When you are strapped for cash. Cheaper games will not increase sales: You will still spend your budget in games: It just will be 2 or 3 expensive games instead of 20 cheaper ones. In that case, what lowering prices does is help the publisher get some of your money when the product isn't good enough to be one of those 2 or 3 purchases.
Now, there's also the people that will pirate everything because they want to sample everything. Those guys will not pay more no matter the price, so there's nothing a publisher can do to get the sale, which is why counting every download as a lost sale is silly. Remove the download option, and the game will just not get played, period.
But the pricing problem just leads to people buying other games, instead of to piracy. I do not buy $60 games. Heck, there are very few games I'd buy for $50. So, instead of spending my money on, say, Skyrim. I buy last year's games for $10-$20, or packs of indie games for $5.
For piracy to be the winning option for me, it has to have a crushing advantage in service. Like, not being available in my country, and having to go through ridiculous hoops to get it to play in my hardware.
Nah.Yields keep going up, and protectionism would go to hell the minute you have anything that resembles severe food inflation that isn't caused by higher oil prices.
Africa and chunks of Asia still use agronomic tech that yields from 1/10th to 1/4th of what we get in the US and Europe. Some tech transfer and we'd still have plenty of production to go. Not to mention that population growth doesn't appear to be the problem we once thought: As populations become richer, they also realize that having 10 children that will survive into adulthood is, for your average family, nothing more than putting your kids at a disadvantage when compared to a family that has 2.
The thing is that, without the 22 player view, It's extremely hard to judge a QB or a coordinator's performance. The TV can't tell you if the quarterback stinks, the receivers stink, or the offensive coordinator stinks.
Now, if a guard is having a horrible game, TV will make it far easier to find out, but that's arguably a far less interesting question unless you've spent half of your young years as a lineman.
The camera will probably show the 11 offensive players on almost every snap, but you will very rarely see a safety for more than a quarter of a second. And after the ball is snapped, the camera is stuck in the pocket until a pass is thrown, so you won't know which specific route was ran. Heck, receivers on the other side of the pass probably won't be shown at all.
There are sports where the TV coverage is better than what you'd get on a mid-priced ticket on the stadium, as far as following the action goes. With NFL football, the only way of knowing what is really going on is to go to the stadium: The worst seat beats the TV coverage by a mile.
7 was almost a minor revision when compared to anything Microsoft is doing, or with 1.5 and 6. 7 actually looked promising at first, but pretty much every single feature that seemed like a game changer was delayed.
There's tons and tons of libraries out there that try to emulate what other languages can do, and do it with horrible style due to Java's approach to syntax. Just look at Guava Collections: A large array of workarounds for features that the language should support. But predicates that come with a penalty of 4 lines of noise aren't really any better than dealing with iteration yourself. Jumping through hoops to initialize a map in a concise way? Having to build a full inner class for a one use, one line comparator? Why is there no way to let the compiler create getters and setters upon request, instead of filling codebases with hundreds of lines of code that are sheer noise?
An actual programming assignment is a key part to the interviewing process of my current employer: A day or two before the interview, you are handed a relatively small codebase that uses all the base techs almost every project uses. The interviewee will be asked to add a feature to it. We measure if the candidate can actually solve the problem, if he paid any actual attention to the original codebase, and how he adds the feature: There's always more than one way to do it, and the code is weak on purpose, to provide the candidate opportunities for refactor. It has a very good success rate at finding people that can actually do the job.
The more you push into states, the closer you get to the current EU: Entities with very different laws and economic situations, joined by the hip of a shared currency.
Go the Ron Paul way, and the country splits apart in the next 20-30 years.
At least the jobs that require a degree that still exist pay decently. Take Spain, and its 20% unemployment: Most college graduates get jobs, in their field, making a thousand euros a month. Heck, those that speak decent English end up moving to the UK for better pay!
But a Ron Paul audit is silly, if just because his stated objectives are silly: He believes in hard money, and hard money is not, in any way, shape or form, what we need.
Ask a market monetarist, and they'll say that the issue is not that the fed is doing too much, but that it's doing too little, and in the wrong direction. That what we need is higher inflation, not less. But if we give Paul more of a voice, We'll see ourselves with high unemployment for another couple of decades.
