The article seemed to say that the ink cartriges are actually cheaper than the current epson/etc ones. Did you not read the article, or do you have some reason to believe it's wrong?
Except that the Wii problem doesn't seem to be undersupply to me. The SuperTarget near me gets 60 Wii consoles per week. Multiply that times the number of other Target, Walmart, etc stores around the country.
So we're talking about a minimum of a quarter of a million consoles being shipped each week - maybe more like half a million? That fits in with reports of them boosting production capacity to a million a month. (Maybe more now, that was January) There are only 300 million people in the US - my guess is that they just underestimated demand. I doubt they would carry intentional undersupply this far along from release date. (Remember, Nintendo MAKES money on their consoles..)
The article is *extremely* light on details, but if they're talking about one way signals like current radio then you'd only be able to cache the internet on a set top box, for instance... say if it rebroadcast a set of sites every 24 hours in a continuous loop. Otherwise it would have to act similar to wifi... but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.
I'm not an engineer or anything, just basing the power off the amount/size tower they need to cover an area. One possibility could be to use regular radio towers to broadcast on their end, and small directional dishes to send user requests?
Shouldn't the states have control of the airports within them? If that were the case then you could fly to any other state that had rejected the Real ID as well.
I'd be curious to know exactly what law gives the federal government control over who can fly, instead of the airlines or the airport. If there is such a law, is it constitutional? Interstate commerce is the only federal juristiction I can think of that's close - but that doesn't apply to civilian passengers with nothing to sell...
Creativity and innovation is far more important than mirroring and aggregating content that I can easily find online or - god forbid - in an actual book (Which I can look up online from home if I wish).
Wikipedia in a way illustrates the problem the internet age has thrust upon us - we are too busy gathering and cataloging all the possible information, obsessed with collecting every nuance of unimportant topics. As a result our innovation stagnates. That is the effect I see our current attitudes having on society/economy - wikipedia itself is just an outgrowth of that, and can't really be cited as a major influence in and of itself.
The difference between wikipedia and the first paper encyclopedia is the value of the information (not to mention the questionable veracity of any given section) e.g. Think the difference between an article on the Simpsons and one on George Washington.
I might sound old fashioned, but I'm in my early twenties and grew up on the internet, for what it's worth.
It's like any other resource - you buy material (bandwidth for your site, and disk space), build a product (web site), then resell it. If you choose to give it away rather than selling it, that's your choice. If you can't find the demand to pay for your product, then maybe you need to consider altering your business model or product.
I donate to open source projects - but I've never donated to wikipedia. Mostly I base it on how much I'm interested in/use an item/project, and I rarely visit wikipedia - and usually when I do there are other similar google results where I can get the same information, wikipedia just has a slightly cleaner aggregation of it.
That said, the amount of money they need to run is massive - it seems like for the same amount of donations you could fund tons of smaller and arguably more important open source projects. Paying 100 devs $50,000 a year.. or even 50 devs $100,000 a year. That amount of money will buy you a lot of skill and creativity. Give a good project manager 10 devs @ $100,000 a year and I wager within a year or two you could produce an entire open source graphics engine that would rival DX10, just as an example. (Yes, I know about OpenGL, this is just an example) Five projects the size/importance of a graphics engine seems like a far better use of the money than a site aggregating data.
Reminds me of the repair spiders in Deus Ex. Now all we have to do is equip them with weapons and they can hunt sneaky terrists. Funny how all the classic conspiracy theories/times leading up to bad things in history are mirrored in our current societal situation. Makes you wonder if the signs always foreshadow the bad things, or if there are times where the crisis was averted and history just doesn't remember them.
These are the sacred rules of Slashdot to decide which of the two opposing parties is actually the good one in any given fight. If both parties are equal, proceed to the next step.
1. Small business = good, big business = bad 2. open source = good, proprietary = bad 3. rootkits = bad 4. suing people = bad 5. lots of patents = bad 6. internet related = good 7. given all above items are equal, put on wizard's cap and role 16-sided die for one party. If it is even they are good; odd is evil. first poster to declare their results determines the outcome unless they make a typo - in which case the first person calling them an idiot or troll will determine the good/evil ratio of the two opposing parties.
My guess is that Bush & Company realize that if they raise taxes there will be far more outcry against the war. If it doesn't cost us anything then moderates can afford to be apathetic - but once it starts costing, everyone takes a side.
