That means absolutely every console in America gets about two hours of use each and every day.
On average, that doesn't surprise me at all. People are stunned when they read that people in the US watch something like 4 hours/day of TV on average (statistic from my memory, probably only vaguely accurate). I'm on my PS3 for 2 or 3 hours a night quite regularly, with 6 hour stretches on the weekends not that unusual -- and there are a lot of gamers who play MUCH more than I do.
There was a recent study about gaming and OCD. People get sucked in and spend job-like hours on their games all the time.
I hate to disagree, but this is nothing -- M$ knows their bread and butter is backward compatibility, so they can suck you in. Here's a better story --
In 1996, I installed and ran Windows NT 4.0 on an IBM PS/2 Model 80 that was build when Ronald Reagan was president -- 1987!
It had a 1GB SCSI drive, 16MB of RAM (the maximum for that system), and a 386/25. Ran fine, only problem I had was I couldn't get it to recognize the XGA card I had as an XGA card, so I was stuck with setting it to be an 8514 -- 1024/768/16colors.
This was my daily use computer through early '97, and I think I installed up to SP3 on it. Don't ask why I had such a crappy machine....
"The word 'nuclear' makes me nervous," said Randy Virgin of the Alaska Center for the Environment. "But we've long seen the problems with diesel, and I'm pretty excited about the prospect of a clean source of energy," he said. "It sounds very promising, but I'd approach it with extreme skepticism."
No matter what we might say about how the web has changed news, I doubt that many people have gone to newspapers for their up-to-the-minute news for DECADES. A big part of the very wide adoption of radio in the 1930's was to get the latest news. TV took over that function in the 50's, and it still has it.
What I get from newspapers is detailed, long-form analysis -- and you really can only do that AFTER the news has had a chance to "settle" a little bit. CNN is interesting if I want to see what is happening now, but the Post or the Times is what I want if I am interested in figuring out the meaning of what has been happening over the last few days.
What is really special about print newspapers is that they are the most economically efficient means of providing long-format, detailed analysis.
It really comes down to the old "what's the fastest way to transfer a terabyte of data between two points 50 miles apart? A station wagon filled with DLT tapes."
I read the sunday paper from beginning to end every week (and skim the classifieds), which is a couple hundred pages of information, and I pay $1.50 for it. There is no breaking news, and all of this information could be gotten from the website, but I can't imagine trying to read that much copy on a computer screen -- especially with blinking animated ads all over the place. I certainly wouldn't want to print out all of those pages -- counting ink I think we're talking about 2 or 3 cents per page.
And this all comes down to why the Times online paper hasn't been very successful. Paying 50 cents for a print copy of a serious newspaper is a better deal than free registration to read the same information in a less convenient format.
Implementing an off the shelf product to manage your content is like using FrontPage to build your websites. There are lots of pre-designed items for very generic actions that might be useful to a complete novice, but the end result is unacceptable junk that a moderately experienced coder could build much better.
I'm at a large media company, and we've had nothing but nightmares attempting to implement a purchased CMS. Along with the CMS, we also contracted with the vendor's recommended integrator to help us set the system up.
The integrators are competent, and the system is ok in a generic way, but we are not a "generic" shop -- and I don't think any shop really is. If we had simply set aside a few months for one of our in-house developers to build the system from scratch, based on our needs and environment, we would have exactly the sort of functions that we wanted, plus have easy extensibility. Instead, we've spent almost two years, and an enormous amount of money and manpower, on this system and we still have almost nothing in production that uses this system.
One reason that we were pushed to purchase this outside system was that the non-technical management was afraid that if one or two expert coders in our organization were to leave, the site would be in crisis from the loss of specialized information. However, our coders work in Perl -- there are lots of Perl coders around there (though our team is VERY good) -- and now we are dependent on people who are expert in this proprietary system; now we have a vastly reduced pool of people with the necessary expertise to hier from.
The worst part of the whole situation is that instead of making our work easier, it is actually slowing down the specific tasks that we have been able to do for quite some time. We spend so much time trying to massage this tool into doing the things we need to do that we are able to get much less done in general.