If Ron Paul's economic agenda wasn't batshit crazy, he'd at least get some sympathy from the left. But as it is, he'll never go anywhere. I keep wishing for someone to take his views on immigration and foreign affairs, but tied to some modern economic ideas instead.
If you find UK IT salaries to be bad, make sure to check Spain's. Spaniards move to the UK because they get far better money. They start at 1000 euros a month, have little job security, and more experience doesn't increase rates all that much.
The gist of MMM is not anywhere near what you say. Even if we just wanted to cover that single chapter, the points is not just that you can't add more people to speed up a process, but that adding more people to a late project make the project go even later.
And still you'd be missing at least two chapters that are at least equally as important: -There Is No Silver Bullet -Plan To Throw One Away
Which are what makes Brook's little green book timeless, despite how badly some other chapters have aged. This is why MMM sits in my small bookshelf at work, along with Peopleware, Pragmatic Programmer, Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Go4 and Agile Software Development Principles, while K&R stays at home: More a piece of history than something I need today.
It's not an unholy nightmare: It actually relatively simple. Third party vendors will do most of the heavy lifting for you. I've worked at companies that charged tax in 50 states with no issues, very little actual code to support said taxes, and no more than a few extra clerks to handle giving the actual tax back to the states. Home Depot does it. Barnes and Noble does it. Catalog companies do it wherever they have presence. Why in the world can't Amazon do it?
It's an issue of not just having an even bigger advantage over B&Ms, but to make sure that no other online seller that manages to avoid collecting taxes gets an advantage over them.
Re:Data, Images, Binary builds etc.
on
The Rise of Git
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· Score: 1
Your release creation process should be part of your build, and any artifacts and dependencies that you have should come from a dependency repository that the build system can use. Making this kind of thing easy-ish is why people moved to Maven, despite its problems.
If I understand it correctly though, Apple doesn't just want 30% off of your purchases made through something you downloaded in the app store: If you create an account through your app downloading in the app store, Apple wants to claim 30% of what that customer pays for, ever. Charging someone 30% more than the rest because he happened to sign up to your service originally though an Appstore app doesn't seem to make much sense from a retailer POV.
Have you never played Nethack? Most levels are randomly generated, and yet it's definitely a game. It is theoretically possible to turn Minecraft into a game.
Will it only take 2-3 more months to get there? I doubt it, but I'd consider it perfectly doable in 6 months.
Now, the saddest thing about Minecraft is that notch has pretty much sat for monts, doing things that didn't in any way, shape or form make Minecraft take a serious direction: If Minecraft was supposed to be a box of legos, he should have put less emphasis on random mobs. If it was supposed to be a game, it could have started to add more game-like features. But no, Terraria had to be released, just to prove that one can build something minecraft-like that is also a game, before Notch woke up and actually started working on making the game something more than a box of potential.
It's not about one person paying a higher sales tax rate than another, but the fact that the total percentage of your income that get hits by the sales tax has a lot to do with how much you earn. A minimum wage earner will have trouble saving, so most of his income is hit by sales tax. The more you save, the less tax you pay, and given that it's easier to save the more money you have, in essence its effect is not all that different from an income tax that asks for less the more money you have.
By your idea of fairness, a 95% tax surcharge on cars over $25K would also affect everyone the same way. It just happens that the people that don't own cars and those that couldn't afford a car with that base price would not get a tax hike. So really, it's an extremely uneven task under the guise of fairness.
But there's plenty of companies that have very little trouble doing this: I currently work for one. We sell online, but we have presence in every state, so we collect taxes in every state. Not only that, but we have retail stores, which deal with specific local taxes built on top.
As it happens, there are databases that you can purchase that have all the tax information you could possibly want, and all you have to do is import their updates when they happen: You can call a method that hands you the right tax rate based on the merchandise type and location to ship it to. The right accounts in the general ledger are updated so that we know how much we owe to each state/municipality, and then AP cuts the states the necessary checks.
Yes, it'd me madness to have to track of it all by yourself, but at that size, you don't have to. And Amazon is definitely large enough to handle that complexity without ruining them: The only question is whether they are legally obligated to collect the taxes or not.