Can't have an infinite war if your country is screaming for your head... remember, the American public cares most about money - if you don't hurt the dollar then 50% of people are fine with you, at least in the short run (4-8 years).
The thing that mystifies me is that people who doubt the intentions of pretty much everyone else in government somehow can't believe he is anything other than a "good man" trying to do what he thinks is morally right. As if there isn't any possibility that he's as corrupt as any other politicians.
I may be conservative on a number of issues (true conservative, not republican conservative) - but for some reason I don't trust the guy. Seeing him put people like Alberto Gonzales in office seems like an indication that he isn't as sweet as he acts.
Illegal and against the Terms of Service are two totally different things.
Here's a more solid example if you're unclear:
People can (And do) sell AOL screennames for quite a bit of money. It's against the terms of service and they'll kill your account if they catch you. It is not illegal though.
What position was the agent in that had access to this database? I mean sure he had high clearance, but not everyone with high clearance should have access to the password database... what kind of security are they running here?
If he really was in a valid position to need access to it, then they definitely need to screen the mental abilities of people they give sensitive positions more carefully - any half way decent sysadmin knows not to give their password out.
From the article I'd guess you aren't going to get anything close to rich even if you make a 'hit' game on SL:
"The final word for pwning game development should go to Eckhart Dillon, lead creator of Tech War, winner of this year's SL Game Developer Contest, which took in the L$ equivalent of nearly $2500 during the two months of its run."
The ones making the real cash are buying games, running contests with them, that sort of thing:
"One resident named Games Prototype, for example, created and runs a franchise of hugely popular SL casinos and by his estimate, clears $2,000-3,000 monthly for about ten hours of weekly work."
Note that even if the guy in the second example actually created his own games, that isn't what is making him the money. It's using the games to run a casino. It's similar to an article I saw a while ago about the "prostitutes" on SL - the ones giving the virtual sex make a fairly small amount, but the people who run the brothels are really raking in the cash.
I do agree that it isn't stealing, but I'd have to alter your example slightly:
Copying is not stealing. If I touched your sofa, which you were trying to sell at a garage sale, produced an exact copy, and walked off with the copy, guess what? You still have the original.
Yes, I still have my sofa, and you have your exact replica - but I might be a bit miffed because of the lost sale opportunity. However, if you made a copy of my sofa in order to take it home and see how it fit in your living room - that would be a totally different situation all together.
That's the difference between those who download and never buy, and those who download and then buy the decent stuff. Unfortunately there isn't any good way for the record companies to differentiate between those two types currently.
What I would propose the record companies do is come up with a subscription plan - pay a certain amount per month for all the music you want, and at the end of the month you get to decide which groups that money is split between. That would keep the good bands in business and the horrid ones would die. Of course they would have to do it without DRM for me to be happy with it. Yes some people will abuse it and pay for one month and then download everything and cancel - but they already do that with P2P anyway, it's just a cost of doing business.
A second idea I thought up a while ago was basically giving out 'screeners' - find the people who influence everyone elses buying habits, and then offer that 1-2% of people unrestricted free access to the whole music library. In return, their friends end up buying music they recommend.. If you wanted to do it scientifically you could give people referrer IDs that their friends could use for a 5% discount, thereby being able to monitor who was buying from each recommender.
I don't know what experience these people asking for higher resolutions are used to - I'm guessing they use CRT monitors. 1680 x 1050 is pretty standard for 20" widescreen flat panels. It isn't "light on the pixels" as some of them have been saying. Frankly, I don't know why you'd want to go for a higher resolution on a 20" - your fonts would be tiny at the "normal" settings.
Some people just want a reason to bitch and moan about everything.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I don't know of anyone that buys music videos, and I'm only 21. Classically, music videos are the free things on MTV and VH1 used to promote the music.
Why would I pay for something that I have to watch and can't just turn on while I'm doing other stuff, unless it is going to provide me with some new content? Once I have seen a music video once, why would I ever want one enough to pay for it again? This isn't a movie or even porn we're talking about here. This is just another example of the RIAA inflating the amount of money they actually gain from something.
Unless they're charging over a dollar each for these they would have to have sold 1.2 million per month - that's 41,000 per day. I find that highly unlikely. Nothing to see here, just the RIAA trying to squeeze blood from a turnip and screwing themselves out of a perfectly good advertising method.
A pretty girl on a music video with a good voice will make me more likely to buy a CD or song, but not if they try to make me pay for the music video, I'll just stop watching them.
