If you don't d/l that much, then we're not lumping you in with them, and neither will your ISP.
Either you're not d/ling much, so you won't be charged much more, and you should be annoyed at the "mp3 l33t d00dz" who are causing the lag you're complaining of. Or you _are_ one of the people causing the lag, and the other low bandwidth users have the right to be pissed at you and expect you to pay accordingly more so the service can be upgraded.
It was a pretty silly suggestion to begin with, but I think the whole idea was to set up your _own_ ISP, hence the reselling to your neighbors.
Probably still not very cheap, but paying for the T1 connection and then paying the ISP to have access to it would just be dumb. _You_ should be charging the ISP for access to _your_ T1 line.
The average person may only buy one system per generation, but us "average users" that grew up with Nintendo are getting a lot older now, and have perfectly good jobs. PS2's are good, I won't take anything away from that, but $150 to have a second systems doesn't seem that unreasonable. For me, these are the exact announcements I have been waiting for to go out and buy a Gamecube. Also the price drop has provided further incentive for parents to choose the Cube for their kids.
Gord seems to think that just because traditionally the average gamer only bought one console that that is the way it will always remain.
When i first got started on games I bought (convinced my parents to get me for christmas, whatever) a NES. The next year i got a Sega Master System. I played the NES a lot, the Sega almost zero, so the next generation i just got a SNES and didn't bother with the Sega.
However after getting a N64 for generation #3 i was eventually "forced" to get a PSX for the purpose of playing FF7. Having bought that second console, i ended up buying a lot of games for both systems. Having had that experience i figured that for the next generation buying more than one console would be a matter of course.
I'm a geek, so i'm ahead of the curve, but i think that there _is_ a curve, and there are others following along behind me.
Video gaming has now grown to be larger than the movie industry. There ar commercials for video games all over the place and new console information and E3 are now front page items for news agencies.
I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of people out there with a PS2 who are looking at the GameCube and XBox and thinking about getting more than one console this time, especially as some of the big titles start coming out this year.
If the market didn't evolve we'd still all be playing on Atari systems or something like that.
How would that be impossible? Every person/year of service they sell makes up for the losses on one XBox. (Possibly quite a bit more, depending on whose numbers you use)
If they could somehow convince everyone to sign up just for a year they'd be back to zero and could make pure profit on the games.
I recently ran into two functions in the code base I'm using that were titled "ObjectTrackDirection" and "ObjectTrackToDirection". The similarity in names was annoying, but the criminal part was that neither function had comments indicating what they did, or what the difference between the two was. In fact, the only comment in either section of code was on one line that was duplicated in both pieces of code, and which said "not sure why this is needed". This did not give me a great deal of confidence as I started out trying to decipher what exactly these functions were supposed to accomplish differently.
No matter how clear you think you made the name of the function, there should be a comment explaining what the fuction is supposed to be doing. If the function accepts a lot of flags or variables you should briefly explain what they're each used for.
Knowing what the function is supposed to accomplish is a big step forward, even if there are no other comments at all.
If you're still willing to keep at it, start commenting the big blocks of code in the same manner. What are you trying to do with this loop? Why are you testing for these cases in this if statement, and if it succeeds, what are you trying to do inside of it?
Always go in favor of more comments. I would rather have to skim by a dozen comments that I don't need to read than be left hanging for the lack of one comment when something goes wrong.
And finally, always use whatever comment system your source control program uses! Even if it's just "I did some stuff to fix some problems with A," because if I later find out that a particular case of A is broken, I don't want to have to do a diff on every single code change made since the last time I knew that case of A worked.
Shhhh, the Illuminati doesn't want anyone to find out that all the disasters in history are linked by a common cause and were engineered by their Disaster Organization Committee.
When Yoda is seen floating by mace and Obi Wan he looks extra fake
The perspective really sucked. For the first several seconds of this scene it looked to me like Yoda was _behind_ the others, floating about an inch above the floor. It was only when his image crossed in front of the others' that I realized he was supposed to be to the side and about three feet off the ground.
