"Not to say that this isn't a potentially educational game, but this is really more a way to practice doing simple arithematic and logic instead of anything specific to programming itself."
Except, of course, that arithmetic and logic are the foundations of programming. Everything else is bells and whistles, since at their core, computers are a set of binary states.
Understanding of complex logic is not common at all. My days are consistently made more frustrating by the inability of my coworkers to understand a simple conditional action. I'm not even talking about programming syntax, I'm talking about real-life. If the expense is not approved, get the approval; if it is approved, proceed to step 2. Then again, I'm an accountant, so at least the arithmetic is pretty good.
Anything at all that helps people learn basic and complex logic is good.
I still think the best way to teach a kid logic is to sit him/her in front of a computer to program in Basic. Give them some sample games, they'll take it from there. Make them load programs from a tape cassette, and they'll learn about efficiency in writing code.
"I began to read the the article synopsis and got really excited. REAL PLAGUES! Oh yeah, that sounds cool! Unfortunately, it was not by design. I'm aware that it would be expensive and difficult, but thses types of events happening on a regular and accelerated basis would bring me back to MMORPGs in an instant.
"
I sure hope Blizzard, et al read slashdot. Oh wait, of course the game companies do -- that's why release dates are pushed back.
I'll just copy my response to the same question asked an hour earlier by someone else (try reading the thread):
"How about a track that is hard to find elsewhere? If iTMS is the only place to find it, or the easiest place, they can charge more for it. iTMS doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still has to compete with outside sources.
Say I want to find a King Crimson B-side from 1976. I really, really want the track. It's on iTMS for $5.00. So I check other sources for a bit -- message boards, a call down to the record shop, a buddy who's into Prog rock. No dice? Then I pay iTMS the $5.00.
"
"If they don't lower their prices, people will continue to pirate, no matter how much they try and stop it.
"
Even if they lower their prices, people will still buy black market copies. Why do you think most second-run theaters are out of business? Pirated copies will always be cheaper.
You want to know what their biggest profit problem is? I'll give you a hint, it's not revenues.
Obviously, Tom Cruise ain't worth 25 million if his movies don't sell well. Obviously, crazy-good special effects aren't worth it when your movies grosses half what your CGI costs.
Why are CEOs and other officers in other industries expected to maximize profits by balancing revenue and expenses? Why are movie studios not always under the same pressure? And why should we, the consumers, have to pay for their egregious cost-overruns? Because if they get a scheme in place that guarantees profitability, that's what we're doing.
"Really, if Apple did allow variable prices, what do you think would happen? 99 cents would become the base *minimum*, and song prices would range up from there."
Only if the consumer was willing to pay that minimum. And if comapnies didn't use iTMS for promotion. What if I wanted to promote a certain artist, because they have a new album coming out? Maybe I'd drop the price. What if sales were really bad for a song, and I wanted to recoup as much as possible? I'd drop the price to wring some extra revenue from the song -- long-tail sales.
I am 100% positive that the minimum price would be below $0.99.
Or, here's an idea: Promote a song by offering the first 10,000 downloads free. Then raise the price to whatever you want.
The only problem, as I see it, is that consumers will b very unhappy if they buy a track for $2.00 one day, and it's listed for $1.00 then next.
"Many stores tried to simplify this process, but the different licenses were insisted upon by the various record companies."
There's the crux of your issue -- not price variability, but licensing difficulties. I'd bet the industry would be willing to adopt a standard format set by iTMS, since they have such a large market share.
This is absolutely great. This is an element of gameplay that even if unintended (which I'm not so sure about) can have far-reaching consequences.
Why shouldn't MMORPG characters get sick? Maybe once you're exposed and recover from a certain illness, you have immunity. Maybe this immunity will be helpful in a later instance.
I would love for more MMORPGs to release world-affecting things like this into the game. It might be hard to balance, but I think this is fantastic.
