like it. There are somethings that would be easier on the pc, (typing, hotkey spells/weapons) and somethings that I prefer on the console (moving, ease of use, price and availability $20 bucks everywhere) Seems like the X-Box would be a good console to bring more crossover games like this over to since porting is easy. The hardest part would be creating an interface that is limited to 8 buttons and two directional inputs.
My own pipe dream, I'd like to see an open ended RPG that didn't have a central storyline, it was just worlds to explore, possibly short (5-10 hrs before you are too old to adventure) with an ending retirement senario like the old pirates game. Also, this probably requires an MMORPG, but I'd love to set up a shop and be a real merchant. I've been trying this in every game since Oregon trail, (don't try in the Salt Lake Desert, you will dehydrate).
Even more odd, is that the drugs are generally a loss leader to get people in to the store to buy overpriced convienence items. That isn't to say that they lose money on the drugs (generics do ok for em) but that they don't make nearly as much as they do on the "front end" merchandise.
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Must be that spidy makes good games, does anyone else recall the old Atari (perhaps Intellivison, too) Spider-Man game? You web climbed buildings, and at the top fought the green goblin, it was great.
I remember having all of 20 mp3s on my tiny hard drive and how much space they took up, they were a pain to go find too, and meet ratios. I don't remember which was the first one I downloaded, but the first I encoded was a bad rip/encode that Cardigan's song (the video had them all in a submarine, maybe) that had a recurring tick. I had to learn all about l3enc and l3dnc to get it fixed. That and Quake II or Command & Conquer networked games in class, only the ROTC profs would let you get away with it, they really didn't care.
That's a great idea, it's an easy crossover from computers to RPG/mini/CCGs and product sales are a great secondary revenue source that doesn't require a ton of investment, in addition to table rental.
Crikey mate, who doesn't. Didn't the penguin that bit him come from Australia? Perhaps he's going back to extract his pound of flesh.
They want to replace the flag raising symbol, but the rules specify that it can not contain the daemon. I guess I don't really see the difference between this and not blatently serving meat around vegitarians, or pork around Jews or Muslems, or beef to Indians. I might not agree that that is the right way to live, but I'm certainly going to provide an option for them to live within their beliefs. It seems like common courtesy would be to show some understanding that those around you have different opinions about things that are ok for you but not to someone else. Especially when the use/development of your project depends almost entirely on goodwill.
The contract expired because Pixar gave Disney a sweet deal on their first five or six films to get exposure. Now that they have established a solid name for themselves, they want a better cut. Since Pixar is now widely viewed as a can't go wrong hitmaker, they can pretty much name their terms to a distributor on the next contract, and Disney must accept them. Because TimeWarner, Vivendi/Universal, or any other distributor will be happy to get a little cut and branding out of the deal.
In order to buy the current owners have to want to sell. Notice the % held by insiders is well above 50%. The company is largely owned by Steve Jobs (54%) It's not availible at Yahoo, check a recent proxy (at the SEC). Poor Steve, he needs Apple to keep paying for that expensive V. Just because a company is public doesn't mean that it is majority owned by outsiders, however most are. Disney can not buy the company without Steve wanting to sell it. They could make such a sweet offer that the remaining shareholders sue Steve to compel him to take the offer (or pay significant damages).
I think the bigger reason is that 3d animation is cheaper, render farm vs lots of expensive animators, which only added to the perceived customer preference.
I know I listen to AM radio while I surf, I didn't think about NPR either it makes sense, I was surprised that I wasn't the only one. The only other surprise to me was the big increase in very conservative users this year (2001-2002 12%-23%), odd that it would be the only real change and would happen so quickly, possibly sept 11 related, depending on the timing of the studies.
How much more popular radio was with experinced users than non users, in almost every case, radio was much more commonly used, more important to older (been online a long time not age) interent users than noobs. Either the old guard loves Rush, or it's just something that doesn't require eyes, but that is odd. Who'd have thought that an older technology would benefit from the rapid adoption of a newer one leaving the middle tech aced out.
And you can cram 4 hours of TV into 2.5 hours of TiVo.
It seesm like a ton of Information Resources are utilized at businesses, and as the resident business geek, I get tons of questions regarding how some accounting proceedures work (journaling, account closing, payroll). So I'd suggest that technical IT curriculum, not those who will be doing research into CS theory but those who will be the day to day practitioners of it, get a few accounting classes. For starters I think the average IT student would benefit from a Principles of Accounting (100 level class) and a managerial finance (how to use accounting to make business decisions type of 200 level class) almost all colleges and technical schools offer them and they would probably do more than any other thing to improve the productivity of a graduate than anything else I can imagine. As a bonus it would be quite useful for anyone planning to start a business. Finally, the thinking behind accounting is very similar to the data manipulation that I've seen in beginning programming classes. Later, a personal finance class and principles of economics class would be more marginal improvments.
The investigation regarding Take-Two is about a fairly obscure bit of accounting, although it's common to the game industry. You have to understand that in the game industry retail stores are allowed to return unsold merchandise (or get a credit to mark them down). Well more than half the years sales occur in the months of November and December, and game makers would rather have some unsold merchandise returned than run out halfway though black friday. As a result, when game makers book a sale to the store, they are required to estimate how much product will be returned (and subtract that amount from the sales the just recorded. ie 100million copies of Madded 2004 go out, we figure that 5 million will come back, and so we shiped 100 million copies, but only record as sold 95 million copies. As you can guess this is still pretty much a black art, but there are some guidlines (how much got returned last year). Since the product is not returned until January (into the next quarter) a tactic that some companies use to appear to sell more than they really have is to under reserve, in the above example book 97 or even 100 million copies as sold. Then take the hit in March long after anyone cares, or you ship that really cool game that was late, so no one notices, or something else. However the wheels of justice turn slowly, I believe this case dates back to revenues recorded in the PS1 cycle.
