That sounds like an idea. You could make one a crusty-old veteran, give him a buddy from his war days (not a man who lead thousands, though, make them both clearly grunts), add in a pilot, and then populate the ship with boring run-of-the-mill occupations like a doctor, a preacher, a grease-monkey, a woman of ill repute, a mercenary, and maybe a psychically damaged teenager who moonlights as an unstoppable killing machine. Then you could have them do jobs just to earn enough money to keep the ship flying and themselves from starving. The jobs should be pretty freaking pedestrian, and you get most of your gee whiz points from the character interaction and development, not from the hook for the episode.
None of this "saving a planet, bah, we do that weekly" nonsense -- you'd have them ignored by the universe most of the time, make a difference in the lives of a few dozen people once in a while and, OK, maybe we can give you a bit of leeway for the series finale.
Then you'd dial back the technology. No more main deflector array of plot-hole patching -- the ship barely works. The doctor actually performs surgery, rather than merely instructing the computer to turn on the Magical Healing Device. Have him lose patients once in a while. Less photon torpedos. Screw that -- no photon torpedoes, their existence just encourages you to write space battles. It has been mathematically proven that you can't write a dramatic space battle. No phasers -- that encourages you to write bad guys who are not worth killing.
That show would rock. Too bad nobody will make it.
75% of mutual fund managers, who are paid millions and giving staffs of dozens of professionals to assist with their research, will fail at that task every year, when measured against investing in an index fund in the sector their mutual fund plays in. What makes you think you're going to beat 75% of the professionals without the team of analysts or economy of scale that billions of dollars bring?
It is worth noting that the reason that everyone knows, e.g., Lynch's name is that he had the good sense to take a ten year run and then GET THE HECK OUT OF DODGE because he was more useful as marketing material for Fidelity ("We had the most brilliant mutual fund manager of all time! And, while you can't actually get him to manage your money, look at these other guys who worked in the office next door to the most brilliant manager of all time!") than he was as a mere mortal leading a fund which people thought was godly. You can't lose, after all, if you refuse to play. The Magellan fund's overperformance has, predictably, returned to the mean.
... the Slashdot equivalent of strapping buttered toast to the back of a kitten and pushing it off a table. You could power a perpetual motion machine with the flames generated by this combo...
I don't think you're going to see rapid investments in fighter technology, for a simple reason: fighters exist to blow up other military aircraft, and the US military already has the capability to sweep a combat space so thoroughly that there won't be a swallow flying without Air Force tattooed on its wings. Similar to how we've pretty much capped out on reasons to improve our tanks -- no Soviet Union to fight, no reasonable prospect of having a battle with hundreds of tanks versus hundreds of tanks slugging it out ever again, no force other than bureacratic inertia for improving the tanks. Granted, moving the Pentagon to reality will take a few administrations (you'd be disgusted how long we hung on to cavalry, of the actual omgponies! variety), but it has to happen eventually.
What will we see in terms of military technologies? More mobile, wired infantry. Even more advanced emergency care options for battlefield treatment. (Those insta-coagulant patches mentioned a year or so back are just the tip of the iceberg.) More use of unmanned vehicles for recon, bomb disposal, and eventually certain combat missions. More less-lethal weapons, some of which quite sci-fi esque, which are probably going to get called "death rays" no matter how much the Pentagon tries to tell folks they should be called by a bloodless official acronym.
More software -- one of the unsung heroes of the Iraq campaign is a glorified geneology program / org-chart organizer which they have been using to map out entire neighborhoods to find out who the bad guys are and, just as importantly, who we can get to flip on them. ("Hey, Mohammed, your wife is Shiite, isn't she? Would be a terrible thing if that Sunni death squad your uncle runs ever forgot she was married to you. It happened to the cousin of the shopkeeper down the street just last week -- didn't you hear? He was at the funeral yesterday. If you should have a change of heart about cooperating with the only folks who are going to save this neighborhood, here is my business card with my cell number.")
