So, basically, you're saying that no harm occurred to Eric Cartman then? I mean, even though a WoW player kept killing him and all the other players over and over and over, it's all good with you?
How can you live with yourself? Tell you what, you go on WoW with your best character and all your stuff and go to a nice dark forest and tell me exactly when you'll be there. Then you drop all your armor and stuff and turn around and I'll whack you upside the head and jack your stuff.
I remember when I was playing Diablo II (way better than WoW) and some guy in Hong Kong came on and started popping up giving away all his stuff. He said he decided he needed to focus more on studying, and felt the best way was to kill off his characters and give away all their possessions. Got some cool things then.
Now that I would describe as charity, which is normally not a taxable event, but a transaction did occur, in that various characters got greater value.
And I got some eight-socketed shields and body armor...
with lots of special armor - and I sell it to other players for real-world cash - I would HOPE that the IRS would come after me.
Let's get real.
As an investor who's been in many IPOs
on
Dot-Com Bubble v2.0?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think that it is quite possible the YouTube purchase was over-valuated.
However, the problem is that the market has no useful mechanisms to properly evaluate the true worth of future technologies.
They could be insanely great - legendary.
Or they could be really lame.
So, trying to predict future cash flow and growth at the beginning of a company with a new technology is mostly a crap shoot.
One good rule is - don't buy into a rise. It's better to put most of your money in an index fund (Euro stocks mix with say Total US market at a 50/50 split) and only use speculative funds to invest in such speculative ventures. So, let's say you save $20,000 a year - put at most $2000 in YouTube and other such speculations, where the downside is as likely as the upside.
Also, realize that the one thing most new investors are very bad at is knowing when to sell. When I bought into Red Hat at the IPO, I planned to sell half of the stock at a specific dollar amount, right before the lockup expired and the price dropped for a bit. Then I sold most of the rest when the largest lockup expired. Then I bought back into the same number of shares using 1/20th the money I had "earned". Net result - I had the same number of shares - and a lot of cash.
If you buy into such a thing, be willing to sell part of it when it rises to a certain point. If it falls, know at what price you'll give up. You can also sell at a price when you think it will be quiet for a month or so, lock in the capital loss to wipe out the capital gains for tax reasons - and buy back in one month plus one day later.
Originally, Nintendo had plans to release 6 to 8 million Wii's by year end. Sony had plans to release between 2 and 4 million by year end.
Both have scaled back their numbers. Sony mostly due to real and artificial supply constraints (they decided to ship more Blu-Ray players, which undercut the number of Blu-Ray components for the PS3, for example). Nintendo mostly due to quality and manufacturing utilization reasons.
However, this also artificially pumps up demand, as the original numbers were based on market research of probable purchases. The numbers will continue to fluctuate depending on factory outputs and shipping constraints.
1. It makes the game release more of a media event since it's not one of the herd on release day. This also makes sure it's not drowned by release day coverage which usually won't bother to list launch titles in most media.
2. When you go back to the store to get your extra controller and other parts you suddenly needed - or show up hoping they have a new console that wasn't artificially held back to create demand - you'll see a New Game on the shelves and pay more attention to it.
Another one for the consumers who patronize their shops.
The reason they wanted to ban it from their stores - where they do sell GTA and other games - is that it would expose their "public schools" (British for what Americans call "private schools") and the abusive bullying that most of the upper class twits take as a given.
It's a sensitive issue, sure. Sensitive because it exposes them for what they are.
It sounds good. And then what happens is everyone has a dongle or USB device, and you find all your four USB 2.0 ports are taken up by dongles and you can't print or use your wireless mouse any more.
Consumers rebelled against dongles, and copy-only-three-times software protection. They hacked copies of software disks and refused to buy dongle software - or large corporations would say "give us the non-dongle version or we'll buy 10,000 copies from your competitor and tell the media WHY we did it".
They will react similarly to this. This is one of the reasons the Wii has mindshare - they don't region-encode their games, but Sony and Microsoft do.
Nah, tuition's way cheaper when you're professional staff.
