Except nowhere did they say "Never intend to make a good product".
I wholeheartedly embrace this release strategy. As a user I would rather have access to technology before it's outdated. Also with my input *during* the development I can offer them better insights than they could working in a vacuum.
There are two ways to work. You can draw up plans then ho and hum for months about whether A or B would work better. Or you can build a prototype and have people start using A and B. Usually you'll get your answer very quickly and they'll tell you C.
Deploy fast. Fix fast. Respond quickly to your user's input. "A good test is worth a thousand expert opinions."
Programmers are great at programming. But most of the things they develop are to solve problems they have little to no understanding of. Programmers make applications for users who are experts at their jobs. The sooner you can get those experts "working on the software" through feedback the better.
there's lots of profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
True, just look at the relative profits of World of Warcraft and Missile Command over their life spans.
No... wait--"true" isn't the word I was looking for.
There is certainly a value in 'the long tail'. But there is *FAR MORE* value in milking a property for all it's worth in the short term.
In 1989 Nintendo's Inflation Adjusted revenue was $4B.
Today Blizzard is making about $2B a year in revenue off of just WOW. About half of Nintendo at the height of the 80s. And that's a single game not an entire catalog of properties + more importantly: hardware sales.
If Blizzard shut down their servers today and if hypothetically $500M of that was profit. Then put it safe 1% bonds they would make more than $5m in profit. By comparison how much today do you imagine every last SNES cartridge in existence is making for Nintendo today? $50?
No 'liberals like simple taxes with few exceptions. It's conservatives who want a child exception, the ability to write off business expenses, marriage excemptions etc etc..
Your average single, secular, 'liberal' is someone who probably fills out a simple W2 and is done. 10 minutes.
But then the 'conservative' wants to give a tax break or thinks that businesses are being punished and starts adding exemptions. If you don't want to take any exemptions every year taxes are super easy!
Tax batteries would put a large upfront cost though. @.18 per gallon and ~15,000 miles per year on average and 20 mpg you're looking at a tax bill of $135 a year.
Toyota rates the Prius batteries at 150k+ miles for the warranty and drivers have reported over 300k miles.
So at $0.009 per mile for $300k+ miles that works out to be a $2700 tax right up front. And if you are in an accident that destroys the battery that adds almost $3k to the replacement.
You could as easily put the tax on brake pads or timing belts. But that would create disincentives to properly maintain your vehicle.
Because often the money that goes to states is for a project that only occurs once every few decades. It's far too expensive and it doesn't make sense to have the state take out even more huge expensive loans when you sort of spread around the investment.
If NY needs a new bridge then the federal government gives it to them one year. Then the next year NJ might get a bridge. Then the year after that it's Delaware... Sure you only get money every 10 years but it's 10 years worth of money all at once when you need it instead of it either sitting around for 10 years doing nothing or paying it off for 10 years with interest.
Also there might be a traffic situation (such as a bridge) which affects both interstate and local traffic. That's the big investment federal $$ is going into here in Seattle. We have an interstate bridge that needs updating but it's used for commuting as well. So they're splitting the cost with the state. After all just because a state has no value in a road doesn't mean that the states around it don't need it. If you're Montana how much do you really need your interstate system for people passing through? Not as much as WA and Wisconsin need it as a through-way.
But you can always count on self interest. And in this case we know this wikileaks document didn't push them to act since... the government didn't accuse them of such.
If the government wanted to destroy wikileaks all they would have to say is "We almost lost Bin Laden because of Wikileaks. See they're dangerous!"
When it takes 20 people and $40k to bankrupt the world's only superpower... I don't think any intelligence or military campaign has a prayer of succeeding.
And last week we also knew that TomTom didn't *sell* the info *to the police* they sold it to a traffic consulting business who sold their services to the police department and used TomTom data.
Since then TomTom has promised to forbid that in their licensing.
I think the take away from this story is th at the Samsung Focus is broken, not that WP7 is broken. Considering HTC has managed to release a couple products free of problems and that received timely updates the 'problem' updates always seem to be focused on the samsung focus and the omnia.
(Disclosure: I have a Dell Venue Pro and its camera and wifi firmware is garbage and in serious need of updating--it did however update WP7 fine.)
I would be more excited if they had announced a new initiative to enable fast memory access between the GPU and system RAM.
2GB for visualization is just too small. 8GB would be a good start, even if it was DDR3 and not DDR5. Something like Hypertransport that could enable low latency, high bandwidth memory access for expandable system memory on the cheap.
Either that, or it's high time we got 8GB per core for GPUs.