All bets are off if the military decides it really needs to have the capability to fight a large conventional land war with China, but I don't think that is too realistic of a worry. For the forseeable future, the new convention is going to be unconventional warfare, figuring out how to present less of a profile to folks armed with a $25 IED (sufficient to kill everybody in an Abrams, incidentally), and figuring out how to use the US' technical, organizational, and doctrinal superiority to crush guerillas as thoroughly as we are currently capable of using those three to crush anybody stupid enough to try fighting, e.g., an armor campaign against us on a flat surface away from population centers. (Hiya, Gulf War One.)
... has a free webmail service, despite having a vested interest in desktop applications and not a whole lot of interest in cross-platform compabibility. "Better to own 100% of the customers 100% of the time than let someone else muscle in on our territory by offering a key feature which we do not."
* Plone was excessive for our needs. We reimplimented the needed feature subset quicker in Rails than learning how to use the equivalent feature subset in Plone would have taken.
* Plone conventions in database management and templating were difficult to understand, even if you had a deep understanding of databases and web content creation, due to implementation idiosyncracies.
* I really dislike Python's syntax.
I think syntax is a "You say tomato, I say tomato" sort of point, but the first two points should be kept in mind both by folks designing web application frameworks and by folks trying to figure out which framework fits the needs of their current project.
(Incidentally, I think if you actually executed the ruby code above you'd find that it returns his entire post at the end. I'll spare you.)
If you're thirteen, and you aren't doing your schoolwork, then bully on Microsoft for giving parents the tools they need to create fine distinctions about your playtime without having to just wholesale ban games. I'd prefer parents actually, you know, supervising their children, but I know in real life that option is not always readily available. (Mom and Dad have to work to send Junior to the college he will be going to if he manages to graduate, etc.)
I'm now a one-man architectural services firm. Three imaginary people? Hah, I have twelve. Two of them just have to stand there and look pretty all day. Union rules, don't you know.
is greater than 100% of zero, which is exactly what most unknown, unpromoted bands make. Music is a tough business -- it is extraordinarily hit driven, the marketing expenses are stupidly high, the per-customer value is fairly low, most of your customers will steal your main product given half the chance, and the one product you have that consistently makes money (touring) doesn't scale to infinity like IP does.
Compare that to software. I run a wee little software outfit on the side which will probably net me about $10,000 by the time 2007 is up.
1) My software is cheap, $25, of which I receive $24 in pre-tax profit ($1 goes to Paypal). That is a 96% gross margin (!), which is better than the 60-75% gross margin on a $1 music download (credit card processing fees cost a lot at that end of the scale, especially if your name isn't iTunes and you don't aggregate them over several transactions). Note you'd have to fill two rooms with Radiohead customers to find as much profit as I get per customer, and $25 is near the *floor* for software, not the ceiling.
2) Piracy of my software happens, and is annoying, but people in my niche understand it to be illegal and deviant behavior. Piracy of music is a way of life these days, similar to the way people view software in China.
3) My conversion rate apparently is superior to Radiohead's. Of 100 people exposed to my trial, roughly 2.5-4 will pay me 100% of the price I am asking for. Apparently Radiohead can't get money out of 60% of folks who went through a checkout procedure, which I will bet you any amount of money bounces far more people than the download itself.
4) You can get free advertising (the best possible kind) when people Google for questions about your software's niche. For example, my software makes bingo cards. If you Google [bingo cards] or [bingo cards for class] or [4th grade reading bingo cards], you'll probably find it. If you're an unknown band, on the other hand, what are people supposed to find you under other than your bandname? [Sounds like an early Weird Al with hip-hop influences]?
5) My free trial, by design, isn't intrusive and doesn't substitute for my paid product. Music can be one, or the other, but it can't be both -- to maximize compatibility, you'll want to release DRM-free MP3s, and sampling one of them is exactly the same as owning it. To maximize revenue you'll want to DRM-cripple the free trial (5 plays, works for a week, can't be burned, pick your poison), and that will hurt your prospects/customers by preventing them from doing what they want to do with it (put in on their iPod/Zune, listen to it in the car, whatever).