For all but the largest operations though, you need no code audits or anything of the sort: Even a chain with a couple dozen stores won't even be asked to do more than fill a questionnaire claiming to follow PCI standards, which as far as software go, aren't all that difficult to follow, especially if you leave most of the credit card handling to a third party, so you aren't stuck having to deal with securing encryption keys.
This holds true in a simple company that sells one product, or a few unrelated products. A large conglomerate like a modern telco is quite different though.
Take, say, AT&T and internet access using fiber. If all they did was sell consumers the bandwidth, they could beat what any reseller would do, no questions. However, they don't just sell connections: They try to sell cable TV over fiber. Broadband internet access competes with TV directly. Make the connection too good, and a competitor that sells just internet TV will make AT&T's TV service a loser. Heck, I know quite a few people that would abandon Cable TV if our good friends at HBO and Showtime supported individual subscriptions over internet. Offering too good an internet service too cheaply, is something the company as a whole can't afford, even if it would maximize their fiber internet sales: They make more money by offering a higher price.
Allowing someone that offers no TV services to reuse the same line at cost would make those that only want internet access have better prices, either by making AT&T have to match the competition in internet only prices, or by having a competitor who has no interest in selling bundles really offer their best possible price on the single product they sell.
Stop competition, and nothing stops this large providers to overcharge one service to make a bundle look more appealing.
Not so interesting really: In a DS, touching the screen and using the buttons at the same time is extremely uncomfortable, and yet it's not been a problem at all, because it's really an either/or situation: They'll make games that are controlled my the touch screen, where you are expected to hold the console on your lap/table, and games where you'll use the buttons and the analog stick, where you'll barely ever use the touch screen. The most they'll ask for is one hand dedicated to buttons, and another to the touch screen, and I doubt that'd be all that popular.
The N64 also had more buttons that one could use with two hands, and it was never a problem: It's not as if control schemes that require 8+ buttons, two analog sticks and a touch screen will ever be all that popular no matter how you make the system: If anything, modern console games use too many inputs already.
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When you are strapped for cash. Cheaper games will not increase sales: You will still spend your budget in games: It just will be 2 or 3 expensive games instead of 20 cheaper ones. In that case, what lowering prices does is help the publisher get some of your money when the product isn't good enough to be one of those 2 or 3 purchases.
Now, there's also the people that will pirate everything because they want to sample everything. Those guys will not pay more no matter the price, so there's nothing a publisher can do to get the sale, which is why counting every download as a lost sale is silly. Remove the download option, and the game will just not get played, period.
But the pricing problem just leads to people buying other games, instead of to piracy. I do not buy $60 games. Heck, there are very few games I'd buy for $50. So, instead of spending my money on, say, Skyrim. I buy last year's games for $10-$20, or packs of indie games for $5.
For piracy to be the winning option for me, it has to have a crushing advantage in service. Like, not being available in my country, and having to go through ridiculous hoops to get it to play in my hardware.
Nah.Yields keep going up, and protectionism would go to hell the minute you have anything that resembles severe food inflation that isn't caused by higher oil prices.
Africa and chunks of Asia still use agronomic tech that yields from 1/10th to 1/4th of what we get in the US and Europe. Some tech transfer and we'd still have plenty of production to go. Not to mention that population growth doesn't appear to be the problem we once thought: As populations become richer, they also realize that having 10 children that will survive into adulthood is, for your average family, nothing more than putting your kids at a disadvantage when compared to a family that has 2.
The thing is that, without the 22 player view, It's extremely hard to judge a QB or a coordinator's performance. The TV can't tell you if the quarterback stinks, the receivers stink, or the offensive coordinator stinks.
Now, if a guard is having a horrible game, TV will make it far easier to find out, but that's arguably a far less interesting question unless you've spent half of your young years as a lineman.
The camera will probably show the 11 offensive players on almost every snap, but you will very rarely see a safety for more than a quarter of a second. And after the ball is snapped, the camera is stuck in the pocket until a pass is thrown, so you won't know which specific route was ran. Heck, receivers on the other side of the pass probably won't be shown at all.
There are sports where the TV coverage is better than what you'd get on a mid-priced ticket on the stadium, as far as following the action goes. With NFL football, the only way of knowing what is really going on is to go to the stadium: The worst seat beats the TV coverage by a mile.