One of the reasons gameplay in MMORPGs gets boring is that typically, the world never changes except for the addition of new material.
Give me the four horsemen of the apocalypse any day!
"But then I realize that he's a university bookseller. The books people pay for college and university classes are overpriced as it is, ($80 for my USED calculus text, and that was ten years ago; I can only imagine how much it is now.) "
You think the bookstore is raking in much profit on texts? How much do you think they paid for that text when it was new? Look to the publishing companies, not the retailers, for what is driving textbook price gouging. Used texts and university-branded merchandise are where a bookstore makes its money. Although, for used texts, you're better off going for a P2P sale than buying from the bookstore.
"A bookseller who's worried that making books that are in the public domain available on the net will hurt his revenues."
I agree with you, but remember that books in the public domain compete with books that are not.
One of my concerns is that if smaller bookstores become unprofitable, we'll have less good material being published.
How about a track that is hard to find elsewhere? If iTMS is the only place to find it, or the easiest place, they can charge more for it. iTMS doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still has to compete with outside sources.
Say I want to find a King Crimson B-side from 1976. I really, really want the track. It's on iTMS for $5.00. So I check other sources for a bit -- message boards, a call down to the record shop, a buddy who's into Prog rock. No dice? Then I pay iTMS the $5.00.
"As the price of reproduction drops, the price of the item should drop correspondingly. At least that's how the economic theory goes."
What economic theory is that?
Given infinite supply to a market (which is the case here, unless supply is artificially limited -- i.e., only the first 1000 people can download each day), the only pressure on price is demand. Recording companies spend tons of money on marketing to increase this demand. Cost of goods sold has absolutely nothing to do with price -- only with profit and loss.
In this case, though, we have an artificially fixed price. This does not change demand, but instead changes what proportion of that demand is met through the black market.
"Profit margins drop but profits are made through bulk sales, much like today's commodity ethernet cards and memory chips."
Hogwash. No consumer buys "song downloads" in bulk to resell them. Unless the recording companies are selling rights of transfer for x number of downloads for y dollars to Apple, which I highly doubt.
I think what you mean is that companies will still see increased profits due to larger sales volume, if they lower prices. While this may be true, it may not be the most profitable method of pricing.
If at $1 ea, I sell 100 songs, I realize $100 revenue. If I price the song at $0.50 ea, but sell 180 copies, my revenues are only $90, and my marginal costs will be higher, since I sold more copies. The pricing curve for songs will determine what price I should set to maximize my profits.
The problem I have is that all songs are the same price, which is fixed. Why not allow more variable pricing? I'm sure they can hire a few pricing gurus to figure out the price for each song to maximize profits, based upon numbers of units sold -- this will make them happy.
What's the advantage to consumers? Lower prices for less popular tracks -- although legacy or hard-to-find tracks might be more expensive.
If they set the pricing too high, the black market grabs a larger share.
Price-fixing is not the right way to operate this market, IMO.
This is not an attempt to place blanket copy protection on radio broadcasts.
This is an attempt to prevent TIVO-like devices from recording on any other basis than "as-broadcast." You want to record a song? No problem, according to the request. You want your DAR to record every song played by a certain artist? Not allowed.
The broadcast industry wants to preserve their ability to send advertising to their audiences. The recording industry wants to preservce their ability to sell albums to the public.
I don't see a problem with those goals.
In the long run, though, I can't see radio music broadcasting being profitable, except for live performances. There are far too many competing access points to music.
"So, what exactly is the point of going to the moon, staying a week and then coming back? "
We've become a society of cynics. No one believes anymore in the amazing power that we can wield for good if we band together (ie, by government).
What captures the headlines, and what do we create massive initiatives to spend our money on?
Natural disaster relief (soon to also be disaster prevention).
War.
Preventing the decline of education.
Terrorism prevention.
All of these things are about either preventing a tragedy or trying to fix a problem.
A new lunar landing will help re-establish faith in our government, faith in ourselves, and faith in what we can achieve.