6) Music tends to get stale very quickly. It is very much a "today" thing in most niches, and selling yesterday's sound generates a mere fraction of the sales of something new. This puts you, the band, on a content-production treadmill for the rest of your career. In most software markets, something which worked fine yesterday continues to work fine today (games being the main exception).
... paid money for software, we'd have a different PC industry. As it is, the projects costing tens of millions of dollars keep getting made for the benefit of the folks who pay money for software. Ever wonder why that is?
(Before I get downmodded to Hell and back, I'd like to point out that I have commit access on Megamek. That is probably among the top 3 games on Sourceforge, given that rank among all apps is in the mid-40s. It doesn't have any of the 3D bells-and-whistles you'd expect from a PC game these days because, uh, we didn't have seven figures to hire a team of artists for two to three years. Anybody want to cough up a few dozen man-years of labor, or the equivalent in cash, to make things pretty? Oh, a couple dozen more man-years of labor to test the 3D code on a few hundred possible combinations of hardware, driver, OS, and distribution would be helpful too.)
Japanese computers not really used for gaming
on
The Dying PC Market
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· Score: 1
You'd have to search high and low here to find a PC gaming culture, outside from MMORPGs at Internet cafes, maybe two titles from Koei (historical sims), and a whole mess of games which the US ratings board could probably safely ban based on the cover art alone. The gaming culture here is primarily console based. There are a couple of reasons for this: really lackluster effort by foreign publishers to translate games into Japanese (you can *get* Starcraft in Japan, but I hope you like playing with an English interface and a handy Japanese manual that says "This button is what you press when you want to start a new campaign"), a chicken-egg scenario with Japanese publishers, and just a general impression that the computer is a tool for word processing while the Nintendo is a tool for fun.
Thus, why would you need to upgrade to a new PC every 3 years? The old one still runs Word, browses the Internet, and sends mail. Why blow $700 on a new laptop when the same amount of money gets you a Wii and a year's worth of games or almost enough hardware to boot up a single PS3 disk?
We call it "the market" around these parts. Works pretty well. Seems to work pretty well over there, too, if they're not actually selling the broken stuff.
Just hearing the concept of Japanese racism against white people would cause his head to explode. Alternatively, he could go with Plan A and suggest it was the inevitable result of systemic racism against black people, then go back to shaking down gullible white people for money.
Voice actors are paid not too much more than an entry-level programmer or artist on an hourly basis, and the number of hours you need them relative to the number of *man-years* you will be chucking into getting your graphics up to snuff is insignificant. WoW's crazy-refined zones are the products of close to a thousand man years of development. The voices, by comparison, are a tacked-on joke. (Which, in WoW, is actually pretty funny./funny)
Marketing costs as much or more than development, incidentally. It is a vicious cycle -- if you spend $40 million on development and need to sell about 2 million units to break even on that, then you're going to have TV advertisements and an advertising campaign and incentives to retailers and... to break even on that. Those cost money.
Oh, incidentally, about half of the sale price of every game is captured by the retailer. If you want my opinion, procedural content isn't the wave of the future. The wave of the future is cutting the retailer out of the transaction -- boom, the number of copies that you need to sell to break even just got halved. Similarly, online subscription (WoW: pay us a pittance for the retail box, then we'll extract a few hundred out of you over the next two years and you'll be happy to pay it) and "Play For Free" (Puzzle Pirates: surely unlocking that lovely ship is worth a buck to you) are going to be bigger than we can even conceive of right now.
Not to be a Nintendo fanboy (although, fair disclosure, I am a stockholder -- when you and 10,000 of your closest friends buy a Wii, I get a penny):
1) If you're going to be selling to cash-constrained customers, it helps to cost 30-50% what the competition does 2) Nintendo doesn't need hit titles to move consoles. Put a Wii on the shelf at any store I know about and a customer will do the moving for you, on the way to the checkout line. 3) Nintendo's developers don't need megahits, either, because the production costs mean you can make money without selling a million copies. 100k sales on a Wii game which is not one of Nintendo's big properties is a respectable and profitable endeavor, whereas 100k sales on something made for the other system doesn't cover production to say nothing of marketing. You're going to see an EXPLOSION in the coming year or three of games made on the model of Nintendo's DS offerings: cheap, maybe not games in the traditional sense of the word (Yoga for the Wii, Wiirobics, that sort of thing), and aimed at market niches the other two don't even pretend to reach for. And they'll print money hats, just like the DS titles do. (A lot of the DS study games sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies after development cycles on the order of three to six man-years. That might be enough budget to add another weapon to Halo3.)