7 was almost a minor revision when compared to anything Microsoft is doing, or with 1.5 and 6. 7 actually looked promising at first, but pretty much every single feature that seemed like a game changer was delayed.
There's tons and tons of libraries out there that try to emulate what other languages can do, and do it with horrible style due to Java's approach to syntax. Just look at Guava Collections: A large array of workarounds for features that the language should support. But predicates that come with a penalty of 4 lines of noise aren't really any better than dealing with iteration yourself. Jumping through hoops to initialize a map in a concise way? Having to build a full inner class for a one use, one line comparator? Why is there no way to let the compiler create getters and setters upon request, instead of filling codebases with hundreds of lines of code that are sheer noise?
An actual programming assignment is a key part to the interviewing process of my current employer: A day or two before the interview, you are handed a relatively small codebase that uses all the base techs almost every project uses. The interviewee will be asked to add a feature to it. We measure if the candidate can actually solve the problem, if he paid any actual attention to the original codebase, and how he adds the feature: There's always more than one way to do it, and the code is weak on purpose, to provide the candidate opportunities for refactor. It has a very good success rate at finding people that can actually do the job.
The more you push into states, the closer you get to the current EU: Entities with very different laws and economic situations, joined by the hip of a shared currency.
Go the Ron Paul way, and the country splits apart in the next 20-30 years.
At least the jobs that require a degree that still exist pay decently. Take Spain, and its 20% unemployment: Most college graduates get jobs, in their field, making a thousand euros a month. Heck, those that speak decent English end up moving to the UK for better pay!
But a Ron Paul audit is silly, if just because his stated objectives are silly: He believes in hard money, and hard money is not, in any way, shape or form, what we need.
Ask a market monetarist, and they'll say that the issue is not that the fed is doing too much, but that it's doing too little, and in the wrong direction. That what we need is higher inflation, not less. But if we give Paul more of a voice, We'll see ourselves with high unemployment for another couple of decades.
If Ron Paul's economic agenda wasn't batshit crazy, he'd at least get some sympathy from the left. But as it is, he'll never go anywhere. I keep wishing for someone to take his views on immigration and foreign affairs, but tied to some modern economic ideas instead.
I'd take Microsoft over Hermes Conrad at a limbo competition
If she breast fed for over a couple of months, you'd have been better off buying a pump and reselling it in the end.
If you find UK IT salaries to be bad, make sure to check Spain's. Spaniards move to the UK because they get far better money. They start at 1000 euros a month, have little job security, and more experience doesn't increase rates all that much.
The gist of MMM is not anywhere near what you say. Even if we just wanted to cover that single chapter, the points is not just that you can't add more people to speed up a process, but that adding more people to a late project make the project go even later.
And still you'd be missing at least two chapters that are at least equally as important:
-There Is No Silver Bullet
-Plan To Throw One Away
Which are what makes Brook's little green book timeless, despite how badly some other chapters have aged. This is why MMM sits in my small bookshelf at work, along with Peopleware, Pragmatic Programmer, Lessons Learned in Software Testing, Go4 and Agile Software Development Principles, while K&R stays at home: More a piece of history than something I need today.
It's not an unholy nightmare: It actually relatively simple. Third party vendors will do most of the heavy lifting for you. I've worked at companies that charged tax in 50 states with no issues, very little actual code to support said taxes, and no more than a few extra clerks to handle giving the actual tax back to the states. Home Depot does it. Barnes and Noble does it. Catalog companies do it wherever they have presence. Why in the world can't Amazon do it?
It's an issue of not just having an even bigger advantage over B&Ms, but to make sure that no other online seller that manages to avoid collecting taxes gets an advantage over them.
Your release creation process should be part of your build, and any artifacts and dependencies that you have should come from a dependency repository that the build system can use. Making this kind of thing easy-ish is why people moved to Maven, despite its problems.
If I understand it correctly though, Apple doesn't just want 30% off of your purchases made through something you downloaded in the app store: If you create an account through your app downloading in the app store, Apple wants to claim 30% of what that customer pays for, ever. Charging someone 30% more than the rest because he happened to sign up to your service originally though an Appstore app doesn't seem to make much sense from a retailer POV.
