Well if you think about it logically - it should be higher than normal. Maybe not by much, but higher.
You've just tricked pirates into playing a trial of your game, basically. At least a few of those pirates should now be willing to buy it since there is nowhere to get it free yet, and they are impatient.
Maybe it isn't overpriced right now, but if the single guy with the vision and sales charisma for the company dies then you start getting less polished products that aren't marketed quite as well. This results in lower profits and it ends up being overvalued. That is what people are worried about - not that the PE bad currently.
If you aren't day trading usually you want to take into account catastrophes that are likely to happen to a company in the medium term - and Jobs dying has a pretty good probability, especially considering his previous health issues.
Supporting personal privacy, yet wanting government to be transparent is not a dichotomy - especially when government officials end up taking away personal privacy to protect or increase their power.
A minimal government that doesn't play puppet master with world politics, try to protect citizens against themselves, and doesn't spend on pork projects is a government without need for much privacy. The reason governments hide most things isn't to protect the country - it's to protect the duplicitous government officials from the watchful eye of the citizens.
If we were honestly paying for things like that then you might have a point. Most of our tax money is redistribution of wealth though. The "rich" (>40k/yr) pay for the services for everyone else. (ever noticed how much of your property taxes are for education? huge percentage - even if you don't have kids)
If we were really paying for our own police, fire, etc we'd be paying a flat tax amount and not a percentage of income. It would also come out to be a much smaller amount per individual than each person pays now except for the very poorest.
In an Apple vs Google fight it isn't surprising that a heavily Apple-biased blogger like Gruber would ask those questions. Aside from 2 and 3 - which are (rhetorical?) company intention questions that only Google can answer - the rest are fairly easy.
1. Flash is already established, it isn't relevant to 'innovation' - the direction browsers are moving. Removing it would serve no purpose.
4. Netflix uses Microsoft's DRM, but the other large players he list easily have the resources to use whatever the current standard is. If all browsers support WebM and only half support H264 then why would they dual-encode - all they would need to do is re-encode current content in WebM and drop H264 support completely (which might also save some license fees - bonus)
5. Apple supporters are probably the group that's unhappy with this - since they're the company that's been pushing H264 for a long time. It will cost Apple money to re-encode all their video content and add new open codecs to their products - or they get left behind the curve. Pragmatic people just want a solution that works with all the browsers, and so do end users.
In the end I think this could turn out very well for Google. They can cost Apple development money, and help create a free universal standard at the same time. All it costs them is server time to re-encode some youtube videos, and they come out looking like a forward thinking company and puts the spotlight on Apple's walled garden approach to technology.
I remember reading that Comcast has an opt-out for the non-standard 404 pages, I'm sure other ISPs have a similar option if you look hard enough. Probably easier just to use external DNS instead though
Shadowrun tried that and the PC gamers destroyed the console players even though the console players had auto-aim. I doubt anyone is crazy enough to try that again in a FPS
"When it comes to perception, a deep discount gets people playing the game that [they] wouldn't play otherwise, and I think that has both positive and negative effects," Carmel told Ars. "The negative is that if I'm willing to pay $5 but not $20, I probably don't want to play that game very much, so maybe I'm not as excited about it after I play it and maybe I drive down the average appreciation of the game.
I very much disagree with this sentiment. Maybe he's referring to reviewer scores, but appreciation itself is not a zero sum game. If person A loves a game, and person B only enjoys it slightly - there was still more enjoyment derived than if only person A had played it...
I love buying games at $5-10 - not only do I get ~7 for the price of a new retail game, but there isn't any urge to "get my moneys worth". If I enjoy it great - and if not I don't feel bad because it was only a couple bucks - on to the next one. That's how it should be - getting something you enjoy, not feeling pressured to play something you really don't because you paid a lot for it.
Also from a marketing perspective I would expect to see more glowing reviews this way - people who don't care probably won't talk about your game - but there will be a few that picked it up on a whim and loved it. Those are the people who will tell their friends about the great deal/gem they found.