... as well as other superheroes, some of whom were so obscure they could be used as weed-out questions at a comic geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and yet had about as much written about them as topics of minor societal importance such as Catholicism, Argentina, and friction, I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant". Even accepting the snobbish "We want to be Brittanica-lite, no comics, video games, or fantasy literature unless it would shame us not to include them" POV for the sake of argument, after you've got a featured article on Tom Bombadil and Matter-Eater Lad (no, really -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad) you have already gone well past the point of no return for subjects of trivial import.
... selling pirated copies is a billion dollar industry. That isn't any wonky "lost revenue" claim, its just the "No, really, criminal enterprises and the government of China (forgive the slight redudancy) made multiple billions last year selling IP for which the owners were not compensated". Just like other forms of ratware, if the Information That I Want Wants To Be Free crowd doesn't win the race, then it will be done by (comparitively*) highly paid programmers working for the criminal enterprises. Do you think that email harvesting scripts, capcha breakers, spam mailer agents, and phishing sites just wrote themselves? Neither does the massive infastructure that underwrites software, video, or music piracy.
* I used to frequent a spammer forum to see what The Enemy was up to when I was an anti-spam researcher. The going rate for a custom script to cleanse an email list seemed to be about $500, which is probably a half-day to a day of work to a programmer of any skill. Per capita GDP is $12k, you do the math.
Lets say you have 100,000 units of either Half Life 2 or Extend Life Double to distribute in Thailand or Africa. You sell them at the local market clearing price (i.e. the highest price at which all will be sold) or, if you're feeling exceptionally generous and haven't taken econ 101, you sell them below the market clearing price. Who bought them?
Scalpers bought them.
Its obvious -- they have the organization and financial incentive to buy as many units as they can get their hands on and sell them to (relatively speaking) rich Western clients who are looking to exploit the price differential. A scalper who lives next door to a clinic selling AIDS drugs at 10% of the price in New York might as well be living next to a a field full of high-quality pre-processed heroin, EXCEPT he won't get jailed for purchasing or selling it and the price-per-ounce is probably higher. He should get every scrap of money he can get his hands on, buy as much as possible, sell it, and then repeat the process until the source is exhausted. And he will.
If you institute a one-per-customer rule, he will use straw buyers. (Like the Japanese PS3 launch had many scalpers using Chinese foreign exchange students -- now imagine that in a country where a Chinese foreign exchange student's salary for one day would feed a family for a year.) He'll bribe the doctor, the warehouse staff, the govermental authorities, the WHO volunteers, anyone he needs to. If push comes to shove, he'll link up with the local criminal element and take the legal heroin by force. (Not a joke -- if you distribute AIDS drugs in Africa, you need more armed guards than a bank. Who cares about the paper in the bank, you are holding something that actually has market value.)
You're a lawyer playing a Slashdot reader. Same difference -- we can tell you don't belong here. Probably work out, have friends of the opposite sex, use a Windows box and think Perl is an abomination. And you're right, Perl *IS* an abomination, but you still don't belong here.:)
... which is why, if you open a random P2P users' collection, you will find hundreds of gigabytes of quality open-license indie music like Code Monkey and maybe three or four random crappy Britstreet Boys tracks.
The labels are certainly not the only ones capable of making music, but they sure seem like they create the vast majority of the music that people think is valuable enough *to pay nothing for*.
