Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.
Actually, what's funny about that is that last year I bought some Activision Blizzard stock (ATVI on NASDAQ). I had a little leftover money, and I figured that with such a strong release schedule for 2010, there must have been room for growth in the stock. And guess what's happened - the stock is currently down from where I bought it, from about $11.70 at this point last year to about $11.00 today.
This despite the fact that ATVI has been profitable, has lots of cash on hand with no debt, has good releases in the pipe. They've even recently implemented a dividend to try and help with that staggering stock price (which will pay out around 1.5% of the stock price early next year, and I'm quite happy for it since it's at least a small ROI). On the one hand, the stock is largely following the market, so its price won't go up much until the larger market goes up, but the stock has also had a few tumbles apart from the market average that it never recovered from. What's crazy is that the price tumbled just after SC2 came out in part because of a company announcement stating that their quarter 2 earnings weren't going to beat expectations. Huge worldwide release of a long-awaited game apparently meant nothing against a lackluster earnings statement for a quarter with no major releases.
I'm sure your stock price thing was just sort of a flippant comment, but I wanted to mention this since it's been weird following the stock for a year. It's actually taught me a valuable lesson about buying individual stocks - you're told to trade in stocks where you know something about the company, something about the industry, so that you can predict how the price will move, but knowledge about the company doesn't always translate into knowledge about the market.
Man, I remember that we were talking about Cataclysm more than a year ago. It had already been in development for quite some time, it had already gone through a lot of changes. When I talked to other people making guesses about when Cataclysm would come out, we figured it would hit around February/March 2010, so as to not interfere with Starcraft 2's release.
Well, it's not interfering with SC2, that's for sure. December 2010 - sheesh! It amazes me more that I keep falling for it, thinking Blizzard products are coming along okay, then always having the release pushed back by a year and a half. I know the quality of their products usually makes up for it, but you'd think they'd reach a point where they'd just stop hinting at release dates for years in advance. Not to mention that it's strange that they're going to put this out in December - I wonder how Activision feels about having a new WoW release to compete with the rest of its Christmas schedule?
By the way, Diablo 3? Not until summer 2012. Calling it now.
Look, I detest astroturfing as much as the next person who values "truth", but anyone who cares to look, can see lies and half-truths for what they are. Detecting them, then, is not the problem
Let's not talk about the brigher people out there, the ones who always can see political doublespeak for what it is. Let's also not talk about the, uh, less bright people out there, the ones who are absolutely set in there ideas and eat up any reports that fit their viewpoints. Let's talk about Joe Average, the average voter.
Right now, there are PR people in Washington. There are people who are trained in psychology or sociology. There are people who have spent years running advertising campaigns. People who have large networks of contacts in the media, businesses, activist groups who can spread their messages when told. People who are smart enough to understand what the arguments are against the messages that they distribute and know how to counter them.
That is to say, there are people out there that are deliberately skilled in changing the mind of Joe Average. You can call it propaganda or messaging or outright lying, but these people know what they're doing. To say that everyone could stop this if they just stopped to think about it is asking everyone to be above average, a Lake Woebegone sort of thing. And even then, even if everyone figured out what the lies were and starting listening different, then these skilled PR people would figure out what the new average person is doing, and they would figure out how to change their minds in a new way.
Here I insert a reference to the parent's 5-digit ID number, with obligatory "get off my lawn" parallelisms.
...Then I recall my own ID number and imply that I read Slashdot for years before I ever started posting and would have had a lower digit had I simply bothered to register earlier.
This meme is starting to sound like an Old Spice parody.
Look at this article. This is the article you could have written if you had known anything about science. Look at the article that you wrote, now back at this article. I'm holding a peer review, signed by several interesting scientists in the field that you know nothing about. Look at the article you wrote, now back at this article, the peer review is full of discussion and criticism, the likes which you could not understand unless you had the briefest notion of how the review process works. The kind of discussion your article could have had if your article was written with any actual knowledge of science. Now look again. I'm on the internet.
To add to that, it's not like Japan doesn't have its own indie culture. My knowledge of the country is limited, but I can at least say off the top of my head that we've seen Cave Story and the Touhou Project series there, and I just followed a friend's suggestion to get a copy of Recettear off of Steam, a small Japanese RPG that was recently ported over. But of course, being smaller companies, we probably don't hear about every small title that gets released in another country.
When he does go serious, there's always this hint of frustration with the rest of the world to his voice - a sort of "why do I have to be the one to do this? Why has nobody else stepped up and done this?" tone.
That sums up much of what I feel about The Daily Show's coverage. When Stewart goes off the comic message and starts veering into actual punditry, it often carries this hint that he'd rather be doing comedy but he can't stand the fact that no one else is doing the real analysis of the issues. And I'd include his recent checking on Obama, comparing some of his speeches to what he'd said during his campaign, to fall into much the same category.