Was the unceasing references to earlier Star Wars movies, both visual and audible. It seems like every time a major dramatic scene happened both sides felt compelled to toss out minor variations on speaches we heard 20 years ago. "Join with me. Together we can yadda yadda" By the time the Death Star's "cameo" came around I was ready to laugh at the whole thing. It seemed like a desperate ploy on Lucas' part to forcibly remind us of AotC's relation to the movies we loved.
The most implausible scene however was Shmi's death. She was holding out in captivity for a month waiting for a rescue she never knew would arrive. Yet after surviving for that long she then just magically dies a minute or two after Anakin rescues her. The timing of that is beyond coincidental.
A more plausible, and perhaps more fitting, scenario would have been for Anakin to try and carry her out of the camp, only to have a signle Tusken Raider catch them and shoot her.
For added dramatic emphasis, Anakin could reach out with the force in a moment of rage and strangle the Tusken, causing the trademarked cluthing of the throat and falling to the floor. Having quietly dispatched the opponent, Anakin could then have a few minutes for his mom to give him her dying speach before he goes on his rampage and kills everyone.
Along with showing more clearly his fall to the dark side, it would also make his failure to rescue her more pronounced.
(And on a sidenote, where are all the Jedi? If 10,000 systens is only minority of the Republic, there must be at least 100,000 systems. At a billion people each(?) that would be a population of 100 trillion. Yet there are only a hundred or so fully trained Jedi?)
Well if the goat sex version is selling that much better, then clearly it isn't the music itself that's making it popular =)
Besides, that's a completly different issue then what this system is meant to deal with. I think there are probably slightly different laws for normal copying of material vs. plagiarizing other people's works to use in your own.
It sounds like a very tenative step in the right direction.
I agree that getting the RIAA out of the loop is a good thing, but how exactly do they propose to pay the artists directly? $1 a month per user is a pretty generic system, and pays no attention whatsoever to how much any particular user downloads or which artists they are listening to.
As problematic as the details would be, I would still prefer a system where I can donate money to the artists whose music I appreciate, preferably through some centralized system. (Other, than the RIAA of course, with a public declartion of exactly how much of the money goes where.)
At first a lot of people would just continue to download and not donate, but there are certain problems inherent in getting any new system started. Once it was considered a social standard to support the artists whose music you listen to I think the system would work very well, and directly reward the creators of art proportionately to how much society values their creations, rather than by how much money was spent on promoting it by the RIAA.
What the fuck ARE you talking about? Did you read that article you pointed to? Here, I'll quote it for you, right at the end:
So there we have it. The myth that was "all consoles are sold below cost"
has been vanquished!"
And did you actually read the article? "Not all consoles are sold at a loss" does _not_ equate to "All consoles are sold at a profit."
They quite clearly stated that the XBox _is_ one of the consoles that is losing money.
The numbers they use are backed up by industry analysts. Here's one of many articles that cites those numbers.
"Microsoft is set to launch the Xbox on Nov. 15 at a retail price of $299. Estimates of Microsoft's cost to build each unit have ranged from $320 to $400. Microsoft representatives would not comment on manufacturing costs."
Microsoft isn't going to tell us how much money they're losing per console, but that doesn't mean that reasonable estimates can't be made by people who know how such things work, and all of those estimates agree that they are losing money although the exact amounts differ.
If you are going to condem one instance of it, you should condenm every single action taken by a corporation that tries to limit the freedom of others to protect thier profits. To do otherwise makes you look very dumb.
Just because you disagree with the action doesn't mean you can't laugh at the person who was picking on you and ask them how it feels to be in your shoes.
Your enemy's enemny is not your friend if both are your enemy.
They may not be your friend, but there's no reason not to stand back and let them beat each other silly before stepping up to challenge the winner.
If you take the time to look at the numbers it's even more bogus by that. The $192 million was not _all_ in the first year.
A little searching reveals: "At prices of 75 cents for matinees and $1 for evenings, the picture began its extraordinary first run. By the end of it, in June, 1940, over 25 million people had paid admission."
Interestingly, given the value for inflation used above people were paying the equivalent of $9 matinees and $12 for evening shows, more than we do today (at least at most theatres I go to.)
It doesn't say what the total sales were, but if we figure equal numbers of matinees and evenings it comes out to about $22 million dollars, or $264 million adjusting for inflation.