Nothing. Only when you get outside of civilization are you afflicted with the light pollution from stars hundreds of light years away. Don't worry, this pollution, while unsettling if you weren't expecting it, has no permanent ill effects and clears up again after you return to civilization.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds like an idea. You could make one a crusty-old veteran, give him a buddy from his war days (not a man who lead thousands, though, make them both clearly grunts), add in a pilot, and then populate the ship with boring run-of-the-mill occupations like a doctor, a preacher, a grease-monkey, a woman of ill repute, a mercenary, and maybe a psychically damaged teenager who moonlights as an unstoppable killing machine. Then you could have them do jobs just to earn enough money to keep the ship flying and themselves from starving. The jobs should be pretty freaking pedestrian, and you get most of your gee whiz points from the character interaction and development, not from the hook for the episode.
None of this "saving a planet, bah, we do that weekly" nonsense -- you'd have them ignored by the universe most of the time, make a difference in the lives of a few dozen people once in a while and, OK, maybe we can give you a bit of leeway for the series finale.
Then you'd dial back the technology. No more main deflector array of plot-hole patching -- the ship barely works. The doctor actually performs surgery, rather than merely instructing the computer to turn on the Magical Healing Device. Have him lose patients once in a while. Less photon torpedos. Screw that -- no photon torpedoes, their existence just encourages you to write space battles. It has been mathematically proven that you can't write a dramatic space battle. No phasers -- that encourages you to write bad guys who are not worth killing.
That show would rock. Too bad nobody will make it.
75% of mutual fund managers, who are paid millions and giving staffs of dozens of professionals to assist with their research, will fail at that task every year, when measured against investing in an index fund in the sector their mutual fund plays in. What makes you think you're going to beat 75% of the professionals without the team of analysts or economy of scale that billions of dollars bring?
It is worth noting that the reason that everyone knows, e.g., Lynch's name is that he had the good sense to take a ten year run and then GET THE HECK OUT OF DODGE because he was more useful as marketing material for Fidelity ("We had the most brilliant mutual fund manager of all time! And, while you can't actually get him to manage your money, look at these other guys who worked in the office next door to the most brilliant manager of all time!") than he was as a mere mortal leading a fund which people thought was godly. You can't lose, after all, if you refuse to play. The Magellan fund's overperformance has, predictably, returned to the mean.
... the Slashdot equivalent of strapping buttered toast to the back of a kitten and pushing it off a table. You could power a perpetual motion machine with the flames generated by this combo...
I don't think you're going to see rapid investments in fighter technology, for a simple reason: fighters exist to blow up other military aircraft, and the US military already has the capability to sweep a combat space so thoroughly that there won't be a swallow flying without Air Force tattooed on its wings. Similar to how we've pretty much capped out on reasons to improve our tanks -- no Soviet Union to fight, no reasonable prospect of having a battle with hundreds of tanks versus hundreds of tanks slugging it out ever again, no force other than bureacratic inertia for improving the tanks. Granted, moving the Pentagon to reality will take a few administrations (you'd be disgusted how long we hung on to cavalry, of the actual omgponies! variety), but it has to happen eventually.
What will we see in terms of military technologies? More mobile, wired infantry. Even more advanced emergency care options for battlefield treatment. (Those insta-coagulant patches mentioned a year or so back are just the tip of the iceberg.) More use of unmanned vehicles for recon, bomb disposal, and eventually certain combat missions. More less-lethal weapons, some of which quite sci-fi esque, which are probably going to get called "death rays" no matter how much the Pentagon tries to tell folks they should be called by a bloodless official acronym.
More software -- one of the unsung heroes of the Iraq campaign is a glorified geneology program / org-chart organizer which they have been using to map out entire neighborhoods to find out who the bad guys are and, just as importantly, who we can get to flip on them. ("Hey, Mohammed, your wife is Shiite, isn't she? Would be a terrible thing if that Sunni death squad your uncle runs ever forgot she was married to you. It happened to the cousin of the shopkeeper down the street just last week -- didn't you hear? He was at the funeral yesterday. If you should have a change of heart about cooperating with the only folks who are going to save this neighborhood, here is my business card with my cell number.")
All bets are off if the military decides it really needs to have the capability to fight a large conventional land war with China, but I don't think that is too realistic of a worry. For the forseeable future, the new convention is going to be unconventional warfare, figuring out how to present less of a profile to folks armed with a $25 IED (sufficient to kill everybody in an Abrams, incidentally), and figuring out how to use the US' technical, organizational, and doctrinal superiority to crush guerillas as thoroughly as we are currently capable of using those three to crush anybody stupid enough to try fighting, e.g., an armor campaign against us on a flat surface away from population centers. (Hiya, Gulf War One.)