But still, even though one could try to get along just with the Media Center, in reality you'd want all the goodies that add on to it. It's like when you buy a house, you think "Oh, it only costs $465,000" and later you realize it was $465,000 plus 6 percent commission plus 2 percent closing costs and taxes plus you now have to buy drapes, tables, lights, and all the other things.
Spend $10,000 on a wall-mount 50 inch flat screen high end HDTV and a Sony Vaio VGX-XL202 and all the speakers and other things that go with it, and support DRM
- or -
Invest that money in getting a PhD so I can earn three times my salary and buy the exact same hardware for only $2000 in three years time.
I haven't seen a lot of children in the families of our supposed upper class. They tend to have one or two kids at most.
On the other hand, kids are more frequently found in the middle and lower classes.
Part of the risks of tallness are literally heart disease, and the difficulty of pumping so much blood. There are other systems which start failing as we reach higher levels of height, and in fact we notice an increase in the the American population of such problems over time.
If you were looking at such things, you'd have to ask who they were sampling. Seems to me the European groups (including many Americans) are in decline, and other groups are increasing.
On a genetic level, race is pretty meaningless, however, from a scientific perspective.
I never said I wasn't buying a PS3. I'm just not going to buy one now. I have a GameCube, and xBox, and a PS2 at home.
I bought the GameCube when they came out, bought the xBox probably a year after they came out - once they had a few games I wanted (but am disappointed with the lack of titles still), and my son bought the PS2 just this summer - he got lots of games used from his friends - cheap.
I've preordered a Wii and am probably picking up a bundle at CostCo or Fred Meyer or ToysRUs or Target on release day as well - since a friend of his missed out on a preorder and I know marketing and sales and where to hunt.
I'm down on the 360, but might get one if I can find a store that sells Japan-release games they pushed that will work with a US box and do English subtitles, don't care for sports or FPS titles on the whole. Especially now that the price dropped. Don't have HDTV until 2009 at the earliest when they will sell for $300 for a decent set (classic market price curve).
I'll probably buy a PS3 - with a lot of Japanese games that work in US region - when the price drops to $250 retail. By that point I might actually want to buy HDTV, of course. Should be able to get used US game titles for $20 by then.
But buying it now is a waste. Especially with all the first-release tech problems. I'll let others be the guineau pigs.
By the time most people have HDTVs, we'll be three or four console generations further along anyway. Not only do the prices have to come down massively, but a lot more content has to be produced in HDTV to make it viable, and they have to make smaller versions (believe it or not but most people don't even have the room for a 50" TV).
Exactly. By the time we reach 50 percent utilization of HDTV it will be 2010 - most people will use their 2001 or older TV sets with their digital cable boxes quite nicely to see HDTV (at lower res). Market adoption curves currently projected - as I read in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal - show that we won't have full adoption of 1080p HDTV until at least 2015.
No matter what Sony wants, them's the cold hard facts.
Exactly how old are you? I'm 23, and my first hard disk was 20MB. I wouldn't consider myself to be old.
I'm not the original poster, but I'm 46 and my first computer didn't have hard disks. I built my first one on an S-100 bus, hand-soldering (sautering) the boards and pushing in the memory and other chips onto the boards, laying tracks.
My next computer didn't have hard disks either, it was an Apple II+ with 48K (yes, K) of RAM (a lot, then) that I bumped up to 172K with an add-in 128K board and dual floppies (5.25 inch). I sometimes used 8 inch CP/M and IBM floppies on mainframes and mini-computers (they go in upside down).
My third computer had an external 20 GB hard drive on a SCSI II connector that was faster than other Macs (it was a Mac SE with dual floppy 3.5 inch drives). Other Macs at the time had 10 GB internal drives that ran more slowly. The hard disk weighed more than a heavy laptop does now.
I'd rather play a game in high resolution on my HDTV than in low resolution on an old TV. Simple as that - you're out of your mind.
And I'd rather save the $2000 for a decent sized HDTV like the 85 percent of consumers, and wait a few years until 2010 to buy one for only $300 that's the same size.
I think the PS3 will probably sell for $250 by that point as well. And it might have more games I'd actually play by then.