Not knowing much about sonic booms I decided to take a look at the Wikipedia article - it seems to indicate that sonic booms are created by overpressure (of air being forced out of the way of the plane) and that the booms continue the entire time the plane is over mach 1.1 or so (boom carpet?)
If that isn't right feel free to correct me. I always thought the boom was only on entering/exiting mach 1, so that's news to me.
They might not need it - my cell phone (Sprint/Nextel) doesn't get a signal past the registers at my local Walmart for some reason. At the Target less than a block away with a store of the same size my phone works fine throughout the store. So whatever that Walmart is doing blocks phones without using illegal jammer technology. (Quite annoying when you're trying to do research to figure out which product is best for your needs!)
And yet there's probably also many many that have at some point pirated games but also/now pay for them. I know when I was in college and didn't have a job I didn't pay for many games - now I work and don't pirate any at all. (Though I won't pay high prices for games I'm not sure if I'll enjoy)
Lately I've been picking up a lot of year or two old games off Steam and GFWL (they offer $1 deals every week or two) for cheap and enjoying them. When games cost $5 you can buy a lot and not feel bad tossing one aside because you don't enjoy it.
I donated $5 - mostly to the developers for the HB2, because I played a Machinarium demo a while ago and it was a clever and pretty little game. Even if I only play the bundle for a few hours it's worth it. Compare that to big name retail releases you pay $50 for and then have to get a lot out of to feel like you got your moneys worth. (And I also appreciate the devs making a linux version even though I run windows as well)
From personal experience - reputation imbues what you say with credibility. I interact with a lot of people online, and have a reputation for being knowledgeable about certain things.
I've tried speaking to the same people in the same way anonymously (as a different person) - and I can tell you it makes a huge difference in how much credence people give what you say.
Consider the difference between a scandal leaked by Donald Rumsfeld vs one leaked by a plumber from the Pentagon - one instantly has credibility, the other starts from a conspiracy theory angle and has to fight to be believed.
First thing I'd do is look for the off button when installing a release with this feature. Twice I've had an in place upgrade hose my Ubuntu system - and usually it results in quirky bugs if it doesn't entirely blow up. That's enough of that nonsense - every couple years I do a full fresh install and copy over all the important files from my old install.
It seems like Ubuntu is going the way of Firefox, Pidgin, and other open source software - making unilateral changes the users haven't necessarily requested or possibly downright don't want. Pidgin auto-resizing text boxes and Firefox magic navigation bar are easily on par with moving my window managers close/min/max button positions.
Lesson for open source: people are often happy with how something already is - put an option in settings to reset it to the old default when you make major cosmetic changes to your software. I wouldn't be using XYZ software if it wasn't already working for me. Thanks
What they should do is charge more for "Enhanced Security" flights where you have to go through patdowns and scanners. See if people really care enough about their "safety" to pay more for it. If they do then the airlines make more money, and if they don't then we can get rid of a lot of TSA costs.
Don't worry, just a trial run so they can pick out distinguishing characteristics from the scans. Soon they can just store 50 reference points from the scans and identify people without passports or anything, like fingerprinting. The ultimate biometric identification system.
The way I read the whole situation sounds like open source developers forked the project to keep Oracle honest and prevent them from turning years of open source work into a closed source profit center. Oracle wants full rights on the project so they're trying to kick out all the developers that want to run parallel projects.
The open source developers don't see it as a conflict of interest since they are perfectly happy to contribute their updates to both development streams - and it doesn't become a conflict until Oracle tries to start making proprietary changes and preventing those changes from being ported over to the 'more free' project.
I don't see the problem here - the guy was so cheap he didn't want to pay $6.25/month for fire department protection, so he didn't get the services. Exactly the same as getting cancer after choosing not to pay for health insurance.
I think the problem with offering a one time fire-fighting fee of $7500 or whatever is that people would fight it in court as a decision made under duress, and might actually win.
It really depends on what they mean by rated - if they include 'not interested' (aka the rating count they show on the "movies you'll love" page), then I have 17344 ratings. However, I estimate I've probably only watched about 2000-3000 movies and TV series (not all through Netflix, of course).