Of course, that's standard anywhere the internet allows you to leave comments on anything. People will post to things they know nothing about just for the sake of seeing their own post counts go up or for the small fame of seeing their screennames out there somewhere, or they'll post on something that even slightly leans to their biases in an attempt to just increase the population of their side represented in the posts underneath.
Last year, I lived in an apartment close to downtown Houston and shared a U-Verse connection with my roommates. When I moved out, I figured I'd ditch cable TV and splurge on a more expensive pipe. Turns out I couldn't do that, because neither U-Verse nor the newer, stronger Comcast connections were coming to the cheaper single-room apartment I'd chosen to move into on a different side of town. The best I could do was a 3Mdown / 384k up for about $40/month.
There's another facet of the duopoly here - there's only real competition in the more dense areas of the city. For the private companies, there's a point that it's not worth it to continually expand (insert note here about the sudden lack of expansion for Verizon's FiOS).
Japan has a weirder problem, actually. Their low birth rates are a combination of lots of things. There's a traditional/sexist notion that women who wait until they're 30 to get married aren't as desirable, and that women in the workforce aren't able to stay at home and be mothers, so a lot of women who stay in the workforce for years end up just never having children. There's more economic instability, so there are fewer men who feel able enough to start a family, especially if they leave their parents' houses and move into the city so that they don't have grandma and grandpa around to babysit and help raise kids. There's a rash of guys who see marriage as a losing deal, as a situation where you go to work for 50 hours a week and you kinda come home and see the kids and wife now and then but don't really participate, so why bother getting married in the first place?
I don't have any direct experience with Japanese culture, but those are some of the things that I hear repeated from friends who have lived in Japan or from articles written on the subject. In a nutshell, there's a lot of things that have changed in Japan over the past few decade that have added up to a serious dearth in married couples with children, and the government has been talking a lot lately about the problems that are coming on as a result of the country's low birth rate these past many years.
Why nobody ever seems to do a kamikaze political career, a one-term deal where he does all the damage to the system he can and goes back to his law practice, mystifies me. Unless that's what Alan Grayson's plan is. (No plan is actually visible at present.)
Excuse me for being cynical for a moment, but Grayson raises a lot of donations from progressives nationwide because of his harsh demeanor. So does Ron Paul... er, not from progressives, but from other people outside outside of his district that enjoy his views. How much do we know that guys like this aren't acting these parts just to broaded their base of donations?
I imagine the reason the summary didn't say he was a Democrat or not is because TFA doesn't say list his party affiliation. TFA mentions that he serves Gaston county, and Google confirms that the Senator Hoyle that represents Gaston is indeed a Democrat.
Not that I'm surprised that it was a Democrat, as we know that a lot of Democrats have terrible ties to the entertainment and communications industries. But I'm even less surprised by being told that the primary opponent to the public cable service was a state Senator. The more local that politics gets, the more small-fry, the less scrutiny that gets devoted to it. There aren't large independent teams of researchers or journalists devoted to finding out which state Congressman out of 300 is getting campaign contributions in exchange for legislative support. Now, let slip a small word of the tongue that gets quoted in the local paper and gets unleashed on the internet, and that could cause something to happen...
However, that's the direction that a lot of consumers look in. To many people, budgets = quality. If there's a movie put up by some tiny studio that didn't have any advertisements or famous actors, then you're not going to get many people out to see it. If there's a game put out that doesn't have state-of-the-art graphics and a flashy cover, then only so many gamers are going to end up having their moms pick it up for them at Gamestop.
This is the direction that movies have gone it, it's the direction the TV has gone in, it's the direction that music has gone in, because in the end, that's where the money is. It might be better to say - don't spend large budgets on games that aren't going to have a large general audience (a la APB).
In other words, we have a dialect of English that is generally spoken in the inner-city areas that have a predominance of crime, and we need someone who understands this dialect to help us make sure that we understand what's being talked about when we intercept criminals speaking that way. You dig?
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard gains about 20 new customers for every one that quits - so, please, continue to quit - my stock price keeps going up.
Actually, what's funny about that is that last year I bought some Activision Blizzard stock (ATVI on NASDAQ). I had a little leftover money, and I figured that with such a strong release schedule for 2010, there must have been room for growth in the stock. And guess what's happened - the stock is currently down from where I bought it, from about $11.70 at this point last year to about $11.00 today.