You're right, by default EC2 isn't a cloud solution, but Amazon doesn't help alleviate that confusion (from their website for EC2):
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
It doesn't help when the name of the service (EC2) has the word "Cloud" in it.
My backup system is no where near the studio I work at's backup system. But I could deploy something even easier for one simple reason: I have less data.
Do you know how much it would cost to remote push 10TB of data once a week?
True, but this could also be a good first step. You could provide dial-up that only accesses.gov domains and your government issued POP3. It would be borderline free assuming they already had a modem... which is less likely now a days.
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet.
Within the next 2 billion years perhaps.
If we are doing it as a life insurance policy there are far easier and better solutions that don't involve rockets, radiation or zero gravity and provide better backup human populations.
If a comet blanketed the planet in dust I would rather be by a geothermal vent under the ocean than on Mars.
No. Because Linux benefits from thousands of contributors with a stake in its stability. PSN probably has a smaller development team since it charges nothing.
In this case it's two closed source solutions. One of which has a far larger revenue stream.
I'm confused. I've been told that environmental scientists do it for money not because they care about the science! Now I'm hearing they don't make much of that. My world view is crumbling!
We discovered that the company below us a few years back (here in Seattle) had not only an open wifi but also had all of their drives shared. We immediately went down stairs and warned them after one of us accidentally connected to their wifi and saw a whole bunch of computers (with official sounding names even) pop up in the file explorer.
Their reaction? "Whatever." They never put a password on it. I was actually surprised by their disinterest in locking down when alerted. Even after we told them that people could just drive by and steal all their company records... so stupid.
That people and organisations continue to prefer this situation to Vista or Win7 is a complete indictment of Microsoft and their utter failure to produce real value for users since 2001.
No this is an indictment of people who use shitty products a decade after their release and long past their obsolescence. Vista and 7 are excellent products.
They only 'prefer' XP because they are often run by people terrified of change.
We were out for a good portion of the day Monday after a bird flew into the telephone pole outside our office and then caused a critical server to go wonky after the UPS battery ran out and we didn't have the auto-shutdown settings correct.
Well I'll hand them one difference and that is that generally when you purchase a used something that something is inferior.
If I could buy a 'brand new' 2008 car whose owner's manual was wrinkled at 2008 car prices I would happily do it.
The gaming experience of a used title is identical as a new one the only difference being that Gamestop gets $20 in revenue and the developers get nothing.
I doubt the developers would be unhappy if gamers sold their games back to the developers for 20% of their purchase price and then were able to resell it again at a discount price.
The real problem with the used games market is that it's worse than piracy.
Let's take the typical life cycle of a used game:
Owner 1 Purchase $60 Owner 1 Resale $20 Cost $40
Owner 2 Purchase $40 Owner 2 Resale $15 Cost $25
Gamestore through reselling probably made far more in profit from selling used than new copies.
But one of the customers spent $40 on a product none of which went to the developers. And the first customer probably only saved $20.
So let's say the transactions end there and that game is never resold. The argument goes that the first purchaser only bought the game at $60 because he knew it actually would end up costing $40. But if he bought 2 games and pirated one game then he would still only spend $120 for 3 games and the developers missed out on $60. So if it stops here then the developers lose from piracy and they should encouraged used games sales since they make the full $180.
But now you have to look at the used games market. If our 2nd tier used games buyers buy each of the games at $40 instead of $60 (and assume they can sell it at let's say $15 back to the game stores) then their per game cost is $25. If they buy the 3 games (from buyer 1) it'll cost them $75. But that's $75 that doesn't go to the developers. If though the person instead pirated those 3 games instead of buying used and bought one full price $60 game with the money saved then that would pay for the original piracy in the case of Buyer 1 not reselling 3 games at $20 each. In fact if Buyer 2 who is now spending $75 on new games instead of $75 on used games is actually putting *more* money into the developers' hands by reducing their per game cost by means of piracy.
Now these numbers are made up... but I think I'm being pretty generous on the resale values that Gamestop charges and my point is that through the used market money is being diverted from the developers to the resellers. If in the above example Buyer 1 never put his games up for sale and instead minimized his per unit cost through piracy then Buyer 2 would have no market and again through piracy reducing his per-unit expenses to be the same as buying used if he still spent the same amount except on new games the developers would do better through piracy than used.
Slashdot Mirror
Except nowhere did they say "Never intend to make a good product".
I wholeheartedly embrace this release strategy. As a user I would rather have access to technology before it's outdated. Also with my input *during* the development I can offer them better insights than they could working in a vacuum.