In the meantime, I'll be enjoying my Wii and playing fun games that work now, not living on the bleeding edge.
t remains up to the game publishers how bloated their games will turn out in the end. 25GB (or 50Gb for that matter) might pave the way to mayhem, if nobody is forced to trim out the garbage anymore before shipping, but all it actually offers to the vendors is c h o i c e.
Exactly. However, in our experience in the gaming community, we should pay attention to the reality that what is likely to grow in terms of data storage on game disks is likely in-game ads, cut-scenes (both in length, in number, in alternative choices, etc), game previews, movie previews, and mini-games (add-ons). The addition of alternative cut-scenes (based upon play) is actually a very good thing, in the hands of a good game story editor, in that they are less restricted. I don't know how many times I've run across a game cut-scene where it said things like "now you will grow up to be a warrior with this powerful weapon" when my character already had: a. more powerful weapons and b. was pretty danged huge as I'd maxed out physique and strength by that point.
Nintendo completely redesigned their controller to make games more fun, while Sony added capacity so people can watch high-resolution cutscenes. Just because a large group of people all disagree with you doesn't mean you're the one doing the thinking.
Every time I want to play a game, it's amazing how often I say to myself "You know, this game needs more cutscenes so that I can sit there and watch the same thing over and over and over and not get to play the game for an even longer period of time!".
While I'm sure this is great news for graphics artists, wire frame designers, and pixel plotters, it doesn't mean we gamers will thank them for it.
Translation: More unnecessary splash screens, more in-game ads, more non-skippable scenes between action, and longer time to play what should be a short game.
Information exands to fill the space available. And so does dreck.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, I'll even use IPv4 instead of IPv6 if you insist!
...
Just don't make me do dial-up
I think the Chinese Gold Farmers would disagree with you there. They make a lot from the equivalent of doing that.
That you choose not to do it for profit doesn't mean it can't be profitable.
So, basically, you're saying that no harm occurred to Eric Cartman then? I mean, even though a WoW player kept killing him and all the other players over and over and over, it's all good with you?
How can you live with yourself? Tell you what, you go on WoW with your best character and all your stuff and go to a nice dark forest and tell me exactly when you'll be there. Then you drop all your armor and stuff and turn around and I'll whack you upside the head and jack your stuff.
Still convinced I "gained nothing"?
Didn't think so.
I make myself invisible to microwaves by unplugging them, or turning off the lights.
...
Sneaky little buggers, always watching you and beeping at you to take your dinner or coffee out
I remember when I was playing Diablo II (way better than WoW) and some guy in Hong Kong came on and started popping up giving away all his stuff. He said he decided he needed to focus more on studying, and felt the best way was to kill off his characters and give away all their possessions. Got some cool things then.
...
Now that I would describe as charity, which is normally not a taxable event, but a transaction did occur, in that various characters got greater value.
And I got some eight-socketed shields and body armor
with lots of special armor - and I sell it to other players for real-world cash - I would HOPE that the IRS would come after me.
Let's get real.
I think that it is quite possible the YouTube purchase was over-valuated.
However, the problem is that the market has no useful mechanisms to properly evaluate the true worth of future technologies.
They could be insanely great - legendary.
Or they could be really lame.
So, trying to predict future cash flow and growth at the beginning of a company with a new technology is mostly a crap shoot.
One good rule is - don't buy into a rise. It's better to put most of your money in an index fund (Euro stocks mix with say Total US market at a 50/50 split) and only use speculative funds to invest in such speculative ventures. So, let's say you save $20,000 a year - put at most $2000 in YouTube and other such speculations, where the downside is as likely as the upside.
Also, realize that the one thing most new investors are very bad at is knowing when to sell. When I bought into Red Hat at the IPO, I planned to sell half of the stock at a specific dollar amount, right before the lockup expired and the price dropped for a bit. Then I sold most of the rest when the largest lockup expired. Then I bought back into the same number of shares using 1/20th the money I had "earned". Net result - I had the same number of shares - and a lot of cash.
If you buy into such a thing, be willing to sell part of it when it rises to a certain point. If it falls, know at what price you'll give up. You can also sell at a price when you think it will be quiet for a month or so, lock in the capital loss to wipe out the capital gains for tax reasons - and buy back in one month plus one day later.