That's certainly impressive, but it's not mind blowing. The reason for the $192 million is because it kept getting rereleased. As you said, it's had 60 years to rack up that many sales and a 12:1 inflation does not apply over that whole period.
In fact another site used a different method of calculation and comes up with an adjusted value of $863,288 (In 1996 dollars)
As pointed out DVD and video releases hurt modern day box office sales as well. Disney was able to rerelease their movies every five or ten years right up until the point they finally gave in and started releasing them on video.
Although I have not seen it myself, the Hidden Fortress DVD comes with an interview with George Lucas in which he talks about how the movie inspired him to write Star Wars.
If it makes you feel any better, I seem to remember a theory that if the human brain does indeed opperate on a quantum level, it's information capacity would actually be larger than that of the entire (non-quantum) universe.
So in some ways just the act of being conscious makes you and every other thinking creature out there larger than the whole universe.
Of course if that were true, it would also make the human brain the best (worst?) example of OS overhead consuming system resources ever =)
Misleading? Would anyone really read that and think that they were about to discover the 500 millionth E.T.?
And why they shouldn't be proud of the results they've achieved so far? Is it somehow SETI's fault that there aren't more alien civilizations out there broadcasting signals in ways we can detect?
-Who were the first 499,999,999 E.T.s discovered? I seem to have missed out on the fanfare and parades.
Back when Gamespot first started putting advertisements up they posted an "appologetic" note explaining that they needed to make money like everyone else, and that there are only two ways to fund a site that have been shown to work, advertisements and subscriptions.
That last bit just isn't true. Some sites make some or all of their money selling stuff. Besides the obvious candidates like Amazon, a lot of smaller sites sell things like themes t-shirts and mousepads to bring in some cash.
More importantly, some sites function off of donation based systems. Instead of asking you to subscribe for a service site unseen, they effectively show you what they've got and then ask you how much it's worth.
I've donated to Sluggy, and I've doanted to Adventurers. When The Gaming Intelligence Agency ran out of money eight months ago they asked for donations, and I gave them $20. Not because of the services I expected to recieve in the future, but because of what they'd already given to me. If they had asked for donations again I would have given again based on the quality of the service for the eight months at their site.
If GameSpot asked for donations I might give them some money, but I certainly wouldn't give them $20. They haven't done enough to earn it, and I see little reason why I should give them $20 or $25 now on the gamble that eventually they will get better.
Have you thought about how much of your cable bill goes to pay the fees for stations you couldn't care less about? And you think that paying for individual channel content would be a _bad_ thing?
If I could pay just $5 a month for access to only the sci-fi channel, the cartoon network, the comedy channel, the history channel, and the learning channel, I'd do it in an instant.
And although they may be scattered pretty thin, there _are_ sites that make money, and there will be more of them as time goes on.
You can't isolate the net from real world economics, especially since there are now a tons of online stores pumpign money into the system. I don't really think that what Gamespot is trying to do is the best system, but eventually people will figure out how to concistently make money off of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you're not d/ling much, so you won't be charged much more, and you should be annoyed at the "mp3 l33t d00dz" who are causing the lag you're complaining of. Or you _are_ one of the people causing the lag, and the other low bandwidth users have the right to be pissed at you and expect you to pay accordingly more so the service can be upgraded.
Probably still not very cheap, but paying for the T1 connection and then paying the ISP to have access to it would just be dumb. _You_ should be charging the ISP for access to _your_ T1 line.
Gord seems to think that just because traditionally the average gamer only bought one console that that is the way it will always remain.
When i first got started on games I bought (convinced my parents to get me for christmas, whatever) a NES. The next year i got a Sega Master System. I played the NES a lot, the Sega almost zero, so the next generation i just got a SNES and didn't bother with the Sega.
However after getting a N64 for generation #3 i was eventually "forced" to get a PSX for the purpose of playing FF7. Having bought that second console, i ended up buying a lot of games for both systems. Having had that experience i figured that for the next generation buying more than one console would be a matter of course.
I'm a geek, so i'm ahead of the curve, but i think that there _is_ a curve, and there are others following along behind me.
