Almost by definition, peer-to-peer networks contain what the users want. Shows no-one is interested in are left out.
Never heard of the Long Tail, I guess. Hint: it's the reason why companies like Amazon and Netflix are successful. Another hint: it's not because they only carry the top 5% of products that 80% of the world is interested in. It's because they carry the other 95%.
The fact that I can't get those shows "no-one is interested in" on p2p is precisely why it is not very useful to me, or a lot of other people. Because, see, while you can have an individual show that's liked by 50% of people, you can also guarantee that there are 20 other shows liked collectively by 100% of people... even though individually they may not reach over 5% each. It's those 20 smaller shows that make any content delivery system useful, not the one show that's popular. You can get that one popular show anywhere; it's the place you can get those 20 smaller shows that's special. (And that includes regular old cable TV, which is hardly "irrelevant" as some here have suggested. p2p can never be as relevant as cable, because of the long tail.)
You would think people here would be celebrating the long tail - which is all about choice, after all - rather than promoting only those things that the mainstream is interested in.
And that pretty much sums it up. Other than the DRM issues, HDMI is a solid interface (which is, of course, like the old joke about "other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?").
I hate DRM, but I don't even see how DRM is much of an issue in this case.
Right now, I am watching "Bones" over HDMI through my cable box on my HDTV, in full 1080i 1:1 pixel-mapped resolution and with 5.1 sound. I've got one cable that I bought for five bucks, connected it and it worked.
So what's the problem? It's working just like it's supposed to. Isn't that the definition of a *good* product?
Why, I avoided MIT because their campus sucks. When you're going to spend 3 - 5 years of your life at college why not look at the "little things" and chose one that meshes with what you want?
Your implication that 3-5 years of campus life means a hill of beans to the 50-60 years you're likely to spend afterwards suggests to me that you're a recent graduate, if even that.
Let me put it this way. Within 5 years of graduating college, you will have forgotten what it was even like. (That's especially true if you spend the entire time drunk like a lot of college kids do.) So it's a huge mistake to base your choice - which affects your entire life afterwards - on whether or not you like the campus. Ditto for DMCA policies, which are just as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
You should be basing your college choices on three things, and only three things: a) quality of education, b) reputation in your chosen field, and c) networking opportunities. Using any other criteria is sacrificing decades of your life for a couple of good years that you will probably just forget about once you get out into the real world. The last thing you want is to be stuck in some dead-end job when you're 30, feeling like you have no future and thinking "maybe if I'd gone to a different school, I'd have a better job, more friends and more money right now..."
The good news for you is that it sounds like you may still have time to transfer to MIT. That's assuming you actually got accepted there, of course.
Even if you never transfer out of QA at your current position, just having worked in the industry (and knowing people in the industry) will make a huge difference when looking for that next job.
Not really. Let's see:
Potential boss: "What are your coding qualifications?" Interview candidate: "Well, I worked in QA..." Potential boss: "Next!"
QA skills don't really transfer to any other type of game industry job. You can't be an illustrator. You can't work in marketing. You can't be a coder. You can't do package design. You can't be a project manager. Etc.
I worked at a large publisher for a while (in marketing) and I only ever saw one guy move from QA into anything else. Worse than that, most of the testers that left the company ended up out of the industry all together - mostly by choice, because QA is an awful, awful job. But those that I know that did try to move on within the industry had to end up getting the same kind of training and experience as they would have had they not worked in QA. In short, being a tester doesn't help, and can burn you out on the industry prematurely.
In terms of promotion from within, it almost never happens to testers. It's probably actually worse for you to try to start out as a tester thinking you'll get your "foot in the door" than to just wait to apply until the job you really want comes up. Testers are rarely seen or heard from by most of the company; at least that was the case where I worked. When good jobs came up, nobody said "let's go look in the QA department to see if anybody's qualified" - the thinking was if they were qualified for anything else, they wouldn't be testers.
It's kind of like thinking McDonald's is going to be looking for its next vice president among the ranks of burger flippers. Testing is the game industry equivalent to flipping burgers. You can maybe move up to manager of your department, but you'll never be doing anything meaningful at the company unless you quit, get some real education and experience and then re-apply from scratch. At that point and only at that point will your previous work with the company maybe help you a tiny bit.
That being said, WTF, life imprisonment? What the hell kind of copyright infringement could warrant that, let alone attempted?
Not that I'm in favor of this bill in the least, but let's at least be accurate in what we're talking about here... it's life imprisonment for copyright infringement that causes death. The example given was a hospital using pirated software to manage medications. We all know (or should know) that pirated software is often not exactly "pure"; sometimes it's really beta software, sometimes it has little pirate "signatures" added, and who knows what kinds of problems those things can create. If you're playing a pirated game and it crashes, no big whoop. If you're a hospital and your software crashes, or potentially worse it tells you to give a patient 1000mg of nitroglycerin every 2 hours instead of 10mg every 24 hours, then you're in trouble. And I do think there should be a pretty stiff penalty in a situation like that, if it's determined that the cause of the problem was using pirated software.
I hope this bill goes down in flames for other reasons, but this is probably the least offensive of all of its provisions.
People still cling to the idea that you have to watch a stream in real time. That idea is as quaint as televison = three networks. People mostly watch about 10 to 15 hours of TV a week. Some more, some less. People who watch lots of TV tend to be poorer and have less disposable income.
Elitist and completely untrue. The average US household watches 8 hours of TV per day - that's about five times more than you seem to think. Here's a reference (PDF link).
Moreover, there's nothing "quaint" about watching TV in "real time" (I don't think that's actually what you meant - you meant at the premiere date and time). Even if we moved to a completely internet-only model for television, new content is not going to appear all at once, to be consumed at customers' leisure. It takes time to film each episode of a TV show, and there will continue to be staggered "premieres" of series episodes. Fans of each show will still gather around their computers at the same time each week, just as they do around their TV's now.
People like you are misunderstanding the effects of time-shifting. DVR's are great (I have two of them) but most people are home at 8PM and they're not going to delay watching their favorite TV show that happens to be on at that time simply because they can. DVR owners still watch a hell of a lot of live TV. The point of a DVR is not to enable you not to watch shows that are on while you're watching TV; the point of a DVR is to allow you to watch shows when you otherwise couldn't. You're looking at the entire concept backwards.