Why do I do it? Because I like to be able to see on my queue when things will be added/removed from watch instantly. Seems like a lot of work, but it really isn't if you sit browsing through descriptions while you watch a movie. Probably only took me a few days rating for a couple hours a day to get through the entire WI section.
They recently changed the way the WI browse genres worked - it used to not display anything already in your queue, which was nice - when they made the change I had to give everything in my queue a temporary rating to make it disappear again - slightly annoying. I like to know that when I use browse I am seeing things I haven't evaluated before.
In case anyone is curious, your DVD queue has a limit of 500 titles, and you can add an additional 500 to the Watch Instantly queue. Currently at 406 and 375 respectively. It's nice to be able to browse quickly down a list of titles I'm actually interested in, rather than all the garbage that surrounds the WI gems.
And that doesn't even factor in that if you have other shows on Netflix Watch Instantly you can consume as many of those episodes as you want for free, on most Netflix plans.
I actually designed and coded a website like this - but there is a lot more potential to gain from item based sites than location based achievements. For me, it serves as a database of all the films and TV shows I've seen - so I didn't forget specific reasons for liking/hating a movie. I can also check in an instant whether I've seen something, rather than having to read through a description or watch a trailer. The equivalent to the Twitter/Facebook updates from my site would be Yelp reviews posted to your Facebook wall when you wrote them - much more useful than just a "here I am!"
I know of another similar site for books (mine supports books, music, and video games, as well, but the main focus so far has been the movie/TV features) that allows you to track how many pages you've read in a book, etc - could be pretty useful if you read a bunch of books at once, and have to return some to the library before you're done.
If anyone has feedback/ideas/suggestions feel free to post them here, or use the contact form on http://shortreviews.net/ - even though the site is fairly young I've dedicated a lot of time to features that I thought were useful, but I'm always looking for ways to improve it for other people. If you doubt my passion and dedication you can always take a glance at the reviews I've written and amount of movies I've watched http://shortreviews.net/user/1-unfair/:)
The coverage on the last article I think someone mentioned you can be charged for false accusations in Sweden. Also consider that the first prosecutor could be dirty (as with the Pirate Bay raid), and a higher up prosecutor saw it and immediately took over the case and dismissed the charges to save face and avoid repercussions.
There are probably more scenarios, but those two are the first that came to mind - just because it lasted less than 24 hours doesn't have any bearing on whether it was or wasn't intentional character assassination.
I think the difference is whether the data is secret or not. With music they are offering to share it with millions of people for a nominal fee - but in the case of company data I think of customer names, contacts for sales people, etc - things a normal company wouldn't sell but was integral to their business. Data that if given to a competitor might pose a significant advantage/threat.
Take the formula for Coca-Cola for instance - if someone quit and sold the recipe under the table to Pepsi I think most people would agree that was stealing. Transferring private data with significant impact can actually cost a company money - as opposed to copyright infringement - where the plaintiff may not make money, but the infringement doesn't incur an extra cost.
To me the current 3D is lackluster - though I would be interested in technology that would allow you to actually view and rotate a movie action scene in three dimensions. Imagine watching a movie in three dimensions projected from a turntable on your lap - that would actually add value. Want to watch a specific person during a dialog scene - rotate to watch them rather than being stuck watching the camera jump between two people conversing.
Yes it would remove some of the art from directing - but it would actually give you a new movie-viewing experience. The current 3D is the equivalent of DVD vs 1080p - it adds some eye candy, but doesn't change the intrinsic value of a film, a bad one is still bad. B/W to color was a much bigger change than 2D to "3D" and even that doesn't change the value of a film - there are plenty of classic B/W films that are better than 95% of the color films. Story and acting ability are where the value resides, and that will never change.
Well if you read a lot you can order 5 at a time or so off Amazon ahead of time. This gives you free super saver shipping, cheaper than ebooks, and technically no delivery wait since you're always ordering before you finish your current books.
So a Kindle for example is the cost of approximately 30 paperbacks, with no tangible upsides, unless you're a person that wants to carry around a lot of books for some reason. (I think most people just read one book at a time)
Slashdot Mirror
Well if you think about it logically - it should be higher than normal. Maybe not by much, but higher.