Who are our heroes, and do they have anything to do with government?
Our heroes are sports figures, by and large, especially those that have overcome personal obstacles (like Lance Armstrong). But what about those who take risks for the common good, like Neil Armstrong? Sure, he wasn't completely altruistic in motive (who is?), but he was more of a national hero than Lance ever will be (although Lance is a great personal hero, IMO).
A new moon landing gives us hope, helps us believe that government can do more than just make things less bad.
"but do most hotels allow you to keep the access cards?
"
It doesn't matter. Unless you are informed ahead of time for a fee for a lost card, they won't charge you. And if they value your business, they won't give you a hard time about it.
If they don't value your business, then they'll be losing a customer...
"'Don't be evil' ring a bell? Everyone pretty much "believed" the head honcos at google when they declared that was the company's motto.
"
Speak for yourself -- anyone that truly believed that chose to put the blindfold on themselves. However, it is possible to have a corporate philosophy that encompasses "do no evil." It may even be possible to be profitable, too. The question is, how well is that philosophy applied?
"Dow's motto is 'We Bring Good Things to Life'""
That's GE, Dow's slogan is "living improved daily." Still fits your argument, which reaffirms what my posts about trust and about informed choice had to say.
(1) Even though IE is old, the nature of threats changes -- not all the security holes could have been predicted five years ago.
(2) Just because Mozilla is newer doesn't mean that they don't have the responsibility to have fewer holes in security. On the contrary, the Mozilla developer community has had the opportunity to learn from all the security holes of IE, and to develop the code from the ground up in such a way that limits vulnerabilities.
That said, response time to threats is better for Firefox. The total threat posed is probably less, because the time of exposure is a fraction of IE vulnerabilities.
But Mozilla faces a tough road ahead -- if they maintain or gain market share, they have to be very cautious, as their vulnerabilities will begin to be targeted seriously by malware.
Anyone who uses any browser online should still be running virus-detection software. This will never change, no matter what OS or browser you use.
It's not about Yahoo vs. Google. It's about Yahoo versus me.
That said, I don't trust Google either... I just distrust them less.
And it's not about choice here -- it's about informed choice. As we learn more about the business practices of Yahoo, Google, et al, then we gain the ability to make informed choices. But until every company comes clean about the things that like Yahho has been getting bad publicity about, we don't have real choice.
"Go wank google some more if you don't like it.
Go wank yourself before you make assumptions about what companies I do or do not like.
"But, I don't think I'm being careless in saying that every technilogical advancement had sex as its goal, and as its pioneering breakthrough."
I don't want to burst your bubble, but careless is apt here. Not that anyone couldn't come up with a list of technologies that ostensibly did not have sex as their goal, but here's a couple that jarringly do not fit:
The chastity belt
The nuclear bomb
The cotton gin
The electric light
The electric can-opener
Deviled eggs
I think your slightly off, because it's not that the goal of the technology is sex -- it's that someone will find a way to adapt any technology to sex. (Although I'm not so sure about the electric can-opener).
Slashdot Mirror
The Pacific Ocean is my container. A lasso is my collection device. If I get it all, I win $250,000, right?
Go ahead, mod me down for trollishness... but humor is the intent here.
...just like the new exploits for Vista.
Ballmer:
"We are focused on creating exciting user experiences..."
Because no one ever said that getting BSOD at a critical work time didn't get your heartrate up.
"The platform groups have great expertise in creating a software platform and user experience that touches millions of people..."
"By bringing together the software experience and the service experience..."
Sounds like they are forecasting a crapload of service calls... that can't be good.
Allchin:
"While I will call it a day at the end of next year after Windows Vista ships"
...if he announces his resignation now, he can't be scape-goated.
Please explain.
Your post makes no sense, but I am interested in hearing what you have to say.
Not sure if any of the tracks are original, but KC (or Epitaph) did release a double-album in 1976: "A Young Person's Guide to King Crimson."
h tml
http://www.elephant-talk.com/discog/fripp/indexk.