There will always be timeshifting and there will always be people who can't watch a premiere and will have to watch later, whether it's on a DVR or online. But there will also always be people who will crowd around their screens - whether it's a TV or a computer screen - to watch a TV show premiere on the date and time that it's first posted. The upshot of that is that there's simply no reason for linear TV networks to go away, meaning - with all the equipment, time, and money already invested (and we're talking tens of billions of dollars here) - they likely never will.
Not true. You're assuming "common sense" implies instinct. It doesn't. The word "sense" has many meanings (look it up).
The point being, "common sense" needs to be taught. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that's the reality. Common sense is what it is because everybody knows the same things, but people can't know those things unless they're taught them. It's not instinct to say "it's stupid to fake an attack on kids", despite how obvious it sounds. You don't know it until you learn it. You would hope someone would learn it at the age of about 8, when they grow out of playing cops and robbers, but obviously not everybody does.
In some countries (say, Japan), common sense does mostly rule. The main difference in those countries is a standardized, quality educational system that is the same for all children (hence "common" sense) and that involves practical living skills, not just abstract subjects. Parenting obviously has a lot to do with it as well, but that's harder to quantify. Having a national curriculum and things like high graduation rates and test scores are fairly easy to quantify, and those are things that we don't have in the USA.
You would think that any teacher even in the lacking-in-common-sense USA would be a little better learned than most people, but obviously there are still some gaps. What we lack these days here is a real shared sense of values... which is really the first step in the disintegration of any society. But it largely falls to poor practical education, even among those charged with teaching those skills to children.
The real question is how the UPN during its first season of existance compares to the Sci-fi channel of today in terms of viewers. The UPN shows were always at the absolute bottom of the broadcast ratings back then.
Voyager was UPN's #1 show, which is how they kept it on for so long despite its perceived lack of quality. (I actually liked it; it was certainly no worse than most episodes of TNG or the soap opera that was DS9.)
According to this site (and I can't vouch, but it seems accurate to what I remember), Voyager at one point had a rating of 7.9. Contrast that with BSG's 1.2.
Contrast this with Lost, which I started off watching avidly, but now... well, the four phases of Lost watching:
1. This show is great! I wonder what they'll do next?!? 2. Huh? That didn't make sense. 3. You guys are making it up as you go along, aren't you? 4. God, I hope you guys are making it up, because God help you if you planned it this way.
And Lost just got extended another three seasons.
It got extended three seasons, but with only two seasons worth of actual shows. They're 16 episode seasons, vs. the standard order of 22 (or in '24's' case, 24).
Anyway, I don't understand people that say Lost doesn't make sense or that it hasn't answered any of its early questions. If you think that's the case, then you just haven't been paying attention. Lost doesn't beat you over the head with its answers like a lot of shows do; it doesn't insult your intelligence by wrapping every plot point up with a neat little bow and saying "here! now look!" The shows themselves are about the characters, and that's always been the case; the overarching story of the island is told through the character stories, and it's up to you in most cases to piece it together. Lost requires you to think. Obviously I know that's not what a lot of people want to do when watching TV, but that's part of what makes the show great - it's not a show for the lazy or feeble-minded. It demands audience participation, which should be something we celebrate from the normally non-interactive boob tube.
Almost all of Lost's early questions were answered long ago. In fact, I was starting to wonder for a while how they were going to make it to the end of this season, let alone next, before they ran out of possible plotlines. (I took the filler episodes like the Ken and Barbie kill-off as evidence that the writers had the same thought.) Now, though, at the end of the season they are throwing tons more questions out there... which can get cheesy if it just seems like it's going to be a neverending cycle. Since we know that there's an endpoint, though, it hasn't reached that point yet. And we do know that there is an overarching plot going on here that hasn't changed since the beginning. I just hope they've still got enough material left for 48 more episodes - my prediction is about 25% of those episodes will be more filler, although that still leaves a lot of great TV to come.
As for BSG, I tried watching a few episodes this season and it seems to have turned into "Grey's Anatomy" in space. It's just a big, slickly produced soap opera. Hopefully with only one season left, the writers can pull it together and really drive things forward again.
Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.
Well, this is not exactly true. The big *gift-giving* holiday is actually Christmas, just as it is here - yes, they do celebrate it as a consumer holiday. And yes, they do have a pre-Christmas holiday rush there. The difference is it is not a *family* holiday. That's New Year's. Christmas is a holiday for couples, which actually makes it really big in the video game market, because all those girlfriends go out and buy games for their boyfriends, and now with the DS, boyfriends can do the same for their girlfriends (ditto for husbands/wives, but it's still younger people that spend the most on games).
The post-New Year's week's sales are usually big too for the reason you mentioned, but all of December is huge because of Christmas. The DS sold like 2 million units alone last December, if I remember right.
Golden Week is *usually* bigger than the weeks surrounding it strictly for the reason that a lot of people have that whole week off, so they buy games to play. It's not Christmas or New Year's big, but it's still usually bigger than most weeks.
This year seems to have been fairly slow, actually, which makes it sort of strange to see the numbers being called out in western news, as if there's something noteworthy about them.
Well, why not? How are you going to compete with Nintendo on their own platforms?
If I was a dev, I'd look at this list and think to myself that Nintendo's pretty much got their platforms locked up. This has always been one of Nintendo's problems in dealing with third party developers.
I think they probably sent the C&D because of trademark law.
Trademark law wasn't invoked in this case. Copyright law was, specifically the DMCA.
You don't need to defend your copyrights every time you spot a violation in order to continue being covered by them. If you own the copyright to a work, you own the copyright - nobody can take that away from you.
As for the lawyer issue, I don't buy this "they were just being lawyers" argument. They were hired for a specific purpose; in this case their purpose was to stop this code from being spread on the internet. Their actions instead resulted the code making it (via link) to the New York Times, among others. That was not a very good job they did.
The point of any job is the end result. Nobody hires a lawyer to send out C&D's. They hire a lawyer for a purpose that may or may not require the sending of C&D's. Those are two different things. C&D's are a means to an end, not the end itself - in this case, the results the lawyers got were exactly the opposite of what they were being paid for.
Sony is simply looking to spread some FUD about the Xbox 360 as well.
The source is Dan Houser, who works for Rockstar last I checked, not Sony.
btw, what is new about this article that it deserves another mention on the site? This is the same quote as in the OPM article; it's apparently just CVG referencing OPM.
It's not a lot for Yahoo, but it's a lot for Microsoft. Yes, even Microsoft.