You've just tricked pirates into playing a trial of your game, basically. At least a few of those pirates should now be willing to buy it since there is nowhere to get it free yet, and they are impatient.
Maybe it isn't overpriced right now, but if the single guy with the vision and sales charisma for the company dies then you start getting less polished products that aren't marketed quite as well. This results in lower profits and it ends up being overvalued. That is what people are worried about - not that the PE bad currently.
If you aren't day trading usually you want to take into account catastrophes that are likely to happen to a company in the medium term - and Jobs dying has a pretty good probability, especially considering his previous health issues.
Supporting personal privacy, yet wanting government to be transparent is not a dichotomy - especially when government officials end up taking away personal privacy to protect or increase their power.
A minimal government that doesn't play puppet master with world politics, try to protect citizens against themselves, and doesn't spend on pork projects is a government without need for much privacy. The reason governments hide most things isn't to protect the country - it's to protect the duplicitous government officials from the watchful eye of the citizens.
If we were honestly paying for things like that then you might have a point. Most of our tax money is redistribution of wealth though. The "rich" (>40k/yr) pay for the services for everyone else. (ever noticed how much of your property taxes are for education? huge percentage - even if you don't have kids)
If we were really paying for our own police, fire, etc we'd be paying a flat tax amount and not a percentage of income. It would also come out to be a much smaller amount per individual than each person pays now except for the very poorest.
In an Apple vs Google fight it isn't surprising that a heavily Apple-biased blogger like Gruber would ask those questions. Aside from 2 and 3 - which are (rhetorical?) company intention questions that only Google can answer - the rest are fairly easy.
1. Flash is already established, it isn't relevant to 'innovation' - the direction browsers are moving. Removing it would serve no purpose.
4. Netflix uses Microsoft's DRM, but the other large players he list easily have the resources to use whatever the current standard is. If all browsers support WebM and only half support H264 then why would they dual-encode - all they would need to do is re-encode current content in WebM and drop H264 support completely (which might also save some license fees - bonus)
5. Apple supporters are probably the group that's unhappy with this - since they're the company that's been pushing H264 for a long time. It will cost Apple money to re-encode all their video content and add new open codecs to their products - or they get left behind the curve. Pragmatic people just want a solution that works with all the browsers, and so do end users.
In the end I think this could turn out very well for Google. They can cost Apple development money, and help create a free universal standard at the same time. All it costs them is server time to re-encode some youtube videos, and they come out looking like a forward thinking company and puts the spotlight on Apple's walled garden approach to technology.
I remember reading that Comcast has an opt-out for the non-standard 404 pages, I'm sure other ISPs have a similar option if you look hard enough. Probably easier just to use external DNS instead though
Shadowrun tried that and the PC gamers destroyed the console players even though the console players had auto-aim. I doubt anyone is crazy enough to try that again in a FPS
"When it comes to perception, a deep discount gets people playing the game that [they] wouldn't play otherwise, and I think that has both positive and negative effects," Carmel told Ars. "The negative is that if I'm willing to pay $5 but not $20, I probably don't want to play that game very much, so maybe I'm not as excited about it after I play it and maybe I drive down the average appreciation of the game.
I very much disagree with this sentiment. Maybe he's referring to reviewer scores, but appreciation itself is not a zero sum game. If person A loves a game, and person B only enjoys it slightly - there was still more enjoyment derived than if only person A had played it...
I love buying games at $5-10 - not only do I get ~7 for the price of a new retail game, but there isn't any urge to "get my moneys worth". If I enjoy it great - and if not I don't feel bad because it was only a couple bucks - on to the next one. That's how it should be - getting something you enjoy, not feeling pressured to play something you really don't because you paid a lot for it.
Also from a marketing perspective I would expect to see more glowing reviews this way - people who don't care probably won't talk about your game - but there will be a few that picked it up on a whim and loved it. Those are the people who will tell their friends about the great deal/gem they found.
Not knowing much about sonic booms I decided to take a look at the Wikipedia article - it seems to indicate that sonic booms are created by overpressure (of air being forced out of the way of the plane) and that the booms continue the entire time the plane is over mach 1.1 or so (boom carpet?)