"Not to say that this isn't a potentially educational game, but this is really more a way to practice doing simple arithematic and logic instead of anything specific to programming itself."
Except, of course, that arithmetic and logic are the foundations of programming. Everything else is bells and whistles, since at their core, computers are a set of binary states.
Understanding of complex logic is not common at all. My days are consistently made more frustrating by the inability of my coworkers to understand a simple conditional action. I'm not even talking about programming syntax, I'm talking about real-life. If the expense is not approved, get the approval; if it is approved, proceed to step 2. Then again, I'm an accountant, so at least the arithmetic is pretty good.
Anything at all that helps people learn basic and complex logic is good.
I still think the best way to teach a kid logic is to sit him/her in front of a computer to program in Basic. Give them some sample games, they'll take it from there. Make them load programs from a tape cassette, and they'll learn about efficiency in writing code.
"(Although arithematic and logic is certainly worth learning.) " (emphasis mine)
:)
Yes, but grammar and syntax are certainly worth learning too
"I began to read the the article synopsis and got really excited. REAL PLAGUES! Oh yeah, that sounds cool! Unfortunately, it was not by design. I'm aware that it would be expensive and difficult, but thses types of events happening on a regular and accelerated basis would bring me back to MMORPGs in an instant. "
I sure hope Blizzard, et al read slashdot. Oh wait, of course the game companies do -- that's why release dates are pushed back.
Apple could easily put the record labels in control of pricing, including implementation. Then they just take some off the top.
Flat fee per song to Apple, the rest to the record company.
Easy for Apple to track number of transactions.
I'll just copy my response to the same question asked an hour earlier by someone else (try reading the thread): "How about a track that is hard to find elsewhere? If iTMS is the only place to find it, or the easiest place, they can charge more for it. iTMS doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still has to compete with outside sources.
Say I want to find a King Crimson B-side from 1976. I really, really want the track. It's on iTMS for $5.00. So I check other sources for a bit -- message boards, a call down to the record shop, a buddy who's into Prog rock. No dice? Then I pay iTMS the $5.00. "
"If they don't lower their prices, people will continue to pirate, no matter how much they try and stop it. "
Even if they lower their prices, people will still buy black market copies. Why do you think most second-run theaters are out of business? Pirated copies will always be cheaper.
You want to know what their biggest profit problem is? I'll give you a hint, it's not revenues.
Obviously, Tom Cruise ain't worth 25 million if his movies don't sell well. Obviously, crazy-good special effects aren't worth it when your movies grosses half what your CGI costs.
Why are CEOs and other officers in other industries expected to maximize profits by balancing revenue and expenses? Why are movie studios not always under the same pressure? And why should we, the consumers, have to pay for their egregious cost-overruns? Because if they get a scheme in place that guarantees profitability, that's what we're doing.
"Really, if Apple did allow variable prices, what do you think would happen? 99 cents would become the base *minimum*, and song prices would range up from there."
Only if the consumer was willing to pay that minimum. And if comapnies didn't use iTMS for promotion. What if I wanted to promote a certain artist, because they have a new album coming out? Maybe I'd drop the price. What if sales were really bad for a song, and I wanted to recoup as much as possible? I'd drop the price to wring some extra revenue from the song -- long-tail sales.
I am 100% positive that the minimum price would be below $0.99.
Or, here's an idea: Promote a song by offering the first 10,000 downloads free. Then raise the price to whatever you want.
The only problem, as I see it, is that consumers will b very unhappy if they buy a track for $2.00 one day, and it's listed for $1.00 then next.
"Many stores tried to simplify this process, but the different licenses were insisted upon by the various record companies."
There's the crux of your issue -- not price variability, but licensing difficulties. I'd bet the industry would be willing to adopt a standard format set by iTMS, since they have such a large market share.