Despite their huge revenue and profits, Microsoft currently "only" has $25 billion in the bank. So they couldn't do a straight purchase of Yahoo, they'd have to do a stock swap and maybe some borrowing, which would be a merger rather than a takeover. (In fact, that's how I'm seeing it described in other news reports.) It wouldn't be MS swallowing up Yahoo and dictating who stays and who goes. It would be some of Yahoo and some of MS mixed together.
I can't see that this is what MS would want. This is not how they do business. They're not going to let some Yahoo schlub come in and take over Steve Ballmer's job, and they're not going to want a situation where Yahoo's Hotjobs division is suddenly leading the development of MS Office. But these are the kinds of weird things that happen in mergers.
I think it's more likely that they'll try to do some sort of exclusive search deal with them, where Yahoo searches are done through Windows Live. This would still be a huge deal because Yahoo's invested a lot in their search tech over the past few years (as has MS). So you're probably still talking a multi-billion dollar deal here. But it's one way the two companies could join forces against Google without an outright merger.
There's nothing that differentiates a Mac from a PC hardware-wise. Well, nothing important anyway. The Mac OS runs on the same "platform" as Windows. So does Linux and basically every other OS out there. What you're talking about is the software OS, which is ultimately pretty meaningless in game consoles - I mean I know not all Mac-heads agree, but an OS only exists to run programs and to act as a conduit between your hardware and other software. Consoles didn't even have standalone OS's until a generation ago (they just had firmware), and I would argue that they're the worse for it. Previous to that, games for all intents and purposes contained their own OS as part of the game code.
So really, when people say "platform" in this context, they're talking hardware, because that's all that really matters for gaming. PC architecture is a standard architecture (and that includes the Mac), if anybody wanted to give up marketing standalone game consoles and focus on one standard. But it's never going to happen.
Yes, but you do not own the right to resell the music. Thus, the legal definition is not that of ownership; you are, indeed, licensing it.
The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise.
The first-sale doctrine has not been tested at the supreme court level in relation to downloaded music, but this is one case in which a conservative court is more likely to side against the record industry. The law says what it says; you'd have to be one of those so-called "activist" judges to read something into it other than what's on paper and side with the RIAA.
DRM-free purchased songs are "owned" under the law. Heck, so are DRM'd songs; you just can't legally break the DRM for resale purposes, making the first-sale doctrine moot.
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded.
What you say is true, but it didn't answer the question that was asked, which is whether or not it's normal for a console to be in the red at this point in its lifespan.
The short answer is no, it is not normal. And despite your true statement above, that's important. Why?
MS and Sony both got into video gaming in the first place both because they saw how profitable it was and because they saw the potential for even greater profit through using their systems as a trojan horse for other entertainment and software possibilities. Do you think that either company would have launched a console in the first place if they saw the industry as a money-losing business? Obviously not. They did it because they wanted a piece of the action, and they wanted to define where the action was in the future.
The issue is that neither Sony nor MS has figured out how to make a consistent profit in the video games business. MS has never done it, to my knowledge (possibly one quarter with the original Xbox) and Sony does it about half the time. Nintendo always makes a profit. The only question is how big.
If this keeps up, eventually Sony and MS could drag the industry so far down that it's not going to seem worth it to their shareholders or to any of their potential partners, be they publishers or peripheral makers or whatever. Nobody's going to want to be involved in the game business if it seems obvious that it's a money-losing business.
I actually own all 4 previous-gen consoles and would like to own a PS3, but I honestly think that without Nintendo, we would have had another game industry crash by now. They're single-handedly defining the industry right now, in both home and portable systems, and they're proving to everybody how much money there is to be made at it. Without them, you'd have a money-losing industry that would look to anybody on the outside like the industry itself was no longer viable.
Let's see, the PS3 loses Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto IV to multiplatform releases.
GTA4 was never a PS3 exclusive. I'm not sure why the assumption would even be made, as GTA1, GTA2, GTA3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA were never exclusives either.
I think people need to make a distinction between "exclusive" and "coming out on one platform six months before being ported to another". They are not the same thing, and never have been. This notion of a "timed exclusive" is one of those either meaningless or wrongly-applied industry buzzwords that really needs to go. There is no such thing as a "timed exclusive" - a game is either exclusive or it isn't.
Assassin's Creed I don't know about, but GTA4 was always multi-platform. The only difference in GTA4's case is the simultaneous release. Losing six months of "exclusivity" isn't losing exclusivity, it's losing six months. Again, not the same.
The Wii outsold the Xbox 360 by 25% last month. That's certainly a sizable lead, yet it's not exactly what I'd call "creaming the competition". I'd also argue that the Wii's monthly software sales have been underwhelming
Well, its hardware sales have honestly been somewhat underwhelming too - despite what the article here would lead you to believe. That stuff about them not meeting demand until 2009? Makes it sound like customers are just clamoring to get their hands on the Wii, when the truth is they sold 259,000 units last month. That's about average for any game console, and only a little better than the Xbox 360, which has systems sitting on store shelves all over the country.
The truth is one of two things: either Nintendo's having major production problems, or they're artificially and intentionally short-supplying for PR purposes. If it's the latter, it appears to be working - for now. Lots of people talk about how Nintendo "can't keep up with demand", which implies that demand is great. But that will only last for so long, as people see the actual monthly sales numbers.
They're doing better than MS or Sony right now, and selling more units, so I'm not saying this is all completely overhyped. But I would argue that any game manufacturer that can't make more than 259,000 units a month - especially one that's as relatively simple as the Wii, and especially one that's been on the market for six months now - has some serious problems. Their inability to meet demand is only good news if that means they're selling a huge number of units, but that's not the case. They're unable to meet demand because their production capacity is much too low, which just means they're leaving potential customers' money on the table and selling a lot fewer units than they should be.
I think there are going to be a lot of defensive replies from dSLR owners. But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
"Good pictures" start with accuracy. That's the entire point of a camera, and that's what separates good cameras from bad cameras. Even in the pre-digital days, sure, different films and different settings would give you different results, but photographers paid the big bucks for cameras that would given them a reliable baseline of accuracy - that meant being capable of things like high shutter speeds for daylight photos, low shutter speeds for night photos, high quality light metering, and lenses capable of high resolutions, high color accuracy and low distortion. What a photographer chooses to do artistically is another matter, but the point is photographers don't rely on their cameras to be the artists; that's the photographer's job, not the camera's.
So I don't even need to look at the article to know what the word "vibrant" means with regard to the Nokia photos - it means "artificially jacked colors". In other words, not at all accurate, in other words crap.