If that isn't right feel free to correct me. I always thought the boom was only on entering/exiting mach 1, so that's news to me.
They might not need it - my cell phone (Sprint/Nextel) doesn't get a signal past the registers at my local Walmart for some reason. At the Target less than a block away with a store of the same size my phone works fine throughout the store. So whatever that Walmart is doing blocks phones without using illegal jammer technology. (Quite annoying when you're trying to do research to figure out which product is best for your needs!)
He's referring to the analysis they did on the first HB which found that 25% more people downloaded it than 'paid' for it, even though they could have obtained it legally. Explained in their blog post here:
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Saving-a-penny----pirating-the-Humble-Indie-Bundle
And yet there's probably also many many that have at some point pirated games but also/now pay for them. I know when I was in college and didn't have a job I didn't pay for many games - now I work and don't pirate any at all. (Though I won't pay high prices for games I'm not sure if I'll enjoy)
Lately I've been picking up a lot of year or two old games off Steam and GFWL (they offer $1 deals every week or two) for cheap and enjoying them. When games cost $5 you can buy a lot and not feel bad tossing one aside because you don't enjoy it.
I donated $5 - mostly to the developers for the HB2, because I played a Machinarium demo a while ago and it was a clever and pretty little game. Even if I only play the bundle for a few hours it's worth it. Compare that to big name retail releases you pay $50 for and then have to get a lot out of to feel like you got your moneys worth. (And I also appreciate the devs making a linux version even though I run windows as well)
From personal experience - reputation imbues what you say with credibility. I interact with a lot of people online, and have a reputation for being knowledgeable about certain things.
I've tried speaking to the same people in the same way anonymously (as a different person) - and I can tell you it makes a huge difference in how much credence people give what you say.
Consider the difference between a scandal leaked by Donald Rumsfeld vs one leaked by a plumber from the Pentagon - one instantly has credibility, the other starts from a conspiracy theory angle and has to fight to be believed.
First thing I'd do is look for the off button when installing a release with this feature. Twice I've had an in place upgrade hose my Ubuntu system - and usually it results in quirky bugs if it doesn't entirely blow up. That's enough of that nonsense - every couple years I do a full fresh install and copy over all the important files from my old install.
It seems like Ubuntu is going the way of Firefox, Pidgin, and other open source software - making unilateral changes the users haven't necessarily requested or possibly downright don't want. Pidgin auto-resizing text boxes and Firefox magic navigation bar are easily on par with moving my window managers close/min/max button positions.
Lesson for open source: people are often happy with how something already is - put an option in settings to reset it to the old default when you make major cosmetic changes to your software. I wouldn't be using XYZ software if it wasn't already working for me. Thanks
What they should do is charge more for "Enhanced Security" flights where you have to go through patdowns and scanners. See if people really care enough about their "safety" to pay more for it. If they do then the airlines make more money, and if they don't then we can get rid of a lot of TSA costs.
Don't worry, just a trial run so they can pick out distinguishing characteristics from the scans. Soon they can just store 50 reference points from the scans and identify people without passports or anything, like fingerprinting. The ultimate biometric identification system.
The way I read the whole situation sounds like open source developers forked the project to keep Oracle honest and prevent them from turning years of open source work into a closed source profit center. Oracle wants full rights on the project so they're trying to kick out all the developers that want to run parallel projects.
The open source developers don't see it as a conflict of interest since they are perfectly happy to contribute their updates to both development streams - and it doesn't become a conflict until Oracle tries to start making proprietary changes and preventing those changes from being ported over to the 'more free' project.
I don't see the problem here - the guy was so cheap he didn't want to pay $6.25/month for fire department protection, so he didn't get the services. Exactly the same as getting cancer after choosing not to pay for health insurance.
I think the problem with offering a one time fire-fighting fee of $7500 or whatever is that people would fight it in court as a decision made under duress, and might actually win.
It really depends on what they mean by rated - if they include 'not interested' (aka the rating count they show on the "movies you'll love" page), then I have 17344 ratings. However, I estimate I've probably only watched about 2000-3000 movies and TV series (not all through Netflix, of course).