There are two ways to work. You can draw up plans then ho and hum for months about whether A or B would work better. Or you can build a prototype and have people start using A and B. Usually you'll get your answer very quickly and they'll tell you C.
Deploy fast. Fix fast. Respond quickly to your user's input. "A good test is worth a thousand expert opinions."
Programmers are great at programming. But most of the things they develop are to solve problems they have little to no understanding of. Programmers make applications for users who are experts at their jobs. The sooner you can get those experts "working on the software" through feedback the better.
there's lots of profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
True, just look at the relative profits of World of Warcraft and Missile Command over their life spans.
No... wait--"true" isn't the word I was looking for.
There is certainly a value in 'the long tail'. But there is *FAR MORE* value in milking a property for all it's worth in the short term.
In 1989 Nintendo's Inflation Adjusted revenue was $4B.
Today Blizzard is making about $2B a year in revenue off of just WOW. About half of Nintendo at the height of the 80s. And that's a single game not an entire catalog of properties + more importantly: hardware sales.
If Blizzard shut down their servers today and if hypothetically $500M of that was profit. Then put it safe 1% bonds they would make more than $5m in profit. By comparison how much today do you imagine every last SNES cartridge in existence is making for Nintendo today? $50?
Didn't hurt that the cooling systems were intact at TMI.
No 'liberals like simple taxes with few exceptions. It's conservatives who want a child exception, the ability to write off business expenses, marriage excemptions etc etc..
Your average single, secular, 'liberal' is someone who probably fills out a simple W2 and is done. 10 minutes.
But then the 'conservative' wants to give a tax break or thinks that businesses are being punished and starts adding exemptions. If you don't want to take any exemptions every year taxes are super easy!
Tax batteries would put a large upfront cost though. @ .18 per gallon and ~15,000 miles per year on average and 20 mpg you're looking at a tax bill of $135 a year.
Toyota rates the Prius batteries at 150k+ miles for the warranty and drivers have reported over 300k miles.
So at $0.009 per mile for $300k+ miles that works out to be a $2700 tax right up front. And if you are in an accident that destroys the battery that adds almost $3k to the replacement.
You could as easily put the tax on brake pads or timing belts. But that would create disincentives to properly maintain your vehicle.
Because often the money that goes to states is for a project that only occurs once every few decades. It's far too expensive and it doesn't make sense to have the state take out even more huge expensive loans when you sort of spread around the investment.
If NY needs a new bridge then the federal government gives it to them one year. Then the next year NJ might get a bridge. Then the year after that it's Delaware... Sure you only get money every 10 years but it's 10 years worth of money all at once when you need it instead of it either sitting around for 10 years doing nothing or paying it off for 10 years with interest.
Also there might be a traffic situation (such as a bridge) which affects both interstate and local traffic. That's the big investment federal $$ is going into here in Seattle. We have an interstate bridge that needs updating but it's used for commuting as well. So they're splitting the cost with the state. After all just because a state has no value in a road doesn't mean that the states around it don't need it. If you're Montana how much do you really need your interstate system for people passing through? Not as much as WA and Wisconsin need it as a through-way.
When I sold my car I had to report mileage. And it said mis-reporting would constitute felony fraud.
Self reporting + checking during emission testing seems the most sensible.
Not to mention a "gas station" hopefully will be a thing of the past in the next couple of decades.
We pay for our road system largely off of taxes on petroleum products. If your car is electric you aren't paying for the roads.
But you can always count on self interest. And in this case we know this wikileaks document didn't push them to act since... the government didn't accuse them of such.
If the government wanted to destroy wikileaks all they would have to say is "We almost lost Bin Laden because of Wikileaks. See they're dangerous!"
When it takes 20 people and $40k to bankrupt the world's only superpower... I don't think any intelligence or military campaign has a prayer of succeeding.
And last week we also knew that TomTom didn't *sell* the info *to the police* they sold it to a traffic consulting business who sold their services to the police department and used TomTom data.
Since then TomTom has promised to forbid that in their licensing.
I think the take away from this story is th at the Samsung Focus is broken, not that WP7 is broken. Considering HTC has managed to release a couple products free of problems and that received timely updates the 'problem' updates always seem to be focused on the samsung focus and the omnia.
(Disclosure: I have a Dell Venue Pro and its camera and wifi firmware is garbage and in serious need of updating--it did however update WP7 fine.)
I would be more excited if they had announced a new initiative to enable fast memory access between the GPU and system RAM.
2GB for visualization is just too small. 8GB would be a good start, even if it was DDR3 and not DDR5. Something like Hypertransport that could enable low latency, high bandwidth memory access for expandable system memory on the cheap.
