I quit shopping at Gamestop because they opened many of their boxes. Since they are selling new games along with used for consoles, how do you know which you will end up with? Case in point, I purchased a Nintendo DS game for my daughter. Christmas Day when she opened it up and put it in her DS there were saved games on it already - it had obviously been used. When I bought it, I mentioned that the box was not sealed, and they claimed that they had to do that else they would get shoplifted. I replied that other stores have less employees in the store but don't have their games opened and behind the counter.
Another time in a different Gamestop my son bought the PS2 game Devil May Cry, again the package was open and the had the discs behind the counter. A few days later while playing it asks him to insert Disc 2, which was not in the box. We went back to the store and they still had the 2nd disc.
In both cases they made good, but after those experiences they lost me as a customer, and I had been shopping there nearly every week since they were Babbages. It sounds like they have still haven't learned not to open packages.
In this case it's even worse - don't they have to break the security seal to get the coupon? In the old days they could just re-shrink wrap it, these days most games come with a security seal as well.
Many of the people I knew that bought the previous games with this DRM were not aware of it. Now after being burned once, their awareness of DRM has been raised. They won't get as many unsuspecting customers this time.
1) I like having a phone in most every room instead of having to always carry one around
2) I get a LOT better international calling rate with my PSTN provider than their cell phone international rates, even with the same carrier
3) My DSL broadband line uses the same wiring. It is still going to have to be maintained even if the PSTN goes away
4) Ever try to make a call with a cell in a regional emergency such as an earthquake, tornado, etc? No cells available. The PSTN lines get full too at such times, but not usually to the extent that the cells do. Local weather events can disrupt cell coverage. Once during a hurricane I lost electricity for 2 days, yet never lost my telephone signal.
5) Quality. In nearly 40 years of phone service, I can't remember a single dropped call, where that is a weekly occurrence on my work cell phone. While I have had some occasional bleedover and humming at times on my regular phone, the quality of the sound is still a lot better than my cell.
I resisted for a long time. I read a lot of books and liked the feel of a real one. I can drop it from 2 meters high and just pick it up and find my place again. I did not like the idea of books having DRM and not being able to loan them to a few close friends or trade them in for more at a used book store or donate them to the library. Then there was the whole George Orwell fiasco with Amazon, quite ironic that 1984 was one of the remotely deleted titles.
What finally convinced me to switch to e-books was the adjustable font size. The older I got, the harder it was for me to read many of the books I wanted to, and large print editions are not available for every title. With the Kindle I was able to increase the font on any of my purchased books to the size that was most comfortable for me to read. I still buy technical books with lots of diagrams and illustrations that do not translate well to e-book formats but most of my reading for pleasure is now done with an e-book reader.
You are right, the quote was from the blog post, which took the figures to mean that more bandwidth is used rather than increased viewing, but the Sandvine article doesn't say that increased viewing is the reason for the disparity, just that 360 Netrlix users use double the amount of PC users.
From Sandvine:
Contrast Figure 4 with Figure 5, which shows the average daily data consumption of a Netflix user who uses the service
via an Xbox 360. On average, a Netflix subscriber using an Xbox 360 has about twice the daily consumption as an
average Netflix subscriber (suggesting 80 GB per month).
I would say that more people do watch it though an other device whether it be a roku, 360, or apple tv than a PC so the numbers may be skewed.
From the article:
Users that stream data through a device other than a PC – an Xbox or other game console, for example – use twice that amount of bandwidth for the same content.
Why would it take more bandwidth to stream the same content? Do they use a different streaming video format or codec for the consoles? The article and the linked pdf makes that statement but do not explain why.
An improved digital marketplace might be something the developers want, but as long as your purchases are tied to a single machine and lost when that machine has a hardware failure, I am not going to buy from there. That is the reason I haven't bought anything from their current marketplace.
AT&T has a page where they show your usage. Last month I was at 179 GBs, but I did buy several games from Steam sales (about 36 GB total), more from Good Old Games, and watched all 65 episodes of Weeds on Netflix (approximately an hour a night for a month) along with my regular surfing, updates for multiple devices, and other downloading. I probably was less than 150 GB myself, but it doesn't take into consideration what my wife and kids use, which is quite a lot as well. It's not hard to run up against the cap in my opinion, especially once you start streaming video.
The way AT&T is measuring it also adds in the protocol overhead, which can be 10% or more. They measure it at the DSLAM, not the customer modem. For instance they show me uploading 10 GB and downloading 97 GB this month. The only uploads I have did for the entire month is some emails that might contain a picture or two, nothing with a large file attachment and I do not use any P2P software that would be uploading. The previous month the overhead that they measured was enough to put me over their 150 GB limit for DSL.
They need to improve their online usage tool too. It is only updated weekly until you go over their limit so you really don't have a precise way to measure daily usage, other than my router which doesn't match what they say I use.
For the very reason that you noted, Amazon has allowed this feature. People were going to other e-readers because of the Kindle lacking library lending. Now they are taking away one of the main reasons to buy from the competition. It may be too late for you, but there are a lot more people that were on the fence that were waiting for this feature before making a purchase.
I like the Nook color, a Coworker has one, but for reading I prefer an e-ink display instead of the Nook Color display.
My feelings are the exact opposite. I prefer the single player experience, whether it be on the PC or Consoles. I am looking forward to games like The Witcher 2, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and other single player games. I have zero interest in multiplayer; when I get home from a hard day's work after dealing with difficult people the last thing I want to do is to have more social interaction. The games I play are usually 40 hours or more in length, that's pretty cheap entertainment and well worth the $60 price tag.
I find very little of the $1 games that can hold my interest for very long at all, where many PC and Console games I have played for hours on end.
Some of the cross platform features sound nice, but it is a big change from the way that online play has worked on the PS3. It sounds like you are going to have to link your PSN account to Steam to play online instead of just playing through PSN. That means that other accounts on your PS3 will need their own copy if they want to play online.
I can't think of any other game on the PS3 that does this - for example I have Killzone 2, CoD, Motorstorm, and more. My PS3 has 3 PSN accounts on it, myself and my two sons. We can each play online under our own PSN account with the one game disc - it isn't tied to a single account.
Funny that you mention Settlers 2 (Serf City 2). I remember one of the directories on the US retail discs had a crack for the included SciTech Display Doctor. It seemed that they did a little infringement of their own.
I ran both Opera and Eudora for a while in ad sponsored mode. The ads were small and not intrusive, much less than a banner takes up on many sites. I found it a reasonable trade off to have a way to support the developers while still getting the full version of the programs for free. I am glad that Amazon is providing this option for those that would want to take advantage of it. From what I read, I don't think I would see them that often. I see the screensaver long enough to turn mine on and I am only on the home page long enough to switch books when I finish what I am reading.
I do think that the discount should be more, a $99 Kindle would be the sweet spot for an ad supported version, especially since for the most part you are locked into buying your ebooks from Amazon so they are going to making money from you with those purchases. There are some smaller publishers that you can get mobi format, Baen for one, but most of the time you would be making your purchases from Amazon.
I have several co-workers I see with their face buried in their phone every time I walk by their cube. Internet usage is monitored where I work (even this post) so they see it as a way to bypass the system. Before they put in Websense the same co-workers were on the web all day - they still are but now it's through their phones. The ones that were Internet addicted all went out and got smart phones when Internet usage started being monitored.
I received one from Tivo, and I haven't been a customer for over 2 years. I guess they still had my account info stored. It was actually my father's account, but since he doesn't have a computer we used my contact info.
http://www.voidtools.com/
As long as you use a descriptive filename or have your media in hierarchical folder structures you can find any file within seconds on any indexed hard drive. It only works on filenames and folders, not metadata.
I have a pay as you go phone from T-Mobile. I buy $100 worth of minutes and they don't expire for a year. With AT&T's prepaid plan you have a dollar a day access fee on top of the minutes you use. If you use it daily it is going to cost you $30 a month + minutes instead of just the minutes like it is now under T-Mobile. I hope they let us stay grandfathered in on T-Mobile's prepaid plan.
I have a 3 mbs DSL line with AT&T. Doing the math tells me I could download a max of 32.4 gigs a day
(3000 Bits Per Second / 8 (to get Bytes per second)) * 3600 (seconds in an hour) * 24 (hours in a day) = 32,400,000
I could theoretically reach my limit in 5 days. That would be just a little over a terabyte a month if I downloaded 24x7 every day @ 3 mbs. I don't use the 150 gigs now, but ask me again in a year or two since my usage is steadily going up year after year.
Since you only have a license for the content, then there is no reason why you should not be able to re-download it again. That license that you bought and paid for should not disappear just because you didn't perform a back up. If you have a physical copy such as a CD then there should be a replacement cost, but you can also sell and give away that CD, unlike a digital purchase which is tied to the account.
I used to purchase a new computer every couple years. Now I find with the exception of high end gaming my 4-5 year old computer will still do everything I want to do at an acceptable speed. Even the gaming works, just not at maximum settings.
It wasn't that long ago that if you were a couple years behind the curve then many operations were extremely slow. That does not hold true anymore, at least in my case.
By not having to pay for a real person to talk to when you have a problem, they save a bundle on paying for tech support. It's email only and it usually takes 24 hours to get a response. There is no number to call or any way to talk to a live person. For a company that was supposed to have made a billion dollars in revenue last year, I have to assume that some of that was profit. They really need to put some of that profit into live tech support.
I see the opposite occurring in my environment. The Server admins will roll out a new application or process without giving any consideration to the amount of bandwidth it will consume or what toll it will take on the network, and of course not informing anyone in the network group of any changes. All of a sudden we start getting lots of calls for slow network performance and found that the bandwidth and latency shot up 300% from what it was averaging before. Once we analyze the traffic we see all the new flows going to and from the server.
In your scenario, 2K line ACLs would be a problem since every packet would have to go through that line by line until it found a permit or deny. If they need that level of protection, then a firewall would be a better solution.
Everything is what I use on the PC to quickly find any file I am looking for.
On the Mac I use Spotlight.
While it would be nice to be completely organized, these tools let me find my files anywhere they are located on my PC. I try to keep things organized into folders, but I am always falling behind so these are what I can use in the interim.
Slashdot Mirror
I quit shopping at Gamestop because they opened many of their boxes. Since they are selling new games along with used for consoles, how do you know which you will end up with? Case in point, I purchased a Nintendo DS game for my daughter. Christmas Day when she opened it up and put it in her DS there were saved games on it already - it had obviously been used. When I bought it, I mentioned that the box was not sealed, and they claimed that they had to do that else they would get shoplifted. I replied that other stores have less employees in the store but don't have their games opened and behind the counter.
Another time in a different Gamestop my son bought the PS2 game Devil May Cry, again the package was open and the had the discs behind the counter. A few days later while playing it asks him to insert Disc 2, which was not in the box. We went back to the store and they still had the 2nd disc.
In both cases they made good, but after those experiences they lost me as a customer, and I had been shopping there nearly every week since they were Babbages. It sounds like they have still haven't learned not to open packages.
In this case it's even worse - don't they have to break the security seal to get the coupon? In the old days they could just re-shrink wrap it, these days most games come with a security seal as well.
Many of the people I knew that bought the previous games with this DRM were not aware of it. Now after being burned once, their awareness of DRM has been raised. They won't get as many unsuspecting customers this time.
I have no plans to do away with my PSTN service.
1) I like having a phone in most every room instead of having to always carry one around
2) I get a LOT better international calling rate with my PSTN provider than their cell phone international rates, even with the same carrier
3) My DSL broadband line uses the same wiring. It is still going to have to be maintained even if the PSTN goes away
4) Ever try to make a call with a cell in a regional emergency such as an earthquake, tornado, etc? No cells available. The PSTN lines get full too at such times, but not usually to the extent that the cells do. Local weather events can disrupt cell coverage. Once during a hurricane I lost electricity for 2 days, yet never lost my telephone signal.
5) Quality. In nearly 40 years of phone service, I can't remember a single dropped call, where that is a weekly occurrence on my work cell phone. While I have had some occasional bleedover and humming at times on my regular phone, the quality of the sound is still a lot better than my cell.
I resisted for a long time. I read a lot of books and liked the feel of a real one. I can drop it from 2 meters high and just pick it up and find my place again. I did not like the idea of books having DRM and not being able to loan them to a few close friends or trade them in for more at a used book store or donate them to the library. Then there was the whole George Orwell fiasco with Amazon, quite ironic that 1984 was one of the remotely deleted titles.
What finally convinced me to switch to e-books was the adjustable font size. The older I got, the harder it was for me to read many of the books I wanted to, and large print editions are not available for every title. With the Kindle I was able to increase the font on any of my purchased books to the size that was most comfortable for me to read. I still buy technical books with lots of diagrams and illustrations that do not translate well to e-book formats but most of my reading for pleasure is now done with an e-book reader.
You are right, the quote was from the blog post, which took the figures to mean that more bandwidth is used rather than increased viewing, but the Sandvine article doesn't say that increased viewing is the reason for the disparity, just that 360 Netrlix users use double the amount of PC users.
From Sandvine:
Contrast Figure 4 with Figure 5, which shows the average daily data consumption of a Netflix user who uses the service via an Xbox 360. On average, a Netflix subscriber using an Xbox 360 has about twice the daily consumption as an average Netflix subscriber (suggesting 80 GB per month).
I would say that more people do watch it though an other device whether it be a roku, 360, or apple tv than a PC so the numbers may be skewed.
From the article:
Users that stream data through a device other than a PC – an Xbox or other game console, for example – use twice that amount of bandwidth for the same content.
Why would it take more bandwidth to stream the same content? Do they use a different streaming video format or codec for the consoles? The article and the linked pdf makes that statement but do not explain why.
An improved digital marketplace might be something the developers want, but as long as your purchases are tied to a single machine and lost when that machine has a hardware failure, I am not going to buy from there. That is the reason I haven't bought anything from their current marketplace.
If you just have a single Windows workstation, DUMeter works well. http://www.hageltech.com/dumeter/about
AT&T has a page where they show your usage. Last month I was at 179 GBs, but I did buy several games from Steam sales (about 36 GB total), more from Good Old Games, and watched all 65 episodes of Weeds on Netflix (approximately an hour a night for a month) along with my regular surfing, updates for multiple devices, and other downloading. I probably was less than 150 GB myself, but it doesn't take into consideration what my wife and kids use, which is quite a lot as well. It's not hard to run up against the cap in my opinion, especially once you start streaming video.
The way AT&T is measuring it also adds in the protocol overhead, which can be 10% or more. They measure it at the DSLAM, not the customer modem. For instance they show me uploading 10 GB and downloading 97 GB this month. The only uploads I have did for the entire month is some emails that might contain a picture or two, nothing with a large file attachment and I do not use any P2P software that would be uploading. The previous month the overhead that they measured was enough to put me over their 150 GB limit for DSL.
They need to improve their online usage tool too. It is only updated weekly until you go over their limit so you really don't have a precise way to measure daily usage, other than my router which doesn't match what they say I use.
For the very reason that you noted, Amazon has allowed this feature. People were going to other e-readers because of the Kindle lacking library lending. Now they are taking away one of the main reasons to buy from the competition. It may be too late for you, but there are a lot more people that were on the fence that were waiting for this feature before making a purchase.
I like the Nook color, a Coworker has one, but for reading I prefer an e-ink display instead of the Nook Color display.
My feelings are the exact opposite. I prefer the single player experience, whether it be on the PC or Consoles. I am looking forward to games like The Witcher 2, Elder Scrolls Skyrim, and other single player games. I have zero interest in multiplayer; when I get home from a hard day's work after dealing with difficult people the last thing I want to do is to have more social interaction. The games I play are usually 40 hours or more in length, that's pretty cheap entertainment and well worth the $60 price tag.
I find very little of the $1 games that can hold my interest for very long at all, where many PC and Console games I have played for hours on end.
Some of the cross platform features sound nice, but it is a big change from the way that online play has worked on the PS3. It sounds like you are going to have to link your PSN account to Steam to play online instead of just playing through PSN. That means that other accounts on your PS3 will need their own copy if they want to play online.
I can't think of any other game on the PS3 that does this - for example I have Killzone 2, CoD, Motorstorm, and more. My PS3 has 3 PSN accounts on it, myself and my two sons. We can each play online under our own PSN account with the one game disc - it isn't tied to a single account.
Funny that you mention Settlers 2 (Serf City 2). I remember one of the directories on the US retail discs had a crack for the included SciTech Display Doctor. It seemed that they did a little infringement of their own.
I ran both Opera and Eudora for a while in ad sponsored mode. The ads were small and not intrusive, much less than a banner takes up on many sites. I found it a reasonable trade off to have a way to support the developers while still getting the full version of the programs for free. I am glad that Amazon is providing this option for those that would want to take advantage of it. From what I read, I don't think I would see them that often. I see the screensaver long enough to turn mine on and I am only on the home page long enough to switch books when I finish what I am reading.
I do think that the discount should be more, a $99 Kindle would be the sweet spot for an ad supported version, especially since for the most part you are locked into buying your ebooks from Amazon so they are going to making money from you with those purchases. There are some smaller publishers that you can get mobi format, Baen for one, but most of the time you would be making your purchases from Amazon.
I have several co-workers I see with their face buried in their phone every time I walk by their cube. Internet usage is monitored where I work (even this post) so they see it as a way to bypass the system. Before they put in Websense the same co-workers were on the web all day - they still are but now it's through their phones. The ones that were Internet addicted all went out and got smart phones when Internet usage started being monitored.
I received one from Tivo, and I haven't been a customer for over 2 years. I guess they still had my account info stored. It was actually my father's account, but since he doesn't have a computer we used my contact info.
http://www.voidtools.com/ As long as you use a descriptive filename or have your media in hierarchical folder structures you can find any file within seconds on any indexed hard drive. It only works on filenames and folders, not metadata.
I have a pay as you go phone from T-Mobile. I buy $100 worth of minutes and they don't expire for a year. With AT&T's prepaid plan you have a dollar a day access fee on top of the minutes you use. If you use it daily it is going to cost you $30 a month + minutes instead of just the minutes like it is now under T-Mobile. I hope they let us stay grandfathered in on T-Mobile's prepaid plan.
I have a 3 mbs DSL line with AT&T. Doing the math tells me I could download a max of 32.4 gigs a day
(3000 Bits Per Second / 8 (to get Bytes per second)) * 3600 (seconds in an hour) * 24 (hours in a day) = 32,400,000
I could theoretically reach my limit in 5 days. That would be just a little over a terabyte a month if I downloaded 24x7 every day @ 3 mbs. I don't use the 150 gigs now, but ask me again in a year or two since my usage is steadily going up year after year.
Since you only have a license for the content, then there is no reason why you should not be able to re-download it again. That license that you bought and paid for should not disappear just because you didn't perform a back up. If you have a physical copy such as a CD then there should be a replacement cost, but you can also sell and give away that CD, unlike a digital purchase which is tied to the account.
I used to purchase a new computer every couple years. Now I find with the exception of high end gaming my 4-5 year old computer will still do everything I want to do at an acceptable speed. Even the gaming works, just not at maximum settings.
It wasn't that long ago that if you were a couple years behind the curve then many operations were extremely slow. That does not hold true anymore, at least in my case.
By not having to pay for a real person to talk to when you have a problem, they save a bundle on paying for tech support. It's email only and it usually takes 24 hours to get a response. There is no number to call or any way to talk to a live person. For a company that was supposed to have made a billion dollars in revenue last year, I have to assume that some of that was profit. They really need to put some of that profit into live tech support.
I see the opposite occurring in my environment. The Server admins will roll out a new application or process without giving any consideration to the amount of bandwidth it will consume or what toll it will take on the network, and of course not informing anyone in the network group of any changes. All of a sudden we start getting lots of calls for slow network performance and found that the bandwidth and latency shot up 300% from what it was averaging before. Once we analyze the traffic we see all the new flows going to and from the server.
In your scenario, 2K line ACLs would be a problem since every packet would have to go through that line by line until it found a permit or deny. If they need that level of protection, then a firewall would be a better solution.
Everything is what I use on the PC to quickly find any file I am looking for.
On the Mac I use Spotlight.
While it would be nice to be completely organized, these tools let me find my files anywhere they are located on my PC. I try to keep things organized into folders, but I am always falling behind so these are what I can use in the interim.