Main thing is trust your gut.
Originally, Nintendo had plans to release 6 to 8 million Wii's by year end. Sony had plans to release between 2 and 4 million by year end.
Both have scaled back their numbers. Sony mostly due to real and artificial supply constraints (they decided to ship more Blu-Ray players, which undercut the number of Blu-Ray components for the PS3, for example). Nintendo mostly due to quality and manufacturing utilization reasons.
However, this also artificially pumps up demand, as the original numbers were based on market research of probable purchases. The numbers will continue to fluctuate depending on factory outputs and shipping constraints.
Qui custodes custode.
Who will protect us from our protectors?
Two reasons:
1. It makes the game release more of a media event since it's not one of the herd on release day. This also makes sure it's not drowned by release day coverage which usually won't bother to list launch titles in most media.
2. When you go back to the store to get your extra controller and other parts you suddenly needed - or show up hoping they have a new console that wasn't artificially held back to create demand - you'll see a New Game on the shelves and pay more attention to it.
Another one for the consumers who patronize their shops.
The reason they wanted to ban it from their stores - where they do sell GTA and other games - is that it would expose their "public schools" (British for what Americans call "private schools") and the abusive bullying that most of the upper class twits take as a given.
It's a sensitive issue, sure. Sensitive because it exposes them for what they are.
And they will rebel against this DRM attempt.
It sounds good. And then what happens is everyone has a dongle or USB device, and you find all your four USB 2.0 ports are taken up by dongles and you can't print or use your wireless mouse any more.
Consumers rebelled against dongles, and copy-only-three-times software protection. They hacked copies of software disks and refused to buy dongle software - or large corporations would say "give us the non-dongle version or we'll buy 10,000 copies from your competitor and tell the media WHY we did it".
They will react similarly to this. This is one of the reasons the Wii has mindshare - they don't region-encode their games, but Sony and Microsoft do.
Nah, tuition's way cheaper when you're professional staff.
But still, even though one could try to get along just with the Media Center, in reality you'd want all the goodies that add on to it. It's like when you buy a house, you think "Oh, it only costs $465,000" and later you realize it was $465,000 plus 6 percent commission plus 2 percent closing costs and taxes plus you now have to buy drapes, tables, lights, and all the other things.
Spend $10,000 on a wall-mount 50 inch flat screen high end HDTV and a Sony Vaio VGX-XL202 and all the speakers and other things that go with it, and support DRM
- or -
Invest that money in getting a PhD so I can earn three times my salary and buy the exact same hardware for only $2000 in three years time.
Hmmm.
I think I'll go with option B.
I haven't seen a lot of children in the families of our supposed upper class. They tend to have one or two kids at most.
On the other hand, kids are more frequently found in the middle and lower classes.
Part of the risks of tallness are literally heart disease, and the difficulty of pumping so much blood. There are other systems which start failing as we reach higher levels of height, and in fact we notice an increase in the the American population of such problems over time.
How did the Linux users evolve? I assume they've already moved out to colonize other planets ...
They decided to swing both ways, since the whole Mac-Windows division of humanity meant little to them.
welcome our tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative overlords!!!!
I think you meant our short, squat, well developed and bigger-brained overlords.
Height tends to shorten one's lifespan.
If you were looking at such things, you'd have to ask who they were sampling. Seems to me the European groups (including many Americans) are in decline, and other groups are increasing.
On a genetic level, race is pretty meaningless, however, from a scientific perspective.
I never said I wasn't buying a PS3. I'm just not going to buy one now. I have a GameCube, and xBox, and a PS2 at home.
I bought the GameCube when they came out, bought the xBox probably a year after they came out - once they had a few games I wanted (but am disappointed with the lack of titles still), and my son bought the PS2 just this summer - he got lots of games used from his friends - cheap.
I've preordered a Wii and am probably picking up a bundle at CostCo or Fred Meyer or ToysRUs or Target on release day as well - since a friend of his missed out on a preorder and I know marketing and sales and where to hunt.