... has a free webmail service, despite having a vested interest in desktop applications and not a whole lot of interest in cross-platform compabibility. "Better to own 100% of the customers 100% of the time than let someone else muscle in on our territory by offering a key feature which we do not."
* Plone was excessive for our needs. We reimplimented the needed feature subset quicker in Rails than learning how to use the equivalent feature subset in Plone would have taken.
* Plone conventions in database management and templating were difficult to understand, even if you had a deep understanding of databases and web content creation, due to implementation idiosyncracies.
* I really dislike Python's syntax.
I think syntax is a "You say tomato, I say tomato" sort of point, but the first two points should be kept in mind both by folks designing web application frameworks and by folks trying to figure out which framework fits the needs of their current project.
(Incidentally, I think if you actually executed the ruby code above you'd find that it returns his entire post at the end. I'll spare you.)
If you're thirteen, and you aren't doing your schoolwork, then bully on Microsoft for giving parents the tools they need to create fine distinctions about your playtime without having to just wholesale ban games. I'd prefer parents actually, you know, supervising their children, but I know in real life that option is not always readily available. (Mom and Dad have to work to send Junior to the college he will be going to if he manages to graduate, etc.)
I'm now a one-man architectural services firm. Three imaginary people? Hah, I have twelve. Two of them just have to stand there and look pretty all day. Union rules, don't you know.
is greater than 100% of zero, which is exactly what most unknown, unpromoted bands make. Music is a tough business -- it is extraordinarily hit driven, the marketing expenses are stupidly high, the per-customer value is fairly low, most of your customers will steal your main product given half the chance, and the one product you have that consistently makes money (touring) doesn't scale to infinity like IP does.
Compare that to software. I run a wee little software outfit on the side which will probably net me about $10,000 by the time 2007 is up.
1) My software is cheap, $25, of which I receive $24 in pre-tax profit ($1 goes to Paypal). That is a 96% gross margin (!), which is better than the 60-75% gross margin on a $1 music download (credit card processing fees cost a lot at that end of the scale, especially if your name isn't iTunes and you don't aggregate them over several transactions). Note you'd have to fill two rooms with Radiohead customers to find as much profit as I get per customer, and $25 is near the *floor* for software, not the ceiling.
2) Piracy of my software happens, and is annoying, but people in my niche understand it to be illegal and deviant behavior. Piracy of music is a way of life these days, similar to the way people view software in China.
3) My conversion rate apparently is superior to Radiohead's. Of 100 people exposed to my trial, roughly 2.5-4 will pay me 100% of the price I am asking for. Apparently Radiohead can't get money out of 60% of folks who went through a checkout procedure, which I will bet you any amount of money bounces far more people than the download itself.
4) You can get free advertising (the best possible kind) when people Google for questions about your software's niche. For example, my software makes bingo cards. If you Google [bingo cards] or [bingo cards for class] or [4th grade reading bingo cards], you'll probably find it. If you're an unknown band, on the other hand, what are people supposed to find you under other than your bandname? [Sounds like an early Weird Al with hip-hop influences]?
5) My free trial, by design, isn't intrusive and doesn't substitute for my paid product. Music can be one, or the other, but it can't be both -- to maximize compatibility, you'll want to release DRM-free MP3s, and sampling one of them is exactly the same as owning it. To maximize revenue you'll want to DRM-cripple the free trial (5 plays, works for a week, can't be burned, pick your poison), and that will hurt your prospects/customers by preventing them from doing what they want to do with it (put in on their iPod/Zune, listen to it in the car, whatever).
6) Music tends to get stale very quickly. It is very much a "today" thing in most niches, and selling yesterday's sound generates a mere fraction of the sales of something new. This puts you, the band, on a content-production treadmill for the rest of your career. In most software markets, something which worked fine yesterday continues to work fine today (games being the main exception).