I mean, look. I have a 2mp cell phone camera and I have an 8mp DSLR. I use my cell phone camera when I'm just out and about and don't care about quality. But there is a huge difference in color accuracy, noise and detail between even the best cell phone cameras and the worst dslr's. And that difference is not going away.
So I guess you can consider me one of your "defensive" dslr owners - but hopefully, there will always be defenders of the truth out there.
It's funny, because in the US even chocolate that SHOULD be good (ie: made in Belgium) tastes like crap. I'm pretty sure that all manufacturers cut corners if the product is destined for the good ol' US of A.
When it comes to chocolate it really does suck to be an American:(
The biggest problem is that it has been a problem for so long that the majority of us don't know any better.
Well, a) this is all relative, and b) there is certainly chocolate in America that will measure up to any standard in the world. Here is one example.
I've been to Europe, and quite frankly, the stuff you get in grocery stores there is no better than Hershey's. If you want to compare high end chocolate, then you've gotta compare apples to apples - you can't compare boutique chocolate in Europe to mass produced chocolate in the US. We've got boutique chocolate just as good as Europe, and they've got mass produced chocolate just as bad as us.
And a lot of countries have it worse, even in mass produced chocolate. Japan has awful chocolate, for one example. It's waxy and nearly tasteless - it's like that really cheap stuff they put in chocolate easter bunnies here. This is almost universal there; it's not a particular brand. It's just what people are used to. My wife (who is Japanese) never liked chocolate before she moved to the United States - now she can't get enough of it, even if it's just Hershey's, but especially if it's something like Jacques Torres.
Will the person who picked HD-DVD in April 2007 for the next gen DVD format pool, please step forward to collect their winnings. I don't think that there is any chance that Sony and friends could over come this.
Sony has already overcome this in the form of the PlayStation 3, and the format war is all but over in favor of Blu-Ray. This doesn't really change anything.
I don't know why some people think that everything Wal-Mart touches turns to gold. They've been having all sorts of problems lately, and one of those problems has been their entry into the high-end electronics market, which has gone over like a lead balloon. Wal-Mart's customers just don't go there to buy things like HDTV's and HD-DVD players - they go there to buy cheap food, baby wipes and $4 prescription drugs. HD-DVD players may be "flying off the shelf" compared to other players at Wal-Mart, but that's not saying anything. Wake me up when all of Wal-Mart's HD-DVD players outsell one model of Blu-Ray player at any single Best Buy.
Also, Sony had had a $500 Blu-Ray player since November 2006 (at least refuting that nonsense about them not having a player under $1,000 until "later this year") called the PlayStation 3, and they've got a $600 MSRP standalone player coming in the next month or two that'll probably actually sell for $500 or less also. Realistically, though, I don't think the price of the players matters much. What matters is the movies available. Blu-Ray has a lot more content industry support, and that's not changing.
I mean anyone can make a device and sell it for $20 if they want to, but nobody's going to buy it if there's no content available for it. That's the situation to an extent with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray right now, but Blu-Ray has more releases now and more releases in the pipeline, along with more studios on board.
So, despite this obvious bit of PR from the HD-DVD camp, it's still basically game over for them.
sept these are NPR numbers, which have NEVER reflected online sales or Walmarts.
Jesus, can we put this myth to bed at some point?
I'll say it simply: NPD reports do reflect both online sales and Wal-Mart.
What they don't do is actually count those sales. That doesn't mean they can't reflect them.
The NPD, like most other organizations doing polling, relies on statistical sampling. Their sample, though, is huge - about 60% of the total market. That means they can be accurate to within about 0.1% - probably about the same as if they were actually counting only physical units (because errors do creep in when combining physical data from a variety of disparate sources that each have their own methods of measurement).
Look at it this way. The game industry itself relies on these numbers. Do you think that would be the case if the industry knew that the world's largest retailer was not reflected in the report?
Get it through your heads, everybody - 100% of the industry's sales are reflected in this report. The fact that the NPD isn't going through Wal-Mart hand-counting systems being sold doesn't change that.
I believe it's more like website project managers saying:
92% of our server logs show people using IE7.
Except that there are two problems with that argument.
1) It's not 92%. I mean I *suppose* there could be some Microsoft fansite out there that does nothing but talk about how great Microsoft is all day that gets 92% of their audience from IE. But at my company, which is a mainstream entertainment company, IE usage is currently at 64%. That's all versions, including AOL, including IE4, even including Opera identifying itself as IE.
2) So the question then is how does that website project manager turn to his executive VP for marketing and say "oh, sorry, we're not going to develop for that other 36%, even though that's a couple million visitors per month." If you're at all familiar with the modern corporate environment, you know that the "but we don't have time!" excuse doesn't fly anymore - whether it's actually the case or not. Every web department I've ever worked in has been staffed with overworked, burnt-out, disgruntled workaholics that are on the job 18 hours a day, about 15 of which are spent doing browser QA. (Yeah, you can tell I'm saying this from experience.)
Even if it *is* only 8%, that's still potentially a million visitors or more at some sites. No company in the world is going to say that's not worth making an effort for, even if it means hiring one more person.
We've leveraged scripting technology that only works with ActiveX. If you want to replace it, I'm going to need the following additional server, developers, and it's going to delay the $NEW_CONTENT_PROJECT by 4 months and cost $LARGE_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY.
Or, in other words, time to start looking for a new job while your boss hires somebody who will actually do the work he wanted you to do. It sucks, but that's modern corporate life.
So really, the only reason a modern site would be developed for IE only is gross ignorance on the part of company executives. They'd have to have no interest in or knowledge of the company's own web site. That's certainly possible, but less common these days than it used to be. Because no company these days would knowingly exclude a large portion of their potential audience unless they had some vested interest in doing so (e.g. an MS-affiliated company - though even sites like msnbc.com now use Flash video made to work across all browsers, rather than the ActiveX-enabled Windows Media that they used to use).
Slashdot Mirror
Almost by definition, peer-to-peer networks contain what the users want. Shows no-one is interested in are left out.
Never heard of the Long Tail, I guess. Hint: it's the reason why companies like Amazon and Netflix are successful. Another hint: it's not because they only carry the top 5% of products that 80% of the world is interested in. It's because they carry the other 95%.
