FYI January is the traditional dumping ground for studios. Films that studios believe will be big open in November-December to cash in on the holiday crowds. Smaller films that don't have mass appeal, but appeal more towards the "arthouse" crowds, open in late December in order to be in contention for Oscar consideration, then they are (hopefully) released big in February to March with ad campaigns trumpeting their Oscar nominations. Films that are neither arty nor will be popular open in January.
The process assumes the price of corn will be relatively cheap. What's going to happen over the next few years as many new ethanol plants come on line and suck up any surplus corn?
There's also the fact that ethanol plants use *lots* of water. Many of them are being built in the midwest, where there's lots of corn, but unfortunately there's often not a lot of water.
Since there are so many ethanol plants in the pipeline, I'll be surprised if everything in the planning stages gets completed. Out here in the midwest, most local communities see an ethanol plant as a good source of jobs so there's still a big push to build them. It will be interesting to see what happens to the industry when the laws of supply and demand really start to kick in.
I can understand an investigation that specifically centers around sales in the US, but it sounds like this has an international side to it. I thought that US regulators couldn't do much internationally to cartels in industries like shipping, diamonds or oil (doesn't OPEC do this very thing by manipulating the availability of oil?).
From the Slashdot post: Looks like FF2 is already outnumbering FF 1.5, while IE7 is having a hard time to find followers.
From the linked article: For isc.sans.org (which is probably not your typical site), 50% of Firefox users already use Firefox 2.0, and 23% of Internet Explorer users use MSIE 7.0.
The linked article is only talking about users of isc.sans.org, and that includes the table in the article (the data comes from Google Analytics, but it's only for isc.sans.org.
Jeesh. Does anyone bother to read the articles anymore?
I live in Kansas, where there are a couple of ethanol plants either under construction or in the planning stages. Ethanol plants require something like 200 gallons of water a minute to function, which is a huge amount of water. Some posters above have mentioned desalination to get water, but they're missing the point of ethanol plants: to put the plant near corn production, i.e. away from the coasts. The vast majority of the water in Kansas comes from a single aquifer, and there's a lot of debate about how long before the aquifer will run dry. It's not always an issue of having good water; sometimes it's an issue of having any water at all.
This is kind of OT, but a friend in an archeology program told me once that Chinese interpretations of artifacts are a little unusual sometimes. An American team in China dug up a village from a few thousand years ago that was fairly typical, including a large structure in the middle of the village. The typical interpretation is that the building was where the "big man" of the village lived, i.e. the guy who ran the village. Villages everywhere have these buildings.
The Chinese government's interpretation of it was that it was a communal house where many people lived and worked, thereby proving that Communism existed in China thousands of years before Marx and Mao.
Isn't the whole concept of time a human-centered activity, meaning that concepts relating to time change over time? The clock might be able to tick off the seconds over 10,000 years, but will it be able to reset itself when the switch date of Daylight Savings Time (in the US) changes in a year or so? What about future changes of that sort? TFA is actually pretty fascinating but it sounds like the inventor paid much more attention to engineering problems than to human factors relating to the concept of time.
I know it's par for the course (or at least thought to be) but isn't selling a product below cost an anticompetitive practice (dumping)?
No, I think it's more complex than that. I can't remember what other issues are involved (comparison to other products in the category?) but it's not just selling below cost. Also, don't forget that MS is an American company, competing against two Japanese companies. Allegations of dumping are almost always nationalistic/political, and, even if it was dumping, the FTC would definitely look the other way in a situation like this.
Isn't the source for Doom open? It would be amusing to hack Open Office to include it as an Easter egg. Heh, OO rox because it has an FPS! Take that, Excel!
Actually, it's the broadcast networks who will suffer if the MPAA takes its ball and goes home. I as a consumer have lots of opportunities to see, say, Spiderman 2 long before it comes to TV.
Of course, it's doubtful that the MPAA would ever carry through on this. Broadcast TV is 1) a significant revenue stream, and 2) far enough behind every other stream in terms of time that it doesn't matter all the much if the movie is copied like crazy. By the time a big movie hits broadcast TV, most other revenue streams have been exhausted.
Rather than calculating this forward in time, didn't someone trace this backwards in time, i.e. that you can see it halving every 18 months going back to the nineteenth century? I can't find a link on Google but I swear I saw it somewhere...
Power and control. Microsoft has shown that it is willing to give up short-term profits in order to dominate a market. They only start turning the screws after the competition has been destroyed.
I agree with you, but I don't think that will work so well in the console market. Even if they deliver backwards compatibility in their next gen console, the playing field is much more open than in the OS market. Even if they win with this next round of consoles and start screwing everyone (including 3rd party devs) over, with the following gen Sony (and I guarantee you Sony will still be around) can appeal to those same 3rd party devs and have a good shot.