There is no real end in sight -- or if there is, it will be quite messy; our division has invested so much money and manpower into this project that we will look VERY bad if we simply abandon it.
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That means absolutely every console in America gets about two hours of use each and every day.
On average, that doesn't surprise me at all. People are stunned when they read that people in the US watch something like 4 hours/day of TV on average (statistic from my memory, probably only vaguely accurate). I'm on my PS3 for 2 or 3 hours a night quite regularly, with 6 hour stretches on the weekends not that unusual -- and there are a lot of gamers who play MUCH more than I do. There was a recent study about gaming and OCD. People get sucked in and spend job-like hours on their games all the time.
I hate to disagree, but this is nothing -- M$ knows their bread and butter is backward compatibility, so they can suck you in. Here's a better story -- In 1996, I installed and ran Windows NT 4.0 on an IBM PS/2 Model 80 that was build when Ronald Reagan was president -- 1987! It had a 1GB SCSI drive, 16MB of RAM (the maximum for that system), and a 386/25. Ran fine, only problem I had was I couldn't get it to recognize the XGA card I had as an XGA card, so I was stuck with setting it to be an 8514 -- 1024/768/16colors. This was my daily use computer through early '97, and I think I installed up to SP3 on it. Don't ask why I had such a crappy machine....
"The word 'nuclear' makes me nervous," said Randy Virgin of the Alaska Center for the Environment. "But we've long seen the problems with diesel, and I'm pretty excited about the prospect of a clean source of energy," he said. "It sounds very promising, but I'd approach it with extreme skepticism."
I'm not sure I really need to say more....
What I get from newspapers is detailed, long-form analysis -- and you really can only do that AFTER the news has had a chance to "settle" a little bit. CNN is interesting if I want to see what is happening now, but the Post or the Times is what I want if I am interested in figuring out the meaning of what has been happening over the last few days.
What is really special about print newspapers is that they are the most economically efficient means of providing long-format, detailed analysis.
It really comes down to the old "what's the fastest way to transfer a terabyte of data between two points 50 miles apart? A station wagon filled with DLT tapes."
I read the sunday paper from beginning to end every week (and skim the classifieds), which is a couple hundred pages of information, and I pay $1.50 for it. There is no breaking news, and all of this information could be gotten from the website, but I can't imagine trying to read that much copy on a computer screen -- especially with blinking animated ads all over the place. I certainly wouldn't want to print out all of those pages -- counting ink I think we're talking about 2 or 3 cents per page.
And this all comes down to why the Times online paper hasn't been very successful. Paying 50 cents for a print copy of a serious newspaper is a better deal than free registration to read the same information in a less convenient format.
I'm at a large media company, and we've had nothing but nightmares attempting to implement a purchased CMS. Along with the CMS, we also contracted with the vendor's recommended integrator to help us set the system up.
The integrators are competent, and the system is ok in a generic way, but we are not a "generic" shop -- and I don't think any shop really is. If we had simply set aside a few months for one of our in-house developers to build the system from scratch, based on our needs and environment, we would have exactly the sort of functions that we wanted, plus have easy extensibility. Instead, we've spent almost two years, and an enormous amount of money and manpower, on this system and we still have almost nothing in production that uses this system.
One reason that we were pushed to purchase this outside system was that the non-technical management was afraid that if one or two expert coders in our organization were to leave, the site would be in crisis from the loss of specialized information. However, our coders work in Perl -- there are lots of Perl coders around there (though our team is VERY good) -- and now we are dependent on people who are expert in this proprietary system; now we have a vastly reduced pool of people with the necessary expertise to hier from.
The worst part of the whole situation is that instead of making our work easier, it is actually slowing down the specific tasks that we have been able to do for quite some time. We spend so much time trying to massage this tool into doing the things we need to do that we are able to get much less done in general.
There is no real end in sight -- or if there is, it will be quite messy; our division has invested so much money and manpower into this project that we will look VERY bad if we simply abandon it.
Very depressing....