The top winner didn't get much in the way of prizes. Softimage XSI, yeah I know it's expensive - but if the developer is already making games without it, it's questionable whether he needs it or not. The rest of the prizes are fairly small.
So does winning this contest gain you a considerable amount of notoriety or am I missing something?
Personally, I think parents need to stand up and do some actual parenting, but aside from that, this sentence stuck out:
"He also engaged in implied sex with a prostitute in a rocking vehicle before chasing her across a parking lot and beating her to recoup his cash." (Emphasis added)
Since when was implied sex ever an issue? We've had that in movies for what, 70 years now at least? I could see graphic sex, or even just sex being an issue... granted I haven't played the game but that's what the article says...
I think once Jack gets done with this he should go after Britney Spears because of implied sex in her songs.;P
It does take quite a while to download all 29 pages though. Definitely far longer than it should. I'm still waiting for it to finish loading, but I can see it's been downloading stuff, unlike the first one.
Well, I'm late to the party, but I don't see any other top level posts that contain the actual images from the videos (there were two different ones), so here you go - a page with images of the flying object directly from the DOD videos. Saved as a PNG so you don't lose any detail from an already horrid quality video.
I'm not a gold farmer, but as I continually read articles about them, I've come to wonder whos fault it really is.
It seems to me that gold farmers are just performing rote in game tasks. If they're automating it that would be cheating, of course - but assume we're talking about a person who manually farms gold. It's their choice what they do in-game - if gold farming is really so harmful isn't it the fault of the game designers for not programmatically stopping it? Can they truly not structure it in such a way that gold farming isn't effective?
That said, have the ill effects of gold farming actually been proven? I don't think I've actually seen anyone name a real game that has been destroyed by such activities, I'd be interested to know if one (or more) actually exist.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of business are you in?
We predict the future. The best way to predict the future... is to invent it.
-X-Files
The article seemed to say that the ink cartriges are actually cheaper than the current epson/etc ones. Did you not read the article, or do you have some reason to believe it's wrong?
Except that the Wii problem doesn't seem to be undersupply to me. The SuperTarget near me gets 60 Wii consoles per week. Multiply that times the number of other Target, Walmart, etc stores around the country.
o f_sup-lifestyle-walmart-stores-number-supercenters
Walmart alone has over 2000 *SuperCenters* judging from this statistic:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/lif_wal_sto_num_
(That means they have more regular stores as well)
So we're talking about a minimum of a quarter of a million consoles being shipped each week - maybe more like half a million? That fits in with reports of them boosting production capacity to a million a month. (Maybe more now, that was January) There are only 300 million people in the US - my guess is that they just underestimated demand. I doubt they would carry intentional undersupply this far along from release date. (Remember, Nintendo MAKES money on their consoles..)
The article is *extremely* light on details, but if they're talking about one way signals like current radio then you'd only be able to cache the internet on a set top box, for instance... say if it rebroadcast a set of sites every 24 hours in a continuous loop. Otherwise it would have to act similar to wifi... but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.
I'm not an engineer or anything, just basing the power off the amount/size tower they need to cover an area. One possibility could be to use regular radio towers to broadcast on their end, and small directional dishes to send user requests?
Shouldn't the states have control of the airports within them? If that were the case then you could fly to any other state that had rejected the Real ID as well.
I'd be curious to know exactly what law gives the federal government control over who can fly, instead of the airlines or the airport. If there is such a law, is it constitutional? Interstate commerce is the only federal juristiction I can think of that's close - but that doesn't apply to civilian passengers with nothing to sell...
Creativity and innovation is far more important than mirroring and aggregating content that I can easily find online or - god forbid - in an actual book (Which I can look up online from home if I wish).
Wikipedia in a way illustrates the problem the internet age has thrust upon us - we are too busy gathering and cataloging all the possible information, obsessed with collecting every nuance of unimportant topics. As a result our innovation stagnates. That is the effect I see our current attitudes having on society/economy - wikipedia itself is just an outgrowth of that, and can't really be cited as a major influence in and of itself.
The difference between wikipedia and the first paper encyclopedia is the value of the information (not to mention the questionable veracity of any given section) e.g. Think the difference between an article on the Simpsons and one on George Washington.
I might sound old fashioned, but I'm in my early twenties and grew up on the internet, for what it's worth.