Don't forget, unlike with Windows OS, every new generation requires the customer buy a completely new set of hardware, and unless they deliver backwards compatibility there's not that much reason for a customer to stick with the XBox unless the customer actually likes the product. MS won't have the lock-in they have in the OS market.
This MMORPG uses the first ever player-generated mission system...
It'll be interesting to see which way it goes with the player-generated missions. On the one hand it could make for richer content, and on the other hand it could be that the company just isn't budgeting much for content ("Hey, let's have the players make up the content! Just think how much money we'll save!").
This is great and really whets the appetite for the next gen of consoles, but where is the current generation? I finally decided to buy a PS2 (or PSTwo) and everywhere I look, stores seem to be out of them (and XBoxs, and GCs). Anyone know what the deal is? Did they sell out of everything over the holidays?
I wonder how much time is spent combatting spyware?
Because MS is such a geek culture, I'd be interested in finding out if what the social reprecussions are for someone finding malware on their system. If you consider yourself to be an alpha geek, are you really going to be calling the helpdesk about a computer issue that you brought on yourself?
And I generally agree with your points, but there is one caveat:
Convergence - my pet theory is that the PSP is not designed simply to take on the DS in the game space, but also the iPod/MP3 player market, the nascent portable video market, and some of the wireless gadget market.
This cuts both ways. If it's competing in all of those markets, what does it actually do, and do well? What will consumers perceive it to do? If push comes to shove in the features department, what will Sony keep/drop? It's easy to sell your unit as a DVD player and get lots of sales that way; it's much harder to sell your unit as a Swiss Army Knife that also happens to play games.
Your point about sexiness is good, and it leads to the fact that the PS2 is generally seen as an adult gaming box while the GC is pigeonholed as something for the kiddies. I expect the same thing to happen with the PSP/DS, with lots of help from Sony marketing.
Auteur is French for author. Back in the 60's, French film critics got into the idea that a film could be seen as a product of a single person, not a group of people, and that person was usually the director. Today, we talk about a Quentin Tarentino film or an Alfred Hitchcock film, but back then it was unusual to think of a single person influencing a film with a particular style. So the author of the linked article is using auteur to mean a single person who influences a game with their style, like Peter Molyneux.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI January is the traditional dumping ground for studios. Films that studios believe will be big open in November-December to cash in on the holiday crowds. Smaller films that don't have mass appeal, but appeal more towards the "arthouse" crowds, open in late December in order to be in contention for Oscar consideration, then they are (hopefully) released big in February to March with ad campaigns trumpeting their Oscar nominations. Films that are neither arty nor will be popular open in January.
Congratulations Uwe!
The process assumes the price of corn will be relatively cheap. What's going to happen over the next few years as many new ethanol plants come on line and suck up any surplus corn?
There's also the fact that ethanol plants use *lots* of water. Many of them are being built in the midwest, where there's lots of corn, but unfortunately there's often not a lot of water.
Since there are so many ethanol plants in the pipeline, I'll be surprised if everything in the planning stages gets completed. Out here in the midwest, most local communities see an ethanol plant as a good source of jobs so there's still a big push to build them. It will be interesting to see what happens to the industry when the laws of supply and demand really start to kick in.
I can understand an investigation that specifically centers around sales in the US, but it sounds like this has an international side to it. I thought that US regulators couldn't do much internationally to cartels in industries like shipping, diamonds or oil (doesn't OPEC do this very thing by manipulating the availability of oil?).
From the Slashdot post:
Looks like FF2 is already outnumbering FF 1.5, while IE7 is having a hard time to find followers.
From the linked article:
For isc.sans.org (which is probably not your typical site), 50% of Firefox users already use Firefox 2.0, and 23% of Internet Explorer users use MSIE 7.0.
The linked article is only talking about users of isc.sans.org, and that includes the table in the article (the data comes from Google Analytics, but it's only for isc.sans.org.
Jeesh. Does anyone bother to read the articles anymore?
I live in Kansas, where there are a couple of ethanol plants either under construction or in the planning stages. Ethanol plants require something like 200 gallons of water a minute to function, which is a huge amount of water. Some posters above have mentioned desalination to get water, but they're missing the point of ethanol plants: to put the plant near corn production, i.e. away from the coasts. The vast majority of the water in Kansas comes from a single aquifer, and there's a lot of debate about how long before the aquifer will run dry. It's not always an issue of having good water; sometimes it's an issue of having any water at all.
This is kind of OT, but a friend in an archeology program told me once that Chinese interpretations of artifacts are a little unusual sometimes. An American team in China dug up a village from a few thousand years ago that was fairly typical, including a large structure in the middle of the village. The typical interpretation is that the building was where the "big man" of the village lived, i.e. the guy who ran the village. Villages everywhere have these buildings.