Cue the crystal ball, I'm seeing a game cube with a...backlight and a new foldign formfactor!
Sure, but I would think there would be a better market if they switched the pricing structure around to lower initial cost and higher subscription costs. Assuming that there are flat variable network and server costs for each additional user (the 1,000,000 user costs the same amound as the 100,000th). Let's say its $5 in costs for support, bandwidth, servers, patch development etc. The company has two choices sell the game for $40 and charge $9.95/mo or sell the game for $20 (or even free) and charge $15/mo. It doesn't take too many months of use and you have more than made up for the lower initial price on the second plan. Imagine how much more interest there would be in a well developed and promoted MMORPG that was priced at the, "I'm bored, let's give this a try item". Look at how cellular phones are sold. Nokia gets an average of $150 per phone, and most consumers pay between $0 and $100 for their new phone. The phone companies are happy to reduce the initial costs if it means a subscriber, who is likely to stay for a decent amount of time.
Small amounts of platinum and palladium carry even more value than gold. I'm not sure I want a $100 coin the size of a dime though. It's also hard to move millions (or billions) if its not electronic. It seems like the current card market (credit or debit) are providing a pretty good substitute for digital cash. I don't think the market is big enough for people who want to be untracable to justify issuing "cash cards".
I think his point is that the companies should cut the price of the game to boost their subscriber rates. As an example, I got a cheap AO (downloaded copy I think they charged me about $20) and subscribed for a year. If the price had stayed around $40, I would have never subscribed, but thought it was worth checking out for $20. Later I realized I would have been better off, buying a copy off the shelf, you got a nice map, and a free month for the same $20.
I've gotten mine to lock up a few times (even embedded windows still requires a reboot now and then), but how do you get it to "blue" screen?
No he probably loaned it to a friend, who loaned it to a friend, whose kid brother got it and uploaded it to the internet. The problem that the MPAA was trying to crack down on was not the kid brother (although I'm sure that they'd love to get him, too) it was the original loan. These are theoretically provided only to academy members for the purpose of ensuring that voters can vote an informed ballot, not so that Academy members can hook up their friends with a movie that was just released to theaters or will not be out on DVD for some time. It was entrusted to him. You remember the SUNRay cards that carried your login/account info and settings? Imagine if the one with your account info was used to root one of your company's machines. Your boss is not really going to car if you did it, since the person who did used the card they entrusted to you.
What I've never understood is why the Academy doesn't get out of the screener business, if a studio wants to risk piracy, but ensure coverage of their limited exposure film shouldn't that be their decision. Probably all the voting members of the academy saw LotR, if they didn't they probably would not vote for it anyway, but Y tu mama, Tambien (was that last year?) might not have gotten the same coverage so if the distribtion/production company wants to take the chance that their movie will be pirated in to ensure that academy voters see it, let em.
The problem with this is that while here, it's a pretty low value piracy. Most people will buy the DVD when it comes out. Other areas will be selling DVD copies for a few bucks, that's the part of the market the studios really care about, right now. After broadband becomes purvasive, then the market will have some serious transition issues.
They can boot him from the academy, not all punishments are handed down by courts.
You're both right, the ball (or nib if your old school) itself uses capillary action to move the ink to the page, however gravity ensures that there is ink available at the start of the tube. Writing upside down works until the capillary driven tube and ball have exhausted their supply and the ink is at the wrong end of the reservoir.
I'd guess it would be in the 2.5-2.6 GHz range, the fastest 64 bit stuff is in the low 2 Ghz range now.
The athlon 64 is just a way to keep costs reasonable on the Opteron, this was a chip designed from the start to get the server world's attention. There is no money in the PC business for AMD, they can't match Intel's huge operations, and R&D budget. The company bet the farm on building a server chip, but has to keep selling them to consumers because there are a ton of fixed costs, and even if you sell them at breakeven, you lower your average chip cost and stay competitive. If you changed the consumer part, you can not take advantage of the huge unit demand (AMD sells 20 million dice a year) to keep you costs low in the server market.
The two noteworthy items so far have been Dell's continued refusal of the part, and SUNs acceptance. IBM still seems pretty agnostic about the whole thing, likely covering their bases, SUN will be promoting the daylights out of the thing in the coming months.
Count me in the latter group, I didn't ever buy it for the PC, but just got it for the X-Box, and I really like it. There are somethings that would be easier on the pc, (typing, hotkey spells/weapons) and somethings that I prefer on the console (moving, ease of use, price and availability $20 bucks everywhere) Seems like the X-Box would be a good console to bring more crossover games like this over to since porting is easy. The hardest part would be creating an interface that is limited to 8 buttons and two directional inputs.
My own pipe dream, I'd like to see an open ended RPG that didn't have a central storyline, it was just worlds to explore, possibly short (5-10 hrs before you are too old to adventure) with an ending retirement senario like the old pirates game. Also, this probably requires an MMORPG, but I'd love to set up a shop and be a real merchant. I've been trying this in every game since Oregon trail, (don't try in the Salt Lake Desert, you will dehydrate).
Even more odd, is that the drugs are generally a loss leader to get people in to the store to buy overpriced convienence items. That isn't to say that they lose money on the drugs (generics do ok for em) but that they don't make nearly as much as they do on the "front end" merchandise.