The fact that I can't get those shows "no-one is interested in" on p2p is precisely why it is not very useful to me, or a lot of other people. Because, see, while you can have an individual show that's liked by 50% of people, you can also guarantee that there are 20 other shows liked collectively by 100% of people... even though individually they may not reach over 5% each. It's those 20 smaller shows that make any content delivery system useful, not the one show that's popular. You can get that one popular show anywhere; it's the place you can get those 20 smaller shows that's special. (And that includes regular old cable TV, which is hardly "irrelevant" as some here have suggested. p2p can never be as relevant as cable, because of the long tail.)
You would think people here would be celebrating the long tail - which is all about choice, after all - rather than promoting only those things that the mainstream is interested in.
And that pretty much sums it up. Other than the DRM issues, HDMI is a solid interface (which is, of course, like the old joke about "other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?").
I hate DRM, but I don't even see how DRM is much of an issue in this case.
Right now, I am watching "Bones" over HDMI through my cable box on my HDTV, in full 1080i 1:1 pixel-mapped resolution and with 5.1 sound. I've got one cable that I bought for five bucks, connected it and it worked.
So what's the problem? It's working just like it's supposed to. Isn't that the definition of a *good* product?
Why, I avoided MIT because their campus sucks. When you're going to spend 3 - 5 years of your life at college why not look at the "little things" and chose one that meshes with what you want?
Your implication that 3-5 years of campus life means a hill of beans to the 50-60 years you're likely to spend afterwards suggests to me that you're a recent graduate, if even that.
Let me put it this way. Within 5 years of graduating college, you will have forgotten what it was even like. (That's especially true if you spend the entire time drunk like a lot of college kids do.) So it's a huge mistake to base your choice - which affects your entire life afterwards - on whether or not you like the campus. Ditto for DMCA policies, which are just as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
You should be basing your college choices on three things, and only three things: a) quality of education, b) reputation in your chosen field, and c) networking opportunities. Using any other criteria is sacrificing decades of your life for a couple of good years that you will probably just forget about once you get out into the real world. The last thing you want is to be stuck in some dead-end job when you're 30, feeling like you have no future and thinking "maybe if I'd gone to a different school, I'd have a better job, more friends and more money right now..."
The good news for you is that it sounds like you may still have time to transfer to MIT. That's assuming you actually got accepted there, of course.
Even if you never transfer out of QA at your current position, just having worked in the industry (and knowing people in the industry) will make a huge difference when looking for that next job.
Not really. Let's see:
Potential boss: "What are your coding qualifications?"
Interview candidate: "Well, I worked in QA..."
Potential boss: "Next!"
QA skills don't really transfer to any other type of game industry job. You can't be an illustrator. You can't work in marketing. You can't be a coder. You can't do package design. You can't be a project manager. Etc.
I worked at a large publisher for a while (in marketing) and I only ever saw one guy move from QA into anything else. Worse than that, most of the testers that left the company ended up out of the industry all together - mostly by choice, because QA is an awful, awful job. But those that I know that did try to move on within the industry had to end up getting the same kind of training and experience as they would have had they not worked in QA. In short, being a tester doesn't help, and can burn you out on the industry prematurely.
In terms of promotion from within, it almost never happens to testers. It's probably actually worse for you to try to start out as a tester thinking you'll get your "foot in the door" than to just wait to apply until the job you really want comes up. Testers are rarely seen or heard from by most of the company; at least that was the case where I worked. When good jobs came up, nobody said "let's go look in the QA department to see if anybody's qualified" - the thinking was if they were qualified for anything else, they wouldn't be testers.
It's kind of like thinking McDonald's is going to be looking for its next vice president among the ranks of burger flippers. Testing is the game industry equivalent to flipping burgers. You can maybe move up to manager of your department, but you'll never be doing anything meaningful at the company unless you quit, get some real education and experience and then re-apply from scratch. At that point and only at that point will your previous work with the company maybe help you a tiny bit.
That being said, WTF, life imprisonment? What the hell kind of copyright infringement could warrant that, let alone attempted?
Not that I'm in favor of this bill in the least, but let's at least be accurate in what we're talking about here... it's life imprisonment for copyright infringement that causes death. The example given was a hospital using pirated software to manage medications. We all know (or should know) that pirated software is often not exactly "pure"; sometimes it's really beta software, sometimes it has little pirate "signatures" added, and who knows what kinds of problems those things can create. If you're playing a pirated game and it crashes, no big whoop. If you're a hospital and your software crashes, or potentially worse it tells you to give a patient 1000mg of nitroglycerin every 2 hours instead of 10mg every 24 hours, then you're in trouble. And I do think there should be a pretty stiff penalty in a situation like that, if it's determined that the cause of the problem was using pirated software.
I hope this bill goes down in flames for other reasons, but this is probably the least offensive of all of its provisions.
People still cling to the idea that you have to watch a stream in real time. That idea is as quaint as televison = three networks. People mostly watch about 10 to 15 hours of TV a week. Some more, some less. People who watch lots of TV tend to be poorer and have less disposable income.
Elitist and completely untrue. The average US household watches 8 hours of TV per day - that's about five times more than you seem to think. Here's a reference (PDF link).
Moreover, there's nothing "quaint" about watching TV in "real time" (I don't think that's actually what you meant - you meant at the premiere date and time). Even if we moved to a completely internet-only model for television, new content is not going to appear all at once, to be consumed at customers' leisure. It takes time to film each episode of a TV show, and there will continue to be staggered "premieres" of series episodes. Fans of each show will still gather around their computers at the same time each week, just as they do around their TV's now.
People like you are misunderstanding the effects of time-shifting. DVR's are great (I have two of them) but most people are home at 8PM and they're not going to delay watching their favorite TV show that happens to be on at that time simply because they can. DVR owners still watch a hell of a lot of live TV. The point of a DVR is not to enable you not to watch shows that are on while you're watching TV; the point of a DVR is to allow you to watch shows when you otherwise couldn't. You're looking at the entire concept backwards.
There will always be timeshifting and there will always be people who can't watch a premiere and will have to watch later, whether it's on a DVR or online. But there will also always be people who will crowd around their screens - whether it's a TV or a computer screen - to watch a TV show premiere on the date and time that it's first posted. The upshot of that is that there's simply no reason for linear TV networks to go away, meaning - with all the equipment, time, and money already invested (and we're talking tens of billions of dollars here) - they likely never will.
Common sense isn't. Anywhere.
Not true. You're assuming "common sense" implies instinct. It doesn't. The word "sense" has many meanings (look it up).