It's like any other resource - you buy material (bandwidth for your site, and disk space), build a product (web site), then resell it. If you choose to give it away rather than selling it, that's your choice. If you can't find the demand to pay for your product, then maybe you need to consider altering your business model or product.
I donate to open source projects - but I've never donated to wikipedia. Mostly I base it on how much I'm interested in/use an item/project, and I rarely visit wikipedia - and usually when I do there are other similar google results where I can get the same information, wikipedia just has a slightly cleaner aggregation of it.
That said, the amount of money they need to run is massive - it seems like for the same amount of donations you could fund tons of smaller and arguably more important open source projects. Paying 100 devs $50,000 a year.. or even 50 devs $100,000 a year. That amount of money will buy you a lot of skill and creativity. Give a good project manager 10 devs @ $100,000 a year and I wager within a year or two you could produce an entire open source graphics engine that would rival DX10, just as an example. (Yes, I know about OpenGL, this is just an example) Five projects the size/importance of a graphics engine seems like a far better use of the money than a site aggregating data.
Reminds me of the repair spiders in Deus Ex. Now all we have to do is equip them with weapons and they can hunt sneaky terrists. Funny how all the classic conspiracy theories/times leading up to bad things in history are mirrored in our current societal situation. Makes you wonder if the signs always foreshadow the bad things, or if there are times where the crisis was averted and history just doesn't remember them.
These are the sacred rules of Slashdot to decide which of the two opposing parties is actually the good one in any given fight. If both parties are equal, proceed to the next step.
1. Small business = good, big business = bad
2. open source = good, proprietary = bad
3. rootkits = bad
4. suing people = bad
5. lots of patents = bad
6. internet related = good
7. given all above items are equal, put on wizard's cap and role 16-sided die for one party. If it is even they are good; odd is evil. first poster to declare their results determines the outcome unless they make a typo - in which case the first person calling them an idiot or troll will determine the good/evil ratio of the two opposing parties.
My guess is that Bush & Company realize that if they raise taxes there will be far more outcry against the war. If it doesn't cost us anything then moderates can afford to be apathetic - but once it starts costing, everyone takes a side.
Can't have an infinite war if your country is screaming for your head... remember, the American public cares most about money - if you don't hurt the dollar then 50% of people are fine with you, at least in the short run (4-8 years).
The thing that mystifies me is that people who doubt the intentions of pretty much everyone else in government somehow can't believe he is anything other than a "good man" trying to do what he thinks is morally right. As if there isn't any possibility that he's as corrupt as any other politicians.
I may be conservative on a number of issues (true conservative, not republican conservative) - but for some reason I don't trust the guy. Seeing him put people like Alberto Gonzales in office seems like an indication that he isn't as sweet as he acts.
Illegal and against the Terms of Service are two totally different things.
Here's a more solid example if you're unclear:
People can (And do) sell AOL screennames for quite a bit of money. It's against the terms of service and they'll kill your account if they catch you. It is not illegal though.
What position was the agent in that had access to this database? I mean sure he had high clearance, but not everyone with high clearance should have access to the password database... what kind of security are they running here?
If he really was in a valid position to need access to it, then they definitely need to screen the mental abilities of people they give sensitive positions more carefully - any half way decent sysadmin knows not to give their password out.
From the article I'd guess you aren't going to get anything close to rich even if you make a 'hit' game on SL:
"The final word for pwning game development should go to Eckhart Dillon, lead creator of Tech War, winner of this year's SL Game Developer Contest, which took in the L$ equivalent of nearly $2500 during the two months of its run."
The ones making the real cash are buying games, running contests with them, that sort of thing:
"One resident named Games Prototype, for example, created and runs a franchise of hugely popular SL casinos and by his estimate, clears $2,000-3,000 monthly for about ten hours of weekly work."
Note that even if the guy in the second example actually created his own games, that isn't what is making him the money. It's using the games to run a casino. It's similar to an article I saw a while ago about the "prostitutes" on SL - the ones giving the virtual sex make a fairly small amount, but the people who run the brothels are really raking in the cash.
It means killing 'terrists', of course! We all know that's the only current acceptable form of violence. ;P
I do agree that it isn't stealing, but I'd have to alter your example slightly:
Copying is not stealing. If I touched your sofa, which you were trying to sell at a garage sale, produced an exact copy, and walked off with the copy, guess what? You still have the original.
Yes, I still have my sofa, and you have your exact replica - but I might be a bit miffed because of the lost sale opportunity. However, if you made a copy of my sofa in order to take it home and see how it fit in your living room - that would be a totally different situation all together.
