Increasing the rate of production is all well and good, but how big is the installed base for 360 right now, and how big do they expect it to be by the time PS3 comes out?
I'm especially curious about non-US markets here. Has the 360 been selling ANY units in Japan? Last I heard, the answer was no; what happens if we have the 360 as the runaway winner of this console generation here in the States, but the PS3 or Revolution annihilates it in Japan? It would be kind of a weird dichotomy...
Heh, I think getting them to even add OpenDocument support would take precedence. Their Pages program, for example, has its own proprietary format but can export to HTML, text, PDF, Word... and NOT ODF.
Seriously, FFT:DS would be an incredibly good idea. A whole extra screen for data readouts? Touchscreen movement rather than awkward scrolling over terrain and through menus? All combined with the awesome portability of FFT:Advance? Sign me up!
I'm not a huge fan of the term myself, but I think the idea is that people tend to group prices into certain mental categories. For example, there might be an "under $1" price point that people think of as basically nothing, so we're willing to spend 75 cents on a game of Tekken or a Snickers bar or something else we don't really care about. And if we think of 2 cents and 57 cents and 99 cents as basically the same amount of money, why wouldn't a company charge 99 cents?
Same here, I'd imagine. If I'm willing to pay $7 or $8.25 for this mod, I'm almost certainly willing to pay $9.99, because it's all the same "price point" psychologically speaking. I'm not gonna say, "$7.85 would be acceptable, but ten bucks is RIGHT OUT!" So they might as well charge $9.99.
All this is conjecture, of course. Just my $0.99.;-)
Or at least the summary. This isn't a study where the gathered some people who like GTA and people who don't and compared the two groups' behavior. Half the sample group was RANDOMLY ASSIGNED to play GTA, the other half to play the Simpsons game. If the GTA crowd acted more violent and drug-friendly after some time played, then I really don't see how correlation WOULDN'T indicate causation in this case. Unless they randomly selected the GTA players with a beer bong or something.
If you're gonna criticize this study, I'd aim for the small sample size and their extrapolations from the data recorded. The correlation/causation point is moot here.
I mean, stuff like this is annoying enough when you see it moderated +3 Insightful on Slashdot, but now it's getting presented as an informed opinion? Come on.
Obviously, some people don't care enough about OSX's eye candy, security, stability, etc. to make it worth paying a bit extra for. Even MORE obviously, these people aren't Apple's target market.
PRE-Boot Camp, Apple has maybe 5% of the overall home PC market, right? So that's 1 in 20 people willing to give up all the games and productivity applications that are PC-exclusive just for the shiny graphics and Mac applications this guy is poo-pooing. How many MORE people will be willing to buy a Mac now that they can still run those Windows games and applications on it?
I think part of the issue is that these pundits won't consider Apple a success until they have more market share than Dell. But honestly, even if Apple only goes up to 10% of the total market share, that's DOUBLE their sales - and they've presumably got a much better margin on their boxes than Dell and pals, because of the infamous "Apple premium."
With Boot Camp, Apple customers win because they can suddenly run a huge library of new applications. Apple itself wins because it can sell computers to all those borderline "switchers" who see the ability to run AutoCAD or Half-Life 2 or whatever as a mandatory system feature. Hell, even Microsoft wins because it gets to sell a few non-OEM copies of Windows at crazy markup prices. The only people HURT by Boot Camp are (1) the Apple harcore who have too much invested in their corporate loyalties, and (2) those of us still on PPC Macs, who can expect to see our application support slowly wither and die.
I wonder if Apple will still be charging a couple bucks an episode when viewers now have the choice of getting a commercial-loaded copy for free instead.
It'd be nice if the ad-supported version were available for free through iTMS, but that would probably require ABC to actually pay APPLE per download to cover bandwidth costs and overhead, which might be problematic.
Anyway, if Apple doesn't work out SOME kind of new deal, it seems safe to say their $2 iTMS episodes aren't gonna be selling very well anymore, except among the video iPod loyalists.
"again, I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet."
One reason is something you touched on - because leveling in Oblivion is as easy as holding down the "C" button, there would be no challenge to the game if you could beat everything just by gaining more levels. It would add a "grind" