The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier.
that's ok, I'm just gonna "mostly ignore" the legal alternatives to bittorrent
I go through periods where I'll be having 8-10 cups a day, every day, for months on end ; and then at the turn of a hat (say, going on holidays) can cut back to 0-2 a week with no noticeable withdrawal symptoms. I cant imagine how much it would suck to deal with withdrawal symptoms like those described, every time I changed my level of intake down like that; I'd probably give up caffeine all together
I was wondering the same think. Scott Ludlam certainly wasnt and I dont think Bob Brown either; both were vocal opposition. I think it was Scott Ludlam who was one of the first people Conroy accused of supporting child porn by opposing the filter. just which members of the greens were supporting this, gp?
hell, considering the system being replaced and has been good enough until now, you could go dumpster diving every 5 years and upgrade his system for free, forever (or at least until people start disposing of computers in a more environmentally responsible way)
about 10 years ago i got a 1200mhz athlon, it was pretty sweet but within about 3 years it was no good for what I wanted to do with it anymore (was an avid gamer). ram standards changed meaning there wasnt much worth keeping (cpu slow, old style ram, mb didnt support newer processor) so it got turfed. thats a computer with over 10x the power of their current vet system thrown out as scrap. i would of happily given it to anyone who could make use of it. it's not a particularly uncommon scenario either
I would guess the vet is looking at it from an "if it works, dont mess with it" point of view, but from a geek point of view it screams "if anything goes wrong with that pc, you're fucked". good luck finding compatible replacement parts for even a 10 year old pc. remaining current is not just about chasing teh megahurtz. it's about being able to walk into a shop and buy a replacement for whatever component just let out the smoke
same here. the responses I got actually killed any motivation to write more. it was patently obvious they werent being read, probably put straight through a shredder, and I was just being sent a generic form letter. no specific points I mentioned addressed, just generic bullshit you could probably find on their website
I think it would be best if they had no april fools stories one year. everyone is so conditioned to expect that they'll flood the front page with meaningless garbage; they'd fool more people making them try to guess which is the fake article on april 1st when they're all real.
I dont mean to insult your experience because it certainly sounds like a great way of doing thing, but you need to recognize that you were incredibly lucky. for every person like you who was able to get a job with no qualifications that eventually led to something they would want to do for a living, there would be 20 people who found they could get nothing other than apprenticeships with builders, butchers or bricklayers (or a bunch of other low level jobs that dont start with b and wreck my aliteration). to pretend that what you did is achievable by anyone is just getting a bit unrealistic. dont discount your luck in working somewhere that led to something you want to do
As always, Thank you Mr Carmack! It's always nice when developers let you look at their code; there's always a bunch of stuff to learn. hacking around on the q3a source taught me so much more about c programming than I got from a software engineering degree
in Australia it's even worse. child pornography is a 15 year old girl recording herself nude on her mobile phone and then sending the video to her boyfriend in his 15th birthday. it doesnt matter that both parties are under 18 and both are consensual, the girl could be charged with making and distributing child porn and the guy for possession of child porn.
triple j (an Australian government funded radio station) had a segment late last year where they interviewed a bunch of school students and asked them about this. a large number of them admitted they'd been involved in such acts in the past and had no idea it was even illegal.
it's a perfect example that there is way too much focus on how the law is written instead of what it is supposed to achieve
it's illegal to sell in most state, but possession is fine. it's plenty legal to buy hardcore porn from the ACT and take it home with you, I think you can even legally mail order it
whereas Fahrenheit is more convenient for americans, because they grew up with it for most of their lives.
fixed that for you. if it were truly more convenient, it wouldn't receive this unanimous hatred from those who didnt grow up with it. that's not to say that Celsius is any more convenient, it's simply a matter of what you are used to. personally, I wish Americans would use Celsius, not because it's more convenient, but because its what everyone else uses. unification of units across the globe trumps freezing nose hairs
The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) March 9th, 2009
I will freely admit, I've been avoiding writing this article. In fact, as I type this, I'm still not sure that it's something that I want to do. However, again, I come back to that damn promise I made when I started this whole thing about being open and honest. Curse me and my big mouth! I also stated just over a week ago that I would write up on my numbers, so now I stand (sit typing) before you to reveal "The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)".
Dapple
If you've been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting "just another match-3 game", but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you've read it, then you've seen my "conclusions" section that had some numbers. Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
Royalties
Apple's deal is this: for every sale, Apple keeps 30% and you get 70%. So for a sale of $4.99, I make $3.50. That's made in the currency where the app was sold, so I make more money when someone from the U.S. buys my game than someone from Canada. If you're in Canada, it's actually cheaper for you to buy the game than for an American, since it only costs your $4.99 Canadian.
If you do the math, you can see that I need to sell about 9,150 units in the U.S. before I break even on Dapple.
Reviews
Again, if you've been reading the blog then you've seen the excellent reviews the game has been getting. People who play the game tend to really enjoy it. Every review I've had so far has been extremely positive. I even managed to get a review from Kotaku, which is a very large gaming blog. It was the Kotaku review that led many people to start asking me about sales numbers, assuming that I must have seen a massive increase in sales.
However, I haven't had reviews yet from any of the "Big 3" iPhone review sites (Touch Arcade, 148Apps, and AppVee). Those are the ones that I think might really affect sales.
Sales Data
This is what you're here for: the numbers. Here's a graph (done in AppViz) of revenue (the y-axis is dollars, not number of sales) I've made world-wide from sales of Dapple since it went live (all funds in Canadian Dollars): Dapple Revenue Graph
Dapple Revenue Graph
I've marked four important data points:
First Sale - This was the first sale of the game, made maybe an hour after the game went live. I suspect this was purchased by an app cracker. Dapple was cracked and uploaded to pirate sites less than 5 hours after it went live. This was the only sale prior to that. So thanks, Mr./Mrs. Cracker, you were my first sale! On the topic of pirating/cracking: I have no idea how many pirated copies of Dapple are being played right now. I don't track metrics like that, although I should perhaps start.
Launch Day - This was the first day Dapple was on sale. Many of these purchases would have been friends of mine buying the game. Many other sales will have come from my app being in the "New" apps list, as other devs tell me that appearing in any list on the App Store helps sales significantly. By the end of the third day my app wasn't on the front page of newly relea
By the time a new 2009 Prius kicks the bucket (15 years at least),
15 years? why such a low expectation? I know that people say everything is made disposable these days, but are they really making cars so poorly now that a 2009 car is expected to die at around the same year as a poorly looked after 1994 one? seems like the waste created by scraping a prius in just 15 years would far outweigh any environmental benefits accumulated driving it for that period. I really hope you just pulled that figure out of your ass and it's completely pessimistic...
Besides possibly using ECC memory is there any other example of that?
I'd hardly call the option of either quad cord or 8-core "mid-range", and that's completely ignoring the type of processors (they're xeons, go have a look at the price difference between them and your regular mid-range processor)
the mac pro might be good value for what's in it, but what's in it is definitely not mid-range and definitely not needed by the sort of people looking for something they can install a few expansion cards and a graphics card in). right now a hackintosh is the only (cludgy) answer
I wont buy an iMac until they support the opposite feature. when the iMac is getting old and slow, the 24" screen will still be perfectly fine; I'd like to be able to use it as just a monitor, so it could be the second desktop for the iMac bought to replace it.
Color wise, the LED MacBook Pro and Cinema Display are better than the MacBook
I'm glad to read that. I have a black macbook and the screen is terrible. I'd guessed all the glare (calling it glossy is just sidestepping the truth) screens would all be equally shit, but it's nice to hear otherwise. I actually used my old 12" powerbook for the first time in about a year the other week, and the very first think i noticed was how much better the matte screen looked than my macbook's, even though it's both lower resolution and lower dpi.
I love OS X but as time passes I seem less and less able to justify spending money on apple hardware. perhaps my next laptop will be a hackintosh; my "mac mini pro" hackintosh has been running pretty well flawlessly since 10.5 came out. sure, it is nicer on the macbook not having to worry about system updates breaking things if precautions are not taken, but given the choice of a horrible screen, or having to read up on precautions for the latest update a few times a year, I think I'll opt for the extra reading.
computers are not a substitute for good teachers. computers will not make bad teachers into good teachers. spend as little as is truly needed on the computers and use the rest to employ some good teachers.
Slashdot Mirror
no, the USA has Amazon. like so many other sites involving music, people outside of the USA get shafted
The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier.
that's ok, I'm just gonna "mostly ignore" the legal alternatives to bittorrent
I go through periods where I'll be having 8-10 cups a day, every day, for months on end ; and then at the turn of a hat (say, going on holidays) can cut back to 0-2 a week with no noticeable withdrawal symptoms. I cant imagine how much it would suck to deal with withdrawal symptoms like those described, every time I changed my level of intake down like that; I'd probably give up caffeine all together
I was wondering the same think. Scott Ludlam certainly wasnt and I dont think Bob Brown either; both were vocal opposition. I think it was Scott Ludlam who was one of the first people Conroy accused of supporting child porn by opposing the filter. just which members of the greens were supporting this, gp?
hell, considering the system being replaced and has been good enough until now, you could go dumpster diving every 5 years and upgrade his system for free, forever (or at least until people start disposing of computers in a more environmentally responsible way)
about 10 years ago i got a 1200mhz athlon, it was pretty sweet but within about 3 years it was no good for what I wanted to do with it anymore (was an avid gamer). ram standards changed meaning there wasnt much worth keeping (cpu slow, old style ram, mb didnt support newer processor) so it got turfed. thats a computer with over 10x the power of their current vet system thrown out as scrap. i would of happily given it to anyone who could make use of it. it's not a particularly uncommon scenario either
I would guess the vet is looking at it from an "if it works, dont mess with it" point of view, but from a geek point of view it screams "if anything goes wrong with that pc, you're fucked". good luck finding compatible replacement parts for even a 10 year old pc. remaining current is not just about chasing teh megahurtz. it's about being able to walk into a shop and buy a replacement for whatever component just let out the smoke
how do you judge that without having already played through them in all languages?
same here. the responses I got actually killed any motivation to write more. it was patently obvious they werent being read, probably put straight through a shredder, and I was just being sent a generic form letter. no specific points I mentioned addressed, just generic bullshit you could probably find on their website
Come on mods, just once I'd like to see a +5 flamebait
I think it would be best if they had no april fools stories one year. everyone is so conditioned to expect that they'll flood the front page with meaningless garbage; they'd fool more people making them try to guess which is the fake article on april 1st when they're all real.
I'm intrigued, how does a language be math friendly? I'd always thought of math as being somewhat separate from regular language.
I dont mean to insult your experience because it certainly sounds like a great way of doing thing, but you need to recognize that you were incredibly lucky. for every person like you who was able to get a job with no qualifications that eventually led to something they would want to do for a living, there would be 20 people who found they could get nothing other than apprenticeships with builders, butchers or bricklayers (or a bunch of other low level jobs that dont start with b and wreck my aliteration). to pretend that what you did is achievable by anyone is just getting a bit unrealistic. dont discount your luck in working somewhere that led to something you want to do
As always, Thank you Mr Carmack! It's always nice when developers let you look at their code; there's always a bunch of stuff to learn. hacking around on the q3a source taught me so much more about c programming than I got from a software engineering degree
in Australia it's even worse. child pornography is a 15 year old girl recording herself nude on her mobile phone and then sending the video to her boyfriend in his 15th birthday. it doesnt matter that both parties are under 18 and both are consensual, the girl could be charged with making and distributing child porn and the guy for possession of child porn.
triple j (an Australian government funded radio station) had a segment late last year where they interviewed a bunch of school students and asked them about this. a large number of them admitted they'd been involved in such acts in the past and had no idea it was even illegal.
it's a perfect example that there is way too much focus on how the law is written instead of what it is supposed to achieve
it's illegal to sell in most state, but possession is fine. it's plenty legal to buy hardcore porn from the ACT and take it home with you, I think you can even legally mail order it
damn... should have previewed
fixed that for you. if it were truly more convenient, it wouldn't receive this unanimous hatred from those who didnt grow up with it. that's not to say that Celsius is any more convenient, it's simply a matter of what you are used to. personally, I wish Americans would use Celsius, not because it's more convenient, but because its what everyone else uses. unification of units across the globe trumps freezing nose hairs
The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)
March 9th, 2009
I will freely admit, I've been avoiding writing this article. In fact, as I type this, I'm still not sure that it's something that I want to do. However, again, I come back to that damn promise I made when I started this whole thing about being open and honest. Curse me and my big mouth! I also stated just over a week ago that I would write up on my numbers, so now I stand (sit typing) before you to reveal "The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)".
Dapple
If you've been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting "just another match-3 game", but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you've read it, then you've seen my "conclusions" section that had some numbers. Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
Royalties
Apple's deal is this: for every sale, Apple keeps 30% and you get 70%. So for a sale of $4.99, I make $3.50. That's made in the currency where the app was sold, so I make more money when someone from the U.S. buys my game than someone from Canada. If you're in Canada, it's actually cheaper for you to buy the game than for an American, since it only costs your $4.99 Canadian.
If you do the math, you can see that I need to sell about 9,150 units in the U.S. before I break even on Dapple.
Reviews
Again, if you've been reading the blog then you've seen the excellent reviews the game has been getting. People who play the game tend to really enjoy it. Every review I've had so far has been extremely positive. I even managed to get a review from Kotaku, which is a very large gaming blog. It was the Kotaku review that led many people to start asking me about sales numbers, assuming that I must have seen a massive increase in sales.
However, I haven't had reviews yet from any of the "Big 3" iPhone review sites (Touch Arcade, 148Apps, and AppVee). Those are the ones that I think might really affect sales.
Sales Data
This is what you're here for: the numbers. Here's a graph (done in AppViz) of revenue (the y-axis is dollars, not number of sales) I've made world-wide from sales of Dapple since it went live (all funds in Canadian Dollars):
Dapple Revenue Graph
Dapple Revenue Graph
I've marked four important data points:
First Sale - This was the first sale of the game, made maybe an hour after the game went live. I suspect this was purchased by an app cracker. Dapple was cracked and uploaded to pirate sites less than 5 hours after it went live. This was the only sale prior to that. So thanks, Mr./Mrs. Cracker, you were my first sale! On the topic of pirating/cracking: I have no idea how many pirated copies of Dapple are being played right now. I don't track metrics like that, although I should perhaps start.
Launch Day - This was the first day Dapple was on sale. Many of these purchases would have been friends of mine buying the game. Many other sales will have come from my app being in the "New" apps list, as other devs tell me that appearing in any list on the App Store helps sales significantly. By the end of the third day my app wasn't on the front page of newly relea
15 years? why such a low expectation? I know that people say everything is made disposable these days, but are they really making cars so poorly now that a 2009 car is expected to die at around the same year as a poorly looked after 1994 one? seems like the waste created by scraping a prius in just 15 years would far outweigh any environmental benefits accumulated driving it for that period. I really hope you just pulled that figure out of your ass and it's completely pessimistic...
to sum it up: High Quality, Low Costs, On Time. Pick 2
server-class components,
Besides possibly using ECC memory is there any other example of that?
I'd hardly call the option of either quad cord or 8-core "mid-range", and that's completely ignoring the type of processors (they're xeons, go have a look at the price difference between them and your regular mid-range processor)
the mac pro might be good value for what's in it, but what's in it is definitely not mid-range and definitely not needed by the sort of people looking for something they can install a few expansion cards and a graphics card in). right now a hackintosh is the only (cludgy) answer
I wont buy an iMac until they support the opposite feature. when the iMac is getting old and slow, the 24" screen will still be perfectly fine; I'd like to be able to use it as just a monitor, so it could be the second desktop for the iMac bought to replace it.
assuming that Mac Mini is silent, combining it with XBMC would be heaven!
Meow?
I'm glad to read that. I have a black macbook and the screen is terrible. I'd guessed all the glare (calling it glossy is just sidestepping the truth) screens would all be equally shit, but it's nice to hear otherwise. I actually used my old 12" powerbook for the first time in about a year the other week, and the very first think i noticed was how much better the matte screen looked than my macbook's, even though it's both lower resolution and lower dpi.
I love OS X but as time passes I seem less and less able to justify spending money on apple hardware. perhaps my next laptop will be a hackintosh; my "mac mini pro" hackintosh has been running pretty well flawlessly since 10.5 came out. sure, it is nicer on the macbook not having to worry about system updates breaking things if precautions are not taken, but given the choice of a horrible screen, or having to read up on precautions for the latest update a few times a year, I think I'll opt for the extra reading.
good teachers >> good computers
computers are not a substitute for good teachers. computers will not make bad teachers into good teachers. spend as little as is truly needed on the computers and use the rest to employ some good teachers.