The point being, "common sense" needs to be taught. It sounds counter-intuitive, but that's the reality. Common sense is what it is because everybody knows the same things, but people can't know those things unless they're taught them. It's not instinct to say "it's stupid to fake an attack on kids", despite how obvious it sounds. You don't know it until you learn it. You would hope someone would learn it at the age of about 8, when they grow out of playing cops and robbers, but obviously not everybody does.
In some countries (say, Japan), common sense does mostly rule. The main difference in those countries is a standardized, quality educational system that is the same for all children (hence "common" sense) and that involves practical living skills, not just abstract subjects. Parenting obviously has a lot to do with it as well, but that's harder to quantify. Having a national curriculum and things like high graduation rates and test scores are fairly easy to quantify, and those are things that we don't have in the USA.
You would think that any teacher even in the lacking-in-common-sense USA would be a little better learned than most people, but obviously there are still some gaps. What we lack these days here is a real shared sense of values... which is really the first step in the disintegration of any society. But it largely falls to poor practical education, even among those charged with teaching those skills to children.
The real question is how the UPN during its first season of existance compares to the Sci-fi channel of today in terms of viewers. The UPN shows were always at the absolute bottom of the broadcast ratings back then.
Voyager was UPN's #1 show, which is how they kept it on for so long despite its perceived lack of quality. (I actually liked it; it was certainly no worse than most episodes of TNG or the soap opera that was DS9.)
According to this site (and I can't vouch, but it seems accurate to what I remember), Voyager at one point had a rating of 7.9. Contrast that with BSG's 1.2.
Contrast this with Lost, which I started off watching avidly, but now... well, the four phases of Lost watching:
1. This show is great! I wonder what they'll do next?!?
2. Huh? That didn't make sense.
3. You guys are making it up as you go along, aren't you?
4. God, I hope you guys are making it up, because God help you if you planned it this way.
And Lost just got extended another three seasons.
It got extended three seasons, but with only two seasons worth of actual shows. They're 16 episode seasons, vs. the standard order of 22 (or in '24's' case, 24).
Anyway, I don't understand people that say Lost doesn't make sense or that it hasn't answered any of its early questions. If you think that's the case, then you just haven't been paying attention. Lost doesn't beat you over the head with its answers like a lot of shows do; it doesn't insult your intelligence by wrapping every plot point up with a neat little bow and saying "here! now look!" The shows themselves are about the characters, and that's always been the case; the overarching story of the island is told through the character stories, and it's up to you in most cases to piece it together. Lost requires you to think. Obviously I know that's not what a lot of people want to do when watching TV, but that's part of what makes the show great - it's not a show for the lazy or feeble-minded. It demands audience participation, which should be something we celebrate from the normally non-interactive boob tube.
Almost all of Lost's early questions were answered long ago. In fact, I was starting to wonder for a while how they were going to make it to the end of this season, let alone next, before they ran out of possible plotlines. (I took the filler episodes like the Ken and Barbie kill-off as evidence that the writers had the same thought.) Now, though, at the end of the season they are throwing tons more questions out there... which can get cheesy if it just seems like it's going to be a neverending cycle. Since we know that there's an endpoint, though, it hasn't reached that point yet. And we do know that there is an overarching plot going on here that hasn't changed since the beginning. I just hope they've still got enough material left for 48 more episodes - my prediction is about 25% of those episodes will be more filler, although that still leaves a lot of great TV to come.
As for BSG, I tried watching a few episodes this season and it seems to have turned into "Grey's Anatomy" in space. It's just a big, slickly produced soap opera. Hopefully with only one season left, the writers can pull it together and really drive things forward again.
why wasn't Crawford removed from IDG's employ, period?
So your argument is that experienced, generally skilled employees should be fired after their first mistake?
Glad you're not a boss at my company... you'd be boss of an empty building pretty quick.
Golden Week isn't a gift giving holiday. It's a chance to travel somewhere. So, sales of games are actually pretty flat during GW. The big gift giving holiday is (sort of) New Years. At New Years, kids get money from their relatives, then they go out to the stores and blow it on toys. That's as close as Japan has to our holiday rush.
Well, this is not exactly true. The big *gift-giving* holiday is actually Christmas, just as it is here - yes, they do celebrate it as a consumer holiday. And yes, they do have a pre-Christmas holiday rush there. The difference is it is not a *family* holiday. That's New Year's. Christmas is a holiday for couples, which actually makes it really big in the video game market, because all those girlfriends go out and buy games for their boyfriends, and now with the DS, boyfriends can do the same for their girlfriends (ditto for husbands/wives, but it's still younger people that spend the most on games).
The post-New Year's week's sales are usually big too for the reason you mentioned, but all of December is huge because of Christmas. The DS sold like 2 million units alone last December, if I remember right.
Golden Week is *usually* bigger than the weeks surrounding it strictly for the reason that a lot of people have that whole week off, so they buy games to play. It's not Christmas or New Year's big, but it's still usually bigger than most weeks.
This year seems to have been fairly slow, actually, which makes it sort of strange to see the numbers being called out in western news, as if there's something noteworthy about them.
Hey! Lets make PS3 games!
Well, why not? How are you going to compete with Nintendo on their own platforms?
If I was a dev, I'd look at this list and think to myself that Nintendo's pretty much got their platforms locked up. This has always been one of Nintendo's problems in dealing with third party developers.
I think they probably sent the C&D because of trademark law.
Trademark law wasn't invoked in this case. Copyright law was, specifically the DMCA.
You don't need to defend your copyrights every time you spot a violation in order to continue being covered by them. If you own the copyright to a work, you own the copyright - nobody can take that away from you.
As for the lawyer issue, I don't buy this "they were just being lawyers" argument. They were hired for a specific purpose; in this case their purpose was to stop this code from being spread on the internet. Their actions instead resulted the code making it (via link) to the New York Times, among others. That was not a very good job they did.
The point of any job is the end result. Nobody hires a lawyer to send out C&D's. They hire a lawyer for a purpose that may or may not require the sending of C&D's. Those are two different things. C&D's are a means to an end, not the end itself - in this case, the results the lawyers got were exactly the opposite of what they were being paid for.
Sony is simply looking to spread some FUD about the Xbox 360 as well.
The source is Dan Houser, who works for Rockstar last I checked, not Sony.
btw, what is new about this article that it deserves another mention on the site? This is the same quote as in the OPM article; it's apparently just CVG referencing OPM.
$50,000,000,000 seems like a lot for yahoo
It's not a lot for Yahoo, but it's a lot for Microsoft. Yes, even Microsoft.