Either that, or it's high time we got 8GB per core for GPUs.
You're right, by default EC2 isn't a cloud solution, but Amazon doesn't help alleviate that confusion (from their website for EC2):
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
It doesn't help when the name of the service (EC2) has the word "Cloud" in it.
My backup system is no where near the studio I work at's backup system. But I could deploy something even easier for one simple reason: I have less data.
Do you know how much it would cost to remote push 10TB of data once a week?
Even better news is that almost everybody is immune to leprosy so the chances of getting infected is very small.
True, but this could also be a good first step. You could provide dial-up that only accesses .gov domains and your government issued POP3. It would be borderline free assuming they already had a modem... which is less likely now a days.
Because if man is to survive as a species, we must leave this planet.
Within the next 2 billion years perhaps.
If we are doing it as a life insurance policy there are far easier and better solutions that don't involve rockets, radiation or zero gravity and provide better backup human populations.
If a comet blanketed the planet in dust I would rather be by a geothermal vent under the ocean than on Mars.
No. Because Linux benefits from thousands of contributors with a stake in its stability. PSN probably has a smaller development team since it charges nothing.
In this case it's two closed source solutions. One of which has a far larger revenue stream.
I'm confused. I've been told that environmental scientists do it for money not because they care about the science! Now I'm hearing they don't make much of that. My world view is crumbling!
We discovered that the company below us a few years back (here in Seattle) had not only an open wifi but also had all of their drives shared. We immediately went down stairs and warned them after one of us accidentally connected to their wifi and saw a whole bunch of computers (with official sounding names even) pop up in the file explorer.
Their reaction? "Whatever." They never put a password on it. I was actually surprised by their disinterest in locking down when alerted. Even after we told them that people could just drive by and steal all their company records... so stupid.
Vista and 7 have run better on all of my computers than XP.
That people and organisations continue to prefer this situation to Vista or Win7 is a complete indictment of Microsoft and their utter failure to produce real value for users since 2001.
No this is an indictment of people who use shitty products a decade after their release and long past their obsolescence. Vista and 7 are excellent products.
They only 'prefer' XP because they are often run by people terrified of change.
We were out for a good portion of the day Monday after a bird flew into the telephone pole outside our office and then caused a critical server to go wonky after the UPS battery ran out and we didn't have the auto-shutdown settings correct.
Well I'll hand them one difference and that is that generally when you purchase a used something that something is inferior.
If I could buy a 'brand new' 2008 car whose owner's manual was wrinkled at 2008 car prices I would happily do it.
The gaming experience of a used title is identical as a new one the only difference being that Gamestop gets $20 in revenue and the developers get nothing.
I doubt the developers would be unhappy if gamers sold their games back to the developers for 20% of their purchase price and then were able to resell it again at a discount price.
The real problem with the used games market is that it's worse than piracy.
Let's take the typical life cycle of a used game:
Owner 1 Purchase $60
Owner 1 Resale $20
Cost $40
Owner 2 Purchase $40
Owner 2 Resale $15
Cost $25
Gamestore through reselling probably made far more in profit from selling used than new copies.
But one of the customers spent $40 on a product none of which went to the developers. And the first customer probably only saved $20.
So let's say the transactions end there and that game is never resold. The argument goes that the first purchaser only bought the game at $60 because he knew it actually would end up costing $40. But if he bought 2 games and pirated one game then he would still only spend $120 for 3 games and the developers missed out on $60. So if it stops here then the developers lose from piracy and they should encouraged used games sales since they make the full $180.
But now you have to look at the used games market. If our 2nd tier used games buyers buy each of the games at $40 instead of $60 (and assume they can sell it at let's say $15 back to the game stores) then their per game cost is $25. If they buy the 3 games (from buyer 1) it'll cost them $75. But that's $75 that doesn't go to the developers. If though the person instead pirated those 3 games instead of buying used and bought one full price $60 game with the money saved then that would pay for the original piracy in the case of Buyer 1 not reselling 3 games at $20 each. In fact if Buyer 2 who is now spending $75 on new games instead of $75 on used games is actually putting *more* money into the developers' hands by reducing their per game cost by means of piracy.
Now these numbers are made up... but I think I'm being pretty generous on the resale values that Gamestop charges and my point is that through the used market money is being diverted from the developers to the resellers. If in the above example Buyer 1 never put his games up for sale and instead minimized his per unit cost through piracy then Buyer 2 would have no market and again through piracy reducing his per-unit expenses to be the same as buying used if he still spent the same amount except on new games the developers would do better through piracy than used.