That's the difference between those who download and never buy, and those who download and then buy the decent stuff. Unfortunately there isn't any good way for the record companies to differentiate between those two types currently.
What I would propose the record companies do is come up with a subscription plan - pay a certain amount per month for all the music you want, and at the end of the month you get to decide which groups that money is split between. That would keep the good bands in business and the horrid ones would die. Of course they would have to do it without DRM for me to be happy with it. Yes some people will abuse it and pay for one month and then download everything and cancel - but they already do that with P2P anyway, it's just a cost of doing business.
A second idea I thought up a while ago was basically giving out 'screeners' - find the people who influence everyone elses buying habits, and then offer that 1-2% of people unrestricted free access to the whole music library. In return, their friends end up buying music they recommend.. If you wanted to do it scientifically you could give people referrer IDs that their friends could use for a 5% discount, thereby being able to monitor who was buying from each recommender.
Never heard of this game before, but the instant I read the review I thought of the movie Blow: http://imdb.com/title/tt0221027/
I don't know what experience these people asking for higher resolutions are used to - I'm guessing they use CRT monitors. 1680 x 1050 is pretty standard for 20" widescreen flat panels. It isn't "light on the pixels" as some of them have been saying. Frankly, I don't know why you'd want to go for a higher resolution on a 20" - your fonts would be tiny at the "normal" settings.
Some people just want a reason to bitch and moan about everything.
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I don't know of anyone that buys music videos, and I'm only 21. Classically, music videos are the free things on MTV and VH1 used to promote the music.
Why would I pay for something that I have to watch and can't just turn on while I'm doing other stuff, unless it is going to provide me with some new content? Once I have seen a music video once, why would I ever want one enough to pay for it again? This isn't a movie or even porn we're talking about here. This is just another example of the RIAA inflating the amount of money they actually gain from something.
Unless they're charging over a dollar each for these they would have to have sold 1.2 million per month - that's 41,000 per day. I find that highly unlikely. Nothing to see here, just the RIAA trying to squeeze blood from a turnip and screwing themselves out of a perfectly good advertising method.
A pretty girl on a music video with a good voice will make me more likely to buy a CD or song, but not if they try to make me pay for the music video, I'll just stop watching them.
I don't quite understand the prizes - looking at the previous year: http://www.gamedev.net/community/contest/4e4/
The top winner didn't get much in the way of prizes. Softimage XSI, yeah I know it's expensive - but if the developer is already making games without it, it's questionable whether he needs it or not. The rest of the prizes are fairly small.
So does winning this contest gain you a considerable amount of notoriety or am I missing something?
Personally, I think parents need to stand up and do some actual parenting, but aside from that, this sentence stuck out:
;P
"He also engaged in implied sex with a prostitute in a rocking vehicle before chasing her across a parking lot and beating her to recoup his cash." (Emphasis added)
Since when was implied sex ever an issue? We've had that in movies for what, 70 years now at least? I could see graphic sex, or even just sex being an issue... granted I haven't played the game but that's what the article says...
I think once Jack gets done with this he should go after Britney Spears because of implied sex in her songs.
That plugin doesn't seem to work on tomshardware. This one does though: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2099/
It does take quite a while to download all 29 pages though. Definitely far longer than it should. I'm still waiting for it to finish loading, but I can see it's been downloading stuff, unlike the first one.
This page has four vid caps, and at the bottom it has links to both of the mss streams from the DOD: http://miniechelon.com/index.php?p=pentagon_911
Well, I'm late to the party, but I don't see any other top level posts that contain the actual images from the videos (there were two different ones), so here you go - a page with images of the flying object directly from the DOD videos. Saved as a PNG so you don't lose any detail from an already horrid quality video.
http://miniechelon.com/index.php?p=pentagon_911
I'm not a gold farmer, but as I continually read articles about them, I've come to wonder whos fault it really is.
It seems to me that gold farmers are just performing rote in game tasks. If they're automating it that would be cheating, of course - but assume we're talking about a person who manually farms gold. It's their choice what they do in-game - if gold farming is really so harmful isn't it the fault of the game designers for not programmatically stopping it? Can they truly not structure it in such a way that gold farming isn't effective?
That said, have the ill effects of gold farming actually been proven? I don't think I've actually seen anyone name a real game that has been destroyed by such activities, I'd be interested to know if one (or more) actually exist.