This despite the fact that ATVI has been profitable, has lots of cash on hand with no debt, has good releases in the pipe. They've even recently implemented a dividend to try and help with that staggering stock price (which will pay out around 1.5% of the stock price early next year, and I'm quite happy for it since it's at least a small ROI). On the one hand, the stock is largely following the market, so its price won't go up much until the larger market goes up, but the stock has also had a few tumbles apart from the market average that it never recovered from. What's crazy is that the price tumbled just after SC2 came out in part because of a company announcement stating that their quarter 2 earnings weren't going to beat expectations. Huge worldwide release of a long-awaited game apparently meant nothing against a lackluster earnings statement for a quarter with no major releases.
I'm sure your stock price thing was just sort of a flippant comment, but I wanted to mention this since it's been weird following the stock for a year. It's actually taught me a valuable lesson about buying individual stocks - you're told to trade in stocks where you know something about the company, something about the industry, so that you can predict how the price will move, but knowledge about the company doesn't always translate into knowledge about the market.
Have you ever thought that someone who might like an Action-Adventure-RPG such as WoW wouldn't like a twitch First Person Shooter like TF2?
:D
Maybe you should go back in time and tell this to the people funding APB.
Man, I remember that we were talking about Cataclysm more than a year ago. It had already been in development for quite some time, it had already gone through a lot of changes. When I talked to other people making guesses about when Cataclysm would come out, we figured it would hit around February/March 2010, so as to not interfere with Starcraft 2's release.
Well, it's not interfering with SC2, that's for sure. December 2010 - sheesh! It amazes me more that I keep falling for it, thinking Blizzard products are coming along okay, then always having the release pushed back by a year and a half. I know the quality of their products usually makes up for it, but you'd think they'd reach a point where they'd just stop hinting at release dates for years in advance. Not to mention that it's strange that they're going to put this out in December - I wonder how Activision feels about having a new WoW release to compete with the rest of its Christmas schedule?
By the way, Diablo 3? Not until summer 2012. Calling it now.
Look, I detest astroturfing as much as the next person who values "truth", but anyone who cares to look, can see lies and half-truths for what they are. Detecting them, then, is not the problem
Let's not talk about the brigher people out there, the ones who always can see political doublespeak for what it is. Let's also not talk about the, uh, less bright people out there, the ones who are absolutely set in there ideas and eat up any reports that fit their viewpoints. Let's talk about Joe Average, the average voter.
Right now, there are PR people in Washington. There are people who are trained in psychology or sociology. There are people who have spent years running advertising campaigns. People who have large networks of contacts in the media, businesses, activist groups who can spread their messages when told. People who are smart enough to understand what the arguments are against the messages that they distribute and know how to counter them.
That is to say, there are people out there that are deliberately skilled in changing the mind of Joe Average. You can call it propaganda or messaging or outright lying, but these people know what they're doing. To say that everyone could stop this if they just stopped to think about it is asking everyone to be above average, a Lake Woebegone sort of thing. And even then, even if everyone figured out what the lies were and starting listening different, then these skilled PR people would figure out what the new average person is doing, and they would figure out how to change their minds in a new way.
Is it any surprise that the people of the past are a mystery to the archaeologists of today?
[ ] In soviet russia the _____'s YOU /. dupe from last year
[ ] FTFY
[ ] link to
FTFY.
It would be nice to not have to haul that entire bag of 2,000 coins back to town. I might run into a random encounter before then...
Here I insert a reference to the parent's 5-digit ID number, with obligatory "get off my lawn" parallelisms.
...Then I recall my own ID number and imply that I read Slashdot for years before I ever started posting and would have had a lower digit had I simply bothered to register earlier.
This meme is starting to sound like an Old Spice parody.
Look at this article. This is the article you could have written if you had known anything about science. Look at the article that you wrote, now back at this article. I'm holding a peer review, signed by several interesting scientists in the field that you know nothing about. Look at the article you wrote, now back at this article, the peer review is full of discussion and criticism, the likes which you could not understand unless you had the briefest notion of how the review process works. The kind of discussion your article could have had if your article was written with any actual knowledge of science. Now look again. I'm on the internet.
To add to that, it's not like Japan doesn't have its own indie culture. My knowledge of the country is limited, but I can at least say off the top of my head that we've seen Cave Story and the Touhou Project series there, and I just followed a friend's suggestion to get a copy of Recettear off of Steam, a small Japanese RPG that was recently ported over. But of course, being smaller companies, we probably don't hear about every small title that gets released in another country.
When he does go serious, there's always this hint of frustration with the rest of the world to his voice - a sort of "why do I have to be the one to do this? Why has nobody else stepped up and done this?" tone.
That sums up much of what I feel about The Daily Show's coverage. When Stewart goes off the comic message and starts veering into actual punditry, it often carries this hint that he'd rather be doing comedy but he can't stand the fact that no one else is doing the real analysis of the issues. And I'd include his recent checking on Obama, comparing some of his speeches to what he'd said during his campaign, to fall into much the same category.