Why do I do it? Because I like to be able to see on my queue when things will be added/removed from watch instantly. Seems like a lot of work, but it really isn't if you sit browsing through descriptions while you watch a movie. Probably only took me a few days rating for a couple hours a day to get through the entire WI section.
They recently changed the way the WI browse genres worked - it used to not display anything already in your queue, which was nice - when they made the change I had to give everything in my queue a temporary rating to make it disappear again - slightly annoying. I like to know that when I use browse I am seeing things I haven't evaluated before.
In case anyone is curious, your DVD queue has a limit of 500 titles, and you can add an additional 500 to the Watch Instantly queue. Currently at 406 and 375 respectively. It's nice to be able to browse quickly down a list of titles I'm actually interested in, rather than all the garbage that surrounds the WI gems.
And that doesn't even factor in that if you have other shows on Netflix Watch Instantly you can consume as many of those episodes as you want for free, on most Netflix plans.
I actually designed and coded a website like this - but there is a lot more potential to gain from item based sites than location based achievements. For me, it serves as a database of all the films and TV shows I've seen - so I didn't forget specific reasons for liking/hating a movie. I can also check in an instant whether I've seen something, rather than having to read through a description or watch a trailer. The equivalent to the Twitter/Facebook updates from my site would be Yelp reviews posted to your Facebook wall when you wrote them - much more useful than just a "here I am!"
I know of another similar site for books (mine supports books, music, and video games, as well, but the main focus so far has been the movie/TV features) that allows you to track how many pages you've read in a book, etc - could be pretty useful if you read a bunch of books at once, and have to return some to the library before you're done.
If anyone has feedback/ideas/suggestions feel free to post them here, or use the contact form on http://shortreviews.net/ - even though the site is fairly young I've dedicated a lot of time to features that I thought were useful, but I'm always looking for ways to improve it for other people. If you doubt my passion and dedication you can always take a glance at the reviews I've written and amount of movies I've watched http://shortreviews.net/user/1-unfair/ :)
The coverage on the last article I think someone mentioned you can be charged for false accusations in Sweden. Also consider that the first prosecutor could be dirty (as with the Pirate Bay raid), and a higher up prosecutor saw it and immediately took over the case and dismissed the charges to save face and avoid repercussions.
There are probably more scenarios, but those two are the first that came to mind - just because it lasted less than 24 hours doesn't have any bearing on whether it was or wasn't intentional character assassination.
I think the difference is whether the data is secret or not. With music they are offering to share it with millions of people for a nominal fee - but in the case of company data I think of customer names, contacts for sales people, etc - things a normal company wouldn't sell but was integral to their business. Data that if given to a competitor might pose a significant advantage/threat.
Take the formula for Coca-Cola for instance - if someone quit and sold the recipe under the table to Pepsi I think most people would agree that was stealing. Transferring private data with significant impact can actually cost a company money - as opposed to copyright infringement - where the plaintiff may not make money, but the infringement doesn't incur an extra cost.
To me the current 3D is lackluster - though I would be interested in technology that would allow you to actually view and rotate a movie action scene in three dimensions. Imagine watching a movie in three dimensions projected from a turntable on your lap - that would actually add value. Want to watch a specific person during a dialog scene - rotate to watch them rather than being stuck watching the camera jump between two people conversing.
Yes it would remove some of the art from directing - but it would actually give you a new movie-viewing experience. The current 3D is the equivalent of DVD vs 1080p - it adds some eye candy, but doesn't change the intrinsic value of a film, a bad one is still bad. B/W to color was a much bigger change than 2D to "3D" and even that doesn't change the value of a film - there are plenty of classic B/W films that are better than 95% of the color films. Story and acting ability are where the value resides, and that will never change.
Well if you read a lot you can order 5 at a time or so off Amazon ahead of time. This gives you free super saver shipping, cheaper than ebooks, and technically no delivery wait since you're always ordering before you finish your current books.
So a Kindle for example is the cost of approximately 30 paperbacks, with no tangible upsides, unless you're a person that wants to carry around a lot of books for some reason. (I think most people just read one book at a time)