I'm down on the 360, but might get one if I can find a store that sells Japan-release games they pushed that will work with a US box and do English subtitles, don't care for sports or FPS titles on the whole. Especially now that the price dropped. Don't have HDTV until 2009 at the earliest when they will sell for $300 for a decent set (classic market price curve).
I'll probably buy a PS3 - with a lot of Japanese games that work in US region - when the price drops to $250 retail. By that point I might actually want to buy HDTV, of course. Should be able to get used US game titles for $20 by then.
But buying it now is a waste. Especially with all the first-release tech problems. I'll let others be the guineau pigs.
By the time most people have HDTVs, we'll be three or four console generations further along anyway. Not only do the prices have to come down massively, but a lot more content has to be produced in HDTV to make it viable, and they have to make smaller versions (believe it or not but most people don't even have the room for a 50" TV).
Exactly. By the time we reach 50 percent utilization of HDTV it will be 2010 - most people will use their 2001 or older TV sets with their digital cable boxes quite nicely to see HDTV (at lower res). Market adoption curves currently projected - as I read in the print edition of the Wall Street Journal - show that we won't have full adoption of 1080p HDTV until at least 2015.
No matter what Sony wants, them's the cold hard facts.
Exactly how old are you? I'm 23, and my first hard disk was 20MB. I wouldn't consider myself to be old.
I'm not the original poster, but I'm 46 and my first computer didn't have hard disks. I built my first one on an S-100 bus, hand-soldering (sautering) the boards and pushing in the memory and other chips onto the boards, laying tracks.
My next computer didn't have hard disks either, it was an Apple II+ with 48K (yes, K) of RAM (a lot, then) that I bumped up to 172K with an add-in 128K board and dual floppies (5.25 inch). I sometimes used 8 inch CP/M and IBM floppies on mainframes and mini-computers (they go in upside down).
My third computer had an external 20 GB hard drive on a SCSI II connector that was faster than other Macs (it was a Mac SE with dual floppy 3.5 inch drives). Other Macs at the time had 10 GB internal drives that ran more slowly. The hard disk weighed more than a heavy laptop does now.
Your mileage may vary.
I'd rather play a game in high resolution on my HDTV than in low resolution on an old TV. Simple as that - you're out of your mind.
And I'd rather save the $2000 for a decent sized HDTV like the 85 percent of consumers, and wait a few years until 2010 to buy one for only $300 that's the same size.
I think the PS3 will probably sell for $250 by that point as well. And it might have more games I'd actually play by then.
In the meantime, I'll be enjoying my Wii and playing fun games that work now, not living on the bleeding edge.
t remains up to the game publishers how bloated their games will turn out in the end. 25GB (or 50Gb for that matter) might pave the way to mayhem, if nobody is forced to trim out the garbage anymore before shipping, but all it actually offers to the vendors is c h o i c e.
Exactly. However, in our experience in the gaming community, we should pay attention to the reality that what is likely to grow in terms of data storage on game disks is likely in-game ads, cut-scenes (both in length, in number, in alternative choices, etc), game previews, movie previews, and mini-games (add-ons). The addition of alternative cut-scenes (based upon play) is actually a very good thing, in the hands of a good game story editor, in that they are less restricted. I don't know how many times I've run across a game cut-scene where it said things like "now you will grow up to be a warrior with this powerful weapon" when my character already had: a. more powerful weapons and b. was pretty danged huge as I'd maxed out physique and strength by that point.
Nintendo completely redesigned their controller to make games more fun, while Sony added capacity so people can watch high-resolution cutscenes. Just because a large group of people all disagree with you doesn't mean you're the one doing the thinking.
Every time I want to play a game, it's amazing how often I say to myself "You know, this game needs more cutscenes so that I can sit there and watch the same thing over and over and over and not get to play the game for an even longer period of time!".
While I'm sure this is great news for graphics artists, wire frame designers, and pixel plotters, it doesn't mean we gamers will thank them for it.
Translation: More unnecessary splash screens, more in-game ads, more non-skippable scenes between action, and longer time to play what should be a short game.
Information exands to fill the space available. And so does dreck.