This is absolutely great. This is an element of gameplay that even if unintended (which I'm not so sure about) can have far-reaching consequences.
Why shouldn't MMORPG characters get sick? Maybe once you're exposed and recover from a certain illness, you have immunity. Maybe this immunity will be helpful in a later instance.
I would love for more MMORPGs to release world-affecting things like this into the game. It might be hard to balance, but I think this is fantastic.
One of the reasons gameplay in MMORPGs gets boring is that typically, the world never changes except for the addition of new material.
Give me the four horsemen of the apocalypse any day!
"But then I realize that he's a university bookseller. The books people pay for college and university classes are overpriced as it is, ($80 for my USED calculus text, and that was ten years ago; I can only imagine how much it is now.) "
You think the bookstore is raking in much profit on texts? How much do you think they paid for that text when it was new? Look to the publishing companies, not the retailers, for what is driving textbook price gouging. Used texts and university-branded merchandise are where a bookstore makes its money. Although, for used texts, you're better off going for a P2P sale than buying from the bookstore.
"A bookseller who's worried that making books that are in the public domain available on the net will hurt his revenues."
I agree with you, but remember that books in the public domain compete with books that are not.
One of my concerns is that if smaller bookstores become unprofitable, we'll have less good material being published.
How about a track that is hard to find elsewhere? If iTMS is the only place to find it, or the easiest place, they can charge more for it. iTMS doesn't exist in a vacuum, it still has to compete with outside sources.
Say I want to find a King Crimson B-side from 1976. I really, really want the track. It's on iTMS for $5.00. So I check other sources for a bit -- message boards, a call down to the record shop, a buddy who's into Prog rock. No dice? Then I pay iTMS the $5.00.
"As the price of reproduction drops, the price of the item should drop correspondingly. At least that's how the economic theory goes."
What economic theory is that?
Given infinite supply to a market (which is the case here, unless supply is artificially limited -- i.e., only the first 1000 people can download each day), the only pressure on price is demand. Recording companies spend tons of money on marketing to increase this demand. Cost of goods sold has absolutely nothing to do with price -- only with profit and loss.
In this case, though, we have an artificially fixed price. This does not change demand, but instead changes what proportion of that demand is met through the black market.
"Profit margins drop but profits are made through bulk sales, much like today's commodity ethernet cards and memory chips."
Hogwash. No consumer buys "song downloads" in bulk to resell them. Unless the recording companies are selling rights of transfer for x number of downloads for y dollars to Apple, which I highly doubt.
I think what you mean is that companies will still see increased profits due to larger sales volume, if they lower prices. While this may be true, it may not be the most profitable method of pricing.
If at $1 ea, I sell 100 songs, I realize $100 revenue. If I price the song at $0.50 ea, but sell 180 copies, my revenues are only $90, and my marginal costs will be higher, since I sold more copies. The pricing curve for songs will determine what price I should set to maximize my profits.
The problem I have is that all songs are the same price, which is fixed. Why not allow more variable pricing? I'm sure they can hire a few pricing gurus to figure out the price for each song to maximize profits, based upon numbers of units sold -- this will make them happy.
What's the advantage to consumers? Lower prices for less popular tracks -- although legacy or hard-to-find tracks might be more expensive.
If they set the pricing too high, the black market grabs a larger share.
Price-fixing is not the right way to operate this market, IMO.
This is not an attempt to place blanket copy protection on radio broadcasts.
This is an attempt to prevent TIVO-like devices from recording on any other basis than "as-broadcast." You want to record a song? No problem, according to the request. You want your DAR to record every song played by a certain artist? Not allowed.
The broadcast industry wants to preserve their ability to send advertising to their audiences. The recording industry wants to preservce their ability to sell albums to the public.
I don't see a problem with those goals.
In the long run, though, I can't see radio music broadcasting being profitable, except for live performances. There are far too many competing access points to music.