Despite their huge revenue and profits, Microsoft currently "only" has $25 billion in the bank. So they couldn't do a straight purchase of Yahoo, they'd have to do a stock swap and maybe some borrowing, which would be a merger rather than a takeover. (In fact, that's how I'm seeing it described in other news reports.) It wouldn't be MS swallowing up Yahoo and dictating who stays and who goes. It would be some of Yahoo and some of MS mixed together.
I can't see that this is what MS would want. This is not how they do business. They're not going to let some Yahoo schlub come in and take over Steve Ballmer's job, and they're not going to want a situation where Yahoo's Hotjobs division is suddenly leading the development of MS Office. But these are the kinds of weird things that happen in mergers.
I think it's more likely that they'll try to do some sort of exclusive search deal with them, where Yahoo searches are done through Windows Live. This would still be a huge deal because Yahoo's invested a lot in their search tech over the past few years (as has MS). So you're probably still talking a multi-billion dollar deal here. But it's one way the two companies could join forces against Google without an outright merger.
Mac fans may cry foul here.
There's nothing that differentiates a Mac from a PC hardware-wise. Well, nothing important anyway. The Mac OS runs on the same "platform" as Windows. So does Linux and basically every other OS out there. What you're talking about is the software OS, which is ultimately pretty meaningless in game consoles - I mean I know not all Mac-heads agree, but an OS only exists to run programs and to act as a conduit between your hardware and other software. Consoles didn't even have standalone OS's until a generation ago (they just had firmware), and I would argue that they're the worse for it. Previous to that, games for all intents and purposes contained their own OS as part of the game code.
So really, when people say "platform" in this context, they're talking hardware, because that's all that really matters for gaming. PC architecture is a standard architecture (and that includes the Mac), if anybody wanted to give up marketing standalone game consoles and focus on one standard. But it's never going to happen.
Yes, but you do not own the right to resell the music. Thus, the legal definition is not that of ownership; you are, indeed, licensing it.
The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise.
The first-sale doctrine has not been tested at the supreme court level in relation to downloaded music, but this is one case in which a conservative court is more likely to side against the record industry. The law says what it says; you'd have to be one of those so-called "activist" judges to read something into it other than what's on paper and side with the RIAA.
DRM-free purchased songs are "owned" under the law. Heck, so are DRM'd songs; you just can't legally break the DRM for resale purposes, making the first-sale doctrine moot.
The difference between Nintendo and the other two, is that Nintendo is a games only company. They rely solely on their hardware and software sales. On the other hand, Sony and Microsoft's consoles are just one division of a much larger conglomerate. And that conglomerate can support the other gaming divisions until they finally do get out of the red, or the stock holders, whatever, demand that division to be sold off or folded.
What you say is true, but it didn't answer the question that was asked, which is whether or not it's normal for a console to be in the red at this point in its lifespan.
The short answer is no, it is not normal. And despite your true statement above, that's important. Why?
MS and Sony both got into video gaming in the first place both because they saw how profitable it was and because they saw the potential for even greater profit through using their systems as a trojan horse for other entertainment and software possibilities. Do you think that either company would have launched a console in the first place if they saw the industry as a money-losing business? Obviously not. They did it because they wanted a piece of the action, and they wanted to define where the action was in the future.
The issue is that neither Sony nor MS has figured out how to make a consistent profit in the video games business. MS has never done it, to my knowledge (possibly one quarter with the original Xbox) and Sony does it about half the time. Nintendo always makes a profit. The only question is how big.
If this keeps up, eventually Sony and MS could drag the industry so far down that it's not going to seem worth it to their shareholders or to any of their potential partners, be they publishers or peripheral makers or whatever. Nobody's going to want to be involved in the game business if it seems obvious that it's a money-losing business.
I actually own all 4 previous-gen consoles and would like to own a PS3, but I honestly think that without Nintendo, we would have had another game industry crash by now. They're single-handedly defining the industry right now, in both home and portable systems, and they're proving to everybody how much money there is to be made at it. Without them, you'd have a money-losing industry that would look to anybody on the outside like the industry itself was no longer viable.
Let's see, the PS3 loses Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto IV to multiplatform releases.
GTA4 was never a PS3 exclusive. I'm not sure why the assumption would even be made, as GTA1, GTA2, GTA3, GTA:VC and GTA:SA were never exclusives either.
I think people need to make a distinction between "exclusive" and "coming out on one platform six months before being ported to another". They are not the same thing, and never have been. This notion of a "timed exclusive" is one of those either meaningless or wrongly-applied industry buzzwords that really needs to go. There is no such thing as a "timed exclusive" - a game is either exclusive or it isn't.
Assassin's Creed I don't know about, but GTA4 was always multi-platform. The only difference in GTA4's case is the simultaneous release. Losing six months of "exclusivity" isn't losing exclusivity, it's losing six months. Again, not the same.
The Wii outsold the Xbox 360 by 25% last month. That's certainly a sizable lead, yet it's not exactly what I'd call "creaming the competition". I'd also argue that the Wii's monthly software sales have been underwhelming
Well, its hardware sales have honestly been somewhat underwhelming too - despite what the article here would lead you to believe. That stuff about them not meeting demand until 2009? Makes it sound like customers are just clamoring to get their hands on the Wii, when the truth is they sold 259,000 units last month. That's about average for any game console, and only a little better than the Xbox 360, which has systems sitting on store shelves all over the country.
The truth is one of two things: either Nintendo's having major production problems, or they're artificially and intentionally short-supplying for PR purposes. If it's the latter, it appears to be working - for now. Lots of people talk about how Nintendo "can't keep up with demand", which implies that demand is great. But that will only last for so long, as people see the actual monthly sales numbers.
They're doing better than MS or Sony right now, and selling more units, so I'm not saying this is all completely overhyped. But I would argue that any game manufacturer that can't make more than 259,000 units a month - especially one that's as relatively simple as the Wii, and especially one that's been on the market for six months now - has some serious problems. Their inability to meet demand is only good news if that means they're selling a huge number of units, but that's not the case. They're unable to meet demand because their production capacity is much too low, which just means they're leaving potential customers' money on the table and selling a lot fewer units than they should be.
I think there are going to be a lot of defensive replies from dSLR owners. But with enough light, a small lens and sensor can take a good picture.