... paid money for software, we'd have a different PC industry. As it is, the projects costing tens of millions of dollars keep getting made for the benefit of the folks who pay money for software. Ever wonder why that is?
(Before I get downmodded to Hell and back, I'd like to point out that I have commit access on Megamek. That is probably among the top 3 games on Sourceforge, given that rank among all apps is in the mid-40s. It doesn't have any of the 3D bells-and-whistles you'd expect from a PC game these days because, uh, we didn't have seven figures to hire a team of artists for two to three years. Anybody want to cough up a few dozen man-years of labor, or the equivalent in cash, to make things pretty? Oh, a couple dozen more man-years of labor to test the 3D code on a few hundred possible combinations of hardware, driver, OS, and distribution would be helpful too.)
You'd have to search high and low here to find a PC gaming culture, outside from MMORPGs at Internet cafes, maybe two titles from Koei (historical sims), and a whole mess of games which the US ratings board could probably safely ban based on the cover art alone. The gaming culture here is primarily console based. There are a couple of reasons for this: really lackluster effort by foreign publishers to translate games into Japanese (you can *get* Starcraft in Japan, but I hope you like playing with an English interface and a handy Japanese manual that says "This button is what you press when you want to start a new campaign"), a chicken-egg scenario with Japanese publishers, and just a general impression that the computer is a tool for word processing while the Nintendo is a tool for fun.
Thus, why would you need to upgrade to a new PC every 3 years? The old one still runs Word, browses the Internet, and sends mail. Why blow $700 on a new laptop when the same amount of money gets you a Wii and a year's worth of games or almost enough hardware to boot up a single PS3 disk?
We call it "the market" around these parts. Works pretty well. Seems to work pretty well over there, too, if they're not actually selling the broken stuff.
Just hearing the concept of Japanese racism against white people would cause his head to explode. Alternatively, he could go with Plan A and suggest it was the inevitable result of systemic racism against black people, then go back to shaking down gullible white people for money.
... would leave everyone better off.
I meant "You made two predictions and were correct on two of them". But I suppose it could work the other way, too, if you were a lawyer.
Voice actors are paid not too much more than an entry-level programmer or artist on an hourly basis, and the number of hours you need them relative to the number of *man-years* you will be chucking into getting your graphics up to snuff is insignificant. WoW's crazy-refined zones are the products of close to a thousand man years of development. The voices, by comparison, are a tacked-on joke. (Which, in WoW, is actually pretty funny. /funny)
Marketing costs as much or more than development, incidentally. It is a vicious cycle -- if you spend $40 million on development and need to sell about 2 million units to break even on that, then you're going to have TV advertisements and an advertising campaign and incentives to retailers and... to break even on that. Those cost money.
Oh, incidentally, about half of the sale price of every game is captured by the retailer. If you want my opinion, procedural content isn't the wave of the future. The wave of the future is cutting the retailer out of the transaction -- boom, the number of copies that you need to sell to break even just got halved. Similarly, online subscription (WoW: pay us a pittance for the retail box, then we'll extract a few hundred out of you over the next two years and you'll be happy to pay it) and "Play For Free" (Puzzle Pirates: surely unlocking that lovely ship is worth a buck to you) are going to be bigger than we can even conceive of right now.
... you are two for two.
Not to be a Nintendo fanboy (although, fair disclosure, I am a stockholder -- when you and 10,000 of your closest friends buy a Wii, I get a penny):
1) If you're going to be selling to cash-constrained customers, it helps to cost 30-50% what the competition does
2) Nintendo doesn't need hit titles to move consoles. Put a Wii on the shelf at any store I know about and a customer will do the moving for you, on the way to the checkout line.
3) Nintendo's developers don't need megahits, either, because the production costs mean you can make money without selling a million copies. 100k sales on a Wii game which is not one of Nintendo's big properties is a respectable and profitable endeavor, whereas 100k sales on something made for the other system doesn't cover production to say nothing of marketing. You're going to see an EXPLOSION in the coming year or three of games made on the model of Nintendo's DS offerings: cheap, maybe not games in the traditional sense of the word (Yoga for the Wii, Wiirobics, that sort of thing), and aimed at market niches the other two don't even pretend to reach for. And they'll print money hats, just like the DS titles do. (A lot of the DS study games sell tens or hundreds of thousands of copies after development cycles on the order of three to six man-years. That might be enough budget to add another weapon to Halo3.)