Video gaming has now grown to be larger than the movie industry. There ar commercials for video games all over the place and new console information and E3 are now front page items for news agencies.
I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of people out there with a PS2 who are looking at the GameCube and XBox and thinking about getting more than one console this time, especially as some of the big titles start coming out this year.
If the market didn't evolve we'd still all be playing on Atari systems or something like that.
How would that be impossible? Every person/year of service they sell makes up for the losses on one XBox. (Possibly quite a bit more, depending on whose numbers you use) If they could somehow convince everyone to sign up just for a year they'd be back to zero and could make pure profit on the games.
No matter how clear you think you made the name of the function, there should be a comment explaining what the fuction is supposed to be doing. If the function accepts a lot of flags or variables you should briefly explain what they're each used for.
Knowing what the function is supposed to accomplish is a big step forward, even if there are no other comments at all.
If you're still willing to keep at it, start commenting the big blocks of code in the same manner. What are you trying to do with this loop? Why are you testing for these cases in this if statement, and if it succeeds, what are you trying to do inside of it?
Always go in favor of more comments. I would rather have to skim by a dozen comments that I don't need to read than be left hanging for the lack of one comment when something goes wrong.
And finally, always use whatever comment system your source control program uses! Even if it's just "I did some stuff to fix some problems with A," because if I later find out that a particular case of A is broken, I don't want to have to do a diff on every single code change made since the last time I knew that case of A worked.
Shhhh, the Illuminati doesn't want anyone to find out that all the disasters in history are linked by a common cause and were engineered by their Disaster Organization Committee.
The perspective really sucked. For the first several seconds of this scene it looked to me like Yoda was _behind_ the others, floating about an inch above the floor. It was only when his image crossed in front of the others' that I realized he was supposed to be to the side and about three feet off the ground.
The most implausible scene however was Shmi's death. She was holding out in captivity for a month waiting for a rescue she never knew would arrive. Yet after surviving for that long she then just magically dies a minute or two after Anakin rescues her. The timing of that is beyond coincidental.
A more plausible, and perhaps more fitting, scenario would have been for Anakin to try and carry her out of the camp, only to have a signle Tusken Raider catch them and shoot her.
For added dramatic emphasis, Anakin could reach out with the force in a moment of rage and strangle the Tusken, causing the trademarked cluthing of the throat and falling to the floor. Having quietly dispatched the opponent, Anakin could then have a few minutes for his mom to give him her dying speach before he goes on his rampage and kills everyone.
Along with showing more clearly his fall to the dark side, it would also make his failure to rescue her more pronounced.
(And on a sidenote, where are all the Jedi? If 10,000 systens is only minority of the Republic, there must be at least 100,000 systems. At a billion people each(?) that would be a population of 100 trillion. Yet there are only a hundred or so fully trained Jedi?)
Besides, that's a completly different issue then what this system is meant to deal with. I think there are probably slightly different laws for normal copying of material vs. plagiarizing other people's works to use in your own.
I agree that getting the RIAA out of the loop is a good thing, but how exactly do they propose to pay the artists directly? $1 a month per user is a pretty generic system, and pays no attention whatsoever to how much any particular user downloads or which artists they are listening to.
As problematic as the details would be, I would still prefer a system where I can donate money to the artists whose music I appreciate, preferably through some centralized system. (Other, than the RIAA of course, with a public declartion of exactly how much of the money goes where.)
At first a lot of people would just continue to download and not donate, but there are certain problems inherent in getting any new system started. Once it was considered a social standard to support the artists whose music you listen to I think the system would work very well, and directly reward the creators of art proportionately to how much society values their creations, rather than by how much money was spent on promoting it by the RIAA.
So there we have it. The myth that was "all consoles are sold below cost" has been vanquished!"
And did you actually read the article? "Not all consoles are sold at a loss" does _not_ equate to "All consoles are sold at a profit."
They quite clearly stated that the XBox _is_ one of the consoles that is losing money.
The numbers they use are backed up by industry analysts. Here's one of many articles that cites those numbers.
"Microsoft is set to launch the Xbox on Nov. 15 at a retail price of $299. Estimates of Microsoft's cost to build each unit have ranged from $320 to $400. Microsoft representatives would not comment on manufacturing costs."