"Good pictures" start with accuracy. That's the entire point of a camera, and that's what separates good cameras from bad cameras. Even in the pre-digital days, sure, different films and different settings would give you different results, but photographers paid the big bucks for cameras that would given them a reliable baseline of accuracy - that meant being capable of things like high shutter speeds for daylight photos, low shutter speeds for night photos, high quality light metering, and lenses capable of high resolutions, high color accuracy and low distortion. What a photographer chooses to do artistically is another matter, but the point is photographers don't rely on their cameras to be the artists; that's the photographer's job, not the camera's.
So I don't even need to look at the article to know what the word "vibrant" means with regard to the Nokia photos - it means "artificially jacked colors". In other words, not at all accurate, in other words crap.
I mean, look. I have a 2mp cell phone camera and I have an 8mp DSLR. I use my cell phone camera when I'm just out and about and don't care about quality. But there is a huge difference in color accuracy, noise and detail between even the best cell phone cameras and the worst dslr's. And that difference is not going away.
So I guess you can consider me one of your "defensive" dslr owners - but hopefully, there will always be defenders of the truth out there.
It's funny, because in the US even chocolate that SHOULD be good (ie: made in Belgium) tastes like crap. I'm pretty sure that all manufacturers cut corners if the product is destined for the good ol' US of A.
:(
When it comes to chocolate it really does suck to be an American
The biggest problem is that it has been a problem for so long that the majority of us don't know any better.
Well, a) this is all relative, and b) there is certainly chocolate in America that will measure up to any standard in the world. Here is one example.
I've been to Europe, and quite frankly, the stuff you get in grocery stores there is no better than Hershey's. If you want to compare high end chocolate, then you've gotta compare apples to apples - you can't compare boutique chocolate in Europe to mass produced chocolate in the US. We've got boutique chocolate just as good as Europe, and they've got mass produced chocolate just as bad as us.
And a lot of countries have it worse, even in mass produced chocolate. Japan has awful chocolate, for one example. It's waxy and nearly tasteless - it's like that really cheap stuff they put in chocolate easter bunnies here. This is almost universal there; it's not a particular brand. It's just what people are used to. My wife (who is Japanese) never liked chocolate before she moved to the United States - now she can't get enough of it, even if it's just Hershey's, but especially if it's something like Jacques Torres.
So you don't know how good we've got it.
Will the person who picked HD-DVD in April 2007 for the next gen DVD format pool, please step forward to collect their winnings. I don't think that there is any chance that Sony and friends could over come this.
Sony has already overcome this in the form of the PlayStation 3, and the format war is all but over in favor of Blu-Ray. This doesn't really change anything.
I don't know why some people think that everything Wal-Mart touches turns to gold. They've been having all sorts of problems lately, and one of those problems has been their entry into the high-end electronics market, which has gone over like a lead balloon. Wal-Mart's customers just don't go there to buy things like HDTV's and HD-DVD players - they go there to buy cheap food, baby wipes and $4 prescription drugs. HD-DVD players may be "flying off the shelf" compared to other players at Wal-Mart, but that's not saying anything. Wake me up when all of Wal-Mart's HD-DVD players outsell one model of Blu-Ray player at any single Best Buy.
Also, Sony had had a $500 Blu-Ray player since November 2006 (at least refuting that nonsense about them not having a player under $1,000 until "later this year") called the PlayStation 3, and they've got a $600 MSRP standalone player coming in the next month or two that'll probably actually sell for $500 or less also. Realistically, though, I don't think the price of the players matters much. What matters is the movies available. Blu-Ray has a lot more content industry support, and that's not changing.
I mean anyone can make a device and sell it for $20 if they want to, but nobody's going to buy it if there's no content available for it. That's the situation to an extent with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray right now, but Blu-Ray has more releases now and more releases in the pipeline, along with more studios on board.
So, despite this obvious bit of PR from the HD-DVD camp, it's still basically game over for them.
sept these are NPR numbers, which have NEVER reflected online sales or Walmarts.
Jesus, can we put this myth to bed at some point?
I'll say it simply: NPD reports do reflect both online sales and Wal-Mart.
What they don't do is actually count those sales. That doesn't mean they can't reflect them.
The NPD, like most other organizations doing polling, relies on statistical sampling. Their sample, though, is huge - about 60% of the total market. That means they can be accurate to within about 0.1% - probably about the same as if they were actually counting only physical units (because errors do creep in when combining physical data from a variety of disparate sources that each have their own methods of measurement).
Look at it this way. The game industry itself relies on these numbers. Do you think that would be the case if the industry knew that the world's largest retailer was not reflected in the report?
Get it through your heads, everybody - 100% of the industry's sales are reflected in this report. The fact that the NPD isn't going through Wal-Mart hand-counting systems being sold doesn't change that.
I believe it's more like website project managers saying:
92% of our server logs show people using IE7.
Except that there are two problems with that argument.
1) It's not 92%. I mean I *suppose* there could be some Microsoft fansite out there that does nothing but talk about how great Microsoft is all day that gets 92% of their audience from IE. But at my company, which is a mainstream entertainment company, IE usage is currently at 64%. That's all versions, including AOL, including IE4, even including Opera identifying itself as IE.
2) So the question then is how does that website project manager turn to his executive VP for marketing and say "oh, sorry, we're not going to develop for that other 36%, even though that's a couple million visitors per month." If you're at all familiar with the modern corporate environment, you know that the "but we don't have time!" excuse doesn't fly anymore - whether it's actually the case or not. Every web department I've ever worked in has been staffed with overworked, burnt-out, disgruntled workaholics that are on the job 18 hours a day, about 15 of which are spent doing browser QA. (Yeah, you can tell I'm saying this from experience.)
Even if it *is* only 8%, that's still potentially a million visitors or more at some sites. No company in the world is going to say that's not worth making an effort for, even if it means hiring one more person.
We've leveraged scripting technology that only works with ActiveX. If you want to replace it, I'm going to need the following additional server, developers, and it's going to delay the $NEW_CONTENT_PROJECT by 4 months and cost $LARGE_AMOUNT_OF_MONEY.
Or, in other words, time to start looking for a new job while your boss hires somebody who will actually do the work he wanted you to do. It sucks, but that's modern corporate life.
So really, the only reason a modern site would be developed for IE only is gross ignorance on the part of company executives. They'd have to have no interest in or knowledge of the company's own web site. That's certainly possible, but less common these days than it used to be. Because no company these days would knowingly exclude a large portion of their potential audience unless they had some vested interest in doing so (e.g. an MS-affiliated company - though even sites like msnbc.com now use Flash video made to work across all browsers, rather than the ActiveX-enabled Windows Media that they used to use).