"So, what exactly is the point of going to the moon, staying a week and then coming back? "
We've become a society of cynics. No one believes anymore in the amazing power that we can wield for good if we band together (ie, by government).
What captures the headlines, and what do we create massive initiatives to spend our money on?
Natural disaster relief (soon to also be disaster prevention).
War.
Preventing the decline of education.
Terrorism prevention.
All of these things are about either preventing a tragedy or trying to fix a problem.
A new lunar landing will help re-establish faith in our government, faith in ourselves, and faith in what we can achieve.
Who are our heroes, and do they have anything to do with government?
Our heroes are sports figures, by and large, especially those that have overcome personal obstacles (like Lance Armstrong). But what about those who take risks for the common good, like Neil Armstrong? Sure, he wasn't completely altruistic in motive (who is?), but he was more of a national hero than Lance ever will be (although Lance is a great personal hero, IMO).
A new moon landing gives us hope, helps us believe that government can do more than just make things less bad.
"but do most hotels allow you to keep the access cards? "
It doesn't matter. Unless you are informed ahead of time for a fee for a lost card, they won't charge you. And if they value your business, they won't give you a hard time about it.
If they don't value your business, then they'll be losing a customer...
"'Don't be evil' ring a bell? Everyone pretty much "believed" the head honcos at google when they declared that was the company's motto. "
Speak for yourself -- anyone that truly believed that chose to put the blindfold on themselves. However, it is possible to have a corporate philosophy that encompasses "do no evil." It may even be possible to be profitable, too. The question is, how well is that philosophy applied?
"Dow's motto is 'We Bring Good Things to Life'""
That's GE, Dow's slogan is "living improved daily." Still fits your argument, which reaffirms what my posts about trust and about informed choice had to say.
I'm not apologizing for IE, but...
(1) Even though IE is old, the nature of threats changes -- not all the security holes could have been predicted five years ago.
(2) Just because Mozilla is newer doesn't mean that they don't have the responsibility to have fewer holes in security. On the contrary, the Mozilla developer community has had the opportunity to learn from all the security holes of IE, and to develop the code from the ground up in such a way that limits vulnerabilities.
That said, response time to threats is better for Firefox. The total threat posed is probably less, because the time of exposure is a fraction of IE vulnerabilities.
But Mozilla faces a tough road ahead -- if they maintain or gain market share, they have to be very cautious, as their vulnerabilities will begin to be targeted seriously by malware.
Anyone who uses any browser online should still be running virus-detection software. This will never change, no matter what OS or browser you use.
I distrust them less because they do not have as bad of a proven track record.
When I see Google doing the same kinds of things as Yahoo, like in the article, then I will distrust them as much as I distrust Yahoo.
"at its simplest form Yahoo was created with money in mind... It's a money machine... It will do whatever it takes to make more money."
I'm not disputing that. In this case, "whatever it takes" means gaining my trust... otherwise, they'll never get one red cent from me.
It's not about Yahoo vs. Google. It's about Yahoo versus me.
That said, I don't trust Google either... I just distrust them less.
And it's not about choice here -- it's about informed choice. As we learn more about the business practices of Yahoo, Google, et al, then we gain the ability to make informed choices. But until every company comes clean about the things that like Yahho has been getting bad publicity about, we don't have real choice.
"Go wank google some more if you don't like it.
Go wank yourself before you make assumptions about what companies I do or do not like.
Bad Troll.
"But, I don't think I'm being careless in saying that every technilogical advancement had sex as its goal, and as its pioneering breakthrough."
I don't want to burst your bubble, but careless is apt here. Not that anyone couldn't come up with a list of technologies that ostensibly did not have sex as their goal, but here's a couple that jarringly do not fit:
The chastity belt
The nuclear bomb
The cotton gin
The electric light
The electric can-opener
Deviled eggs
I think your slightly off, because it's not that the goal of the technology is sex -- it's that someone will find a way to adapt any technology to sex. (Although I'm not so sure about the electric can-opener).