Of course, that's standard anywhere the internet allows you to leave comments on anything. People will post to things they know nothing about just for the sake of seeing their own post counts go up or for the small fame of seeing their screennames out there somewhere, or they'll post on something that even slightly leans to their biases in an attempt to just increase the population of their side represented in the posts underneath.
:V
Incidentally, mod me up.
Last year, I lived in an apartment close to downtown Houston and shared a U-Verse connection with my roommates. When I moved out, I figured I'd ditch cable TV and splurge on a more expensive pipe. Turns out I couldn't do that, because neither U-Verse nor the newer, stronger Comcast connections were coming to the cheaper single-room apartment I'd chosen to move into on a different side of town. The best I could do was a 3Mdown / 384k up for about $40/month.
There's another facet of the duopoly here - there's only real competition in the more dense areas of the city. For the private companies, there's a point that it's not worth it to continually expand (insert note here about the sudden lack of expansion for Verizon's FiOS).
Followed by, "Low-Digit Slashdotters Enjoy Reading Stories About the Failures of Other Websites."
They seem to think it's a problem.
Japan has a weirder problem, actually. Their low birth rates are a combination of lots of things. There's a traditional/sexist notion that women who wait until they're 30 to get married aren't as desirable, and that women in the workforce aren't able to stay at home and be mothers, so a lot of women who stay in the workforce for years end up just never having children. There's more economic instability, so there are fewer men who feel able enough to start a family, especially if they leave their parents' houses and move into the city so that they don't have grandma and grandpa around to babysit and help raise kids. There's a rash of guys who see marriage as a losing deal, as a situation where you go to work for 50 hours a week and you kinda come home and see the kids and wife now and then but don't really participate, so why bother getting married in the first place?
I don't have any direct experience with Japanese culture, but those are some of the things that I hear repeated from friends who have lived in Japan or from articles written on the subject. In a nutshell, there's a lot of things that have changed in Japan over the past few decade that have added up to a serious dearth in married couples with children, and the government has been talking a lot lately about the problems that are coming on as a result of the country's low birth rate these past many years.
I can't imagine why Japan is having a population problem with low birth rates.
Marcus always has ze right price! ...Wait, no, that's Borderlands.
Why nobody ever seems to do a kamikaze political career, a one-term deal where he does all the damage to the system he can and goes back to his law practice, mystifies me. Unless that's what Alan Grayson's plan is. (No plan is actually visible at present.)
Excuse me for being cynical for a moment, but Grayson raises a lot of donations from progressives nationwide because of his harsh demeanor. So does Ron Paul... er, not from progressives, but from other people outside outside of his district that enjoy his views. How much do we know that guys like this aren't acting these parts just to broaded their base of donations?
I prefer Lone Star, myself. I hear that if you pay extra, then when someone breaks into your house, they'll send MAGES after him!
I imagine the reason the summary didn't say he was a Democrat or not is because TFA doesn't say list his party affiliation. TFA mentions that he serves Gaston county, and Google confirms that the Senator Hoyle that represents Gaston is indeed a Democrat.
Not that I'm surprised that it was a Democrat, as we know that a lot of Democrats have terrible ties to the entertainment and communications industries. But I'm even less surprised by being told that the primary opponent to the public cable service was a state Senator. The more local that politics gets, the more small-fry, the less scrutiny that gets devoted to it. There aren't large independent teams of researchers or journalists devoted to finding out which state Congressman out of 300 is getting campaign contributions in exchange for legislative support. Now, let slip a small word of the tongue that gets quoted in the local paper and gets unleashed on the internet, and that could cause something to happen...
However, that's the direction that a lot of consumers look in. To many people, budgets = quality. If there's a movie put up by some tiny studio that didn't have any advertisements or famous actors, then you're not going to get many people out to see it. If there's a game put out that doesn't have state-of-the-art graphics and a flashy cover, then only so many gamers are going to end up having their moms pick it up for them at Gamestop.
This is the direction that movies have gone it, it's the direction the TV has gone in, it's the direction that music has gone in, because in the end, that's where the money is. It might be better to say - don't spend large budgets on games that aren't going to have a large general audience (a la APB).
As a foundation for a computer game it's a hopeless joke.
That's exactly how I felt about NWN1's attempt to cram 3rd edition rules into a Diablo-like computer game.
'ey man, if the truck is a rockin' then don't come a' knockin'.
In other words, we have a dialect of English that is generally spoken in the inner-city areas that have a predominance of crime, and we need someone who understands this dialect to help us make sure that we understand what's being talked about when we intercept criminals speaking that way. You dig?