Have you never played Nethack? Most levels are randomly generated, and yet it's definitely a game. It is theoretically possible to turn Minecraft into a game.
Will it only take 2-3 more months to get there? I doubt it, but I'd consider it perfectly doable in 6 months.
Now, the saddest thing about Minecraft is that notch has pretty much sat for monts, doing things that didn't in any way, shape or form make Minecraft take a serious direction: If Minecraft was supposed to be a box of legos, he should have put less emphasis on random mobs. If it was supposed to be a game, it could have started to add more game-like features. But no, Terraria had to be released, just to prove that one can build something minecraft-like that is also a game, before Notch woke up and actually started working on making the game something more than a box of potential.
It's not about one person paying a higher sales tax rate than another, but the fact that the total percentage of your income that get hits by the sales tax has a lot to do with how much you earn. A minimum wage earner will have trouble saving, so most of his income is hit by sales tax. The more you save, the less tax you pay, and given that it's easier to save the more money you have, in essence its effect is not all that different from an income tax that asks for less the more money you have.
By your idea of fairness, a 95% tax surcharge on cars over $25K would also affect everyone the same way. It just happens that the people that don't own cars and those that couldn't afford a car with that base price would not get a tax hike. So really, it's an extremely uneven task under the guise of fairness.
The sales tax just punishes those who can't save.
But there's plenty of companies that have very little trouble doing this: I currently work for one. We sell online, but we have presence in every state, so we collect taxes in every state. Not only that, but we have retail stores, which deal with specific local taxes built on top.
As it happens, there are databases that you can purchase that have all the tax information you could possibly want, and all you have to do is import their updates when they happen: You can call a method that hands you the right tax rate based on the merchandise type and location to ship it to. The right accounts in the general ledger are updated so that we know how much we owe to each state/municipality, and then AP cuts the states the necessary checks.
Yes, it'd me madness to have to track of it all by yourself, but at that size, you don't have to. And Amazon is definitely large enough to handle that complexity without ruining them: The only question is whether they are legally obligated to collect the taxes or not.
For all but the largest operations though, you need no code audits or anything of the sort: Even a chain with a couple dozen stores won't even be asked to do more than fill a questionnaire claiming to follow PCI standards, which as far as software go, aren't all that difficult to follow, especially if you leave most of the credit card handling to a third party, so you aren't stuck having to deal with securing encryption keys.
And then they come back into the country, again, because they'd rather get a semblance of pay as illegal than get rights and no job back home.
Which makes sense for the game's sandbox mode. But survival? survival has no meat: it's sandbox with minor annoyances every so often.
This holds true in a simple company that sells one product, or a few unrelated products. A large conglomerate like a modern telco is quite different though.
Take, say, AT&T and internet access using fiber. If all they did was sell consumers the bandwidth, they could beat what any reseller would do, no questions. However, they don't just sell connections: They try to sell cable TV over fiber. Broadband internet access competes with TV directly. Make the connection too good, and a competitor that sells just internet TV will make AT&T's TV service a loser. Heck, I know quite a few people that would abandon Cable TV if our good friends at HBO and Showtime supported individual subscriptions over internet. Offering too good an internet service too cheaply, is something the company as a whole can't afford, even if it would maximize their fiber internet sales: They make more money by offering a higher price.
Allowing someone that offers no TV services to reuse the same line at cost would make those that only want internet access have better prices, either by making AT&T have to match the competition in internet only prices, or by having a competitor who has no interest in selling bundles really offer their best possible price on the single product they sell.
Stop competition, and nothing stops this large providers to overcharge one service to make a bundle look more appealing.
Not so interesting really: In a DS, touching the screen and using the buttons at the same time is extremely uncomfortable, and yet it's not been a problem at all, because it's really an either/or situation: They'll make games that are controlled my the touch screen, where you are expected to hold the console on your lap/table, and games where you'll use the buttons and the analog stick, where you'll barely ever use the touch screen. The most they'll ask for is one hand dedicated to buttons, and another to the touch screen, and I doubt that'd be all that popular.
The N64 also had more buttons that one could use with two hands, and it was never a problem: It's not as if control schemes that require 8+ buttons, two analog sticks and a touch screen will ever be all that popular no matter how you make the system: If anything, modern console games use too many inputs already.