Microsoft isn't going to tell us how much money they're losing per console, but that doesn't mean that reasonable estimates can't be made by people who know how such things work, and all of those estimates agree that they are losing money although the exact amounts differ.
Just because you disagree with the action doesn't mean you can't laugh at the person who was picking on you and ask them how it feels to be in your shoes.
Your enemy's enemny is not your friend if both are your enemy.
They may not be your friend, but there's no reason not to stand back and let them beat each other silly before stepping up to challenge the winner.
A little searching reveals: "At prices of 75 cents for matinees and $1 for evenings, the picture began its extraordinary first run. By the end of it, in June, 1940, over 25 million people had paid admission."
Interestingly, given the value for inflation used above people were paying the equivalent of $9 matinees and $12 for evening shows, more than we do today (at least at most theatres I go to.)
It doesn't say what the total sales were, but if we figure equal numbers of matinees and evenings it comes out to about $22 million dollars, or $264 million adjusting for inflation.
That's certainly impressive, but it's not mind blowing. The reason for the $192 million is because it kept getting rereleased. As you said, it's had 60 years to rack up that many sales and a 12:1 inflation does not apply over that whole period.
In fact another site used a different method of calculation and comes up with an adjusted value of $863,288 (In 1996 dollars)
As pointed out DVD and video releases hurt modern day box office sales as well. Disney was able to rerelease their movies every five or ten years right up until the point they finally gave in and started releasing them on video.
(Articles I got the quotes from are at The Atlantic Online and Entertainment Scene if anyone wants to see it)
Although I have not seen it myself, the Hidden Fortress DVD comes with an interview with George Lucas in which he talks about how the movie inspired him to write Star Wars.
How else do you think the ancients managed to look up at things like four stars in a box with two stars off to the side and decide it was a crab?
If it makes you feel any better, I seem to remember a theory that if the human brain does indeed opperate on a quantum level, it's information capacity would actually be larger than that of the entire (non-quantum) universe.
So in some ways just the act of being conscious makes you and every other thinking creature out there larger than the whole universe.
Of course if that were true, it would also make the human brain the best (worst?) example of OS overhead consuming system resources ever =)
Misleading? Would anyone really read that and think that they were about to discover the 500 millionth E.T.?
And why they shouldn't be proud of the results they've achieved so far? Is it somehow SETI's fault that there aren't more alien civilizations out there broadcasting signals in ways we can detect?
-Who were the first 499,999,999 E.T.s discovered? I seem to have missed out on the fanfare and parades.
Back when Gamespot first started putting advertisements up they posted an "appologetic" note explaining that they needed to make money like everyone else, and that there are only two ways to fund a site that have been shown to work, advertisements and subscriptions.
That last bit just isn't true. Some sites make some or all of their money selling stuff. Besides the obvious candidates like Amazon, a lot of smaller sites sell things like themes t-shirts and mousepads to bring in some cash.
More importantly, some sites function off of donation based systems. Instead of asking you to subscribe for a service site unseen, they effectively show you what they've got and then ask you how much it's worth.
I've donated to Sluggy, and I've doanted to Adventurers. When The Gaming Intelligence Agency ran out of money eight months ago they asked for donations, and I gave them $20. Not because of the services I expected to recieve in the future, but because of what they'd already given to me. If they had asked for donations again I would have given again based on the quality of the service for the eight months at their site.
If GameSpot asked for donations I might give them some money, but I certainly wouldn't give them $20. They haven't done enough to earn it, and I see little reason why I should give them $20 or $25 now on the gamble that eventually they will get better.
Have you thought about how much of your cable bill goes to pay the fees for stations you couldn't care less about? And you think that paying for individual channel content would be a _bad_ thing?
If I could pay just $5 a month for access to only the sci-fi channel, the cartoon network, the comedy channel, the history channel, and the learning channel, I'd do it in an instant.
And although they may be scattered pretty thin, there _are_ sites that make money, and there will be more of them as time goes on.
You can't isolate the net from real world economics, especially since there are now a tons of online stores pumpign money into the system. I don't really think that what Gamespot is trying to do is the best system, but eventually people will figure out how to concistently make money off of it.