... as well as other superheroes, some of whom were so obscure they could be used as weed-out questions at a comic geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and yet had about as much written about them as topics of minor societal importance such as Catholicism, Argentina, and friction, I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant". Even accepting the snobbish "We want to be Brittanica-lite, no comics, video games, or fantasy literature unless it would shame us not to include them" POV for the sake of argument, after you've got a featured article on Tom Bombadil and Matter-Eater Lad (no, really -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad) you have already gone well past the point of no return for subjects of trivial import.
... selling pirated copies is a billion dollar industry. That isn't any wonky "lost revenue" claim, its just the "No, really, criminal enterprises and the government of China (forgive the slight redudancy) made multiple billions last year selling IP for which the owners were not compensated". Just like other forms of ratware, if the Information That I Want Wants To Be Free crowd doesn't win the race, then it will be done by (comparitively*) highly paid programmers working for the criminal enterprises. Do you think that email harvesting scripts, capcha breakers, spam mailer agents, and phishing sites just wrote themselves? Neither does the massive infastructure that underwrites software, video, or music piracy.
* I used to frequent a spammer forum to see what The Enemy was up to when I was an anti-spam researcher. The going rate for a custom script to cleanse an email list seemed to be about $500, which is probably a half-day to a day of work to a programmer of any skill. Per capita GDP is $12k, you do the math.
Lets say you have 100,000 units of either Half Life 2 or Extend Life Double to distribute in Thailand or Africa. You sell them at the local market clearing price (i.e. the highest price at which all will be sold) or, if you're feeling exceptionally generous and haven't taken econ 101, you sell them below the market clearing price. Who bought them?
Scalpers bought them.
Its obvious -- they have the organization and financial incentive to buy as many units as they can get their hands on and sell them to (relatively speaking) rich Western clients who are looking to exploit the price differential. A scalper who lives next door to a clinic selling AIDS drugs at 10% of the price in New York might as well be living next to a a field full of high-quality pre-processed heroin, EXCEPT he won't get jailed for purchasing or selling it and the price-per-ounce is probably higher. He should get every scrap of money he can get his hands on, buy as much as possible, sell it, and then repeat the process until the source is exhausted. And he will.
If you institute a one-per-customer rule, he will use straw buyers. (Like the Japanese PS3 launch had many scalpers using Chinese foreign exchange students -- now imagine that in a country where a Chinese foreign exchange student's salary for one day would feed a family for a year.) He'll bribe the doctor, the warehouse staff, the govermental authorities, the WHO volunteers, anyone he needs to. If push comes to shove, he'll link up with the local criminal element and take the legal heroin by force. (Not a joke -- if you distribute AIDS drugs in Africa, you need more armed guards than a bank. Who cares about the paper in the bank, you are holding something that actually has market value.)
You're a lawyer playing a Slashdot reader. Same difference -- we can tell you don't belong here. Probably work out, have friends of the opposite sex, use a Windows box and think Perl is an abomination. And you're right, Perl *IS* an abomination, but you still don't belong here. :)
... which is why, if you open a random P2P users' collection, you will find hundreds of gigabytes of quality open-license indie music like Code Monkey and maybe three or four random crappy Britstreet Boys tracks.
The labels are certainly not the only ones capable of making music, but they sure seem like they create the vast majority of the music that people think is valuable enough *to pay nothing for*.
... just not anywhere near the price you are willing to pay. The product you want is a business Internet connection.
http://www.comcast.com/business/WorkplaceProducts.ashx
$250 installation, year-long contract required, $100 to $250 a month and up, up, up depending on your requirements.
Nothing. Only when you get outside of civilization are you afflicted with the light pollution from stars hundreds of light years away. Don't worry, this pollution, while unsettling if you weren't expecting it, has no permanent ill effects and clears up again after you return to civilization.