The Chinese government's interpretation of it was that it was a communal house where many people lived and worked, thereby proving that Communism existed in China thousands of years before Marx and Mao.
Isn't the whole concept of time a human-centered activity, meaning that concepts relating to time change over time? The clock might be able to tick off the seconds over 10,000 years, but will it be able to reset itself when the switch date of Daylight Savings Time (in the US) changes in a year or so? What about future changes of that sort? TFA is actually pretty fascinating but it sounds like the inventor paid much more attention to engineering problems than to human factors relating to the concept of time.
Although I'm sure that Google could do this, its not clear that Google will want to do this. Where's the money?
I would think the photos of Bill Gates foaming at the mouth would be pay enough.
I know it's par for the course (or at least thought to be) but isn't selling a product below cost an anticompetitive practice (dumping)?
No, I think it's more complex than that. I can't remember what other issues are involved (comparison to other products in the category?) but it's not just selling below cost. Also, don't forget that MS is an American company, competing against two Japanese companies. Allegations of dumping are almost always nationalistic/political, and, even if it was dumping, the FTC would definitely look the other way in a situation like this.
Sounds useful. This is an example of why it's good to have women in engineering/CS programs. Would a guy ever have thought of this?
Isn't the source for Doom open? It would be amusing to hack Open Office to include it as an Easter egg. Heh, OO rox because it has an FPS! Take that, Excel!
Of course, it's doubtful that the MPAA would ever carry through on this. Broadcast TV is 1) a significant revenue stream, and 2) far enough behind every other stream in terms of time that it doesn't matter all the much if the movie is copied like crazy. By the time a big movie hits broadcast TV, most other revenue streams have been exhausted.
I'm posting from Kansas, so the answer would be no where.
Heh. Maybe they should go back to the two brothers working in their garage process.
Rather than calculating this forward in time, didn't someone trace this backwards in time, i.e. that you can see it halving every 18 months going back to the nineteenth century? I can't find a link on Google but I swear I saw it somewhere...
I agree with you, but I don't think that will work so well in the console market. Even if they deliver backwards compatibility in their next gen console, the playing field is much more open than in the OS market. Even if they win with this next round of consoles and start screwing everyone (including 3rd party devs) over, with the following gen Sony (and I guarantee you Sony will still be around) can appeal to those same 3rd party devs and have a good shot.
Don't forget, unlike with Windows OS, every new generation requires the customer buy a completely new set of hardware, and unless they deliver backwards compatibility there's not that much reason for a customer to stick with the XBox unless the customer actually likes the product. MS won't have the lock-in they have in the OS market.
It'll be interesting to see which way it goes with the player-generated missions. On the one hand it could make for richer content, and on the other hand it could be that the company just isn't budgeting much for content ("Hey, let's have the players make up the content! Just think how much money we'll save!").
This is great and really whets the appetite for the next gen of consoles, but where is the current generation? I finally decided to buy a PS2 (or PSTwo) and everywhere I look, stores seem to be out of them (and XBoxs, and GCs). Anyone know what the deal is? Did they sell out of everything over the holidays?
from your Windows 2000, XP or 2003 machine.
Or maybe not.
Heh. I'll bet he and his coworkers in the mailroom had a good laugh about the wide-eyed kid he met this weekend.
Because MS is such a geek culture, I'd be interested in finding out if what the social reprecussions are for someone finding malware on their system. If you consider yourself to be an alpha geek, are you really going to be calling the helpdesk about a computer issue that you brought on yourself?
Convergence - my pet theory is that the PSP is not designed simply to take on the DS in the game space, but also the iPod/MP3 player market, the nascent portable video market, and some of the wireless gadget market.
This cuts both ways. If it's competing in all of those markets, what does it actually do, and do well? What will consumers perceive it to do? If push comes to shove in the features department, what will Sony keep/drop? It's easy to sell your unit as a DVD player and get lots of sales that way; it's much harder to sell your unit as a Swiss Army Knife that also happens to play games.
Your point about sexiness is good, and it leads to the fact that the PS2 is generally seen as an adult gaming box while the GC is pigeonholed as something for the kiddies. I expect the same thing to happen with the PSP/DS, with lots of help from Sony marketing.
Auteur is French for author. Back in the 60's, French film critics got into the idea that a film could be seen as a product of a single person, not a group of people, and that person was usually the director. Today, we talk about a Quentin Tarentino film or an Alfred Hitchcock film, but back then it was unusual to think of a single person influencing a film with a particular style. So the author of the linked article is using auteur to mean a single person who influences a game with their style, like Peter Molyneux.
Heh. Makes me think there should be a SW-Grand Theft Auto crossover...
Stop it...you're making me misty-eyed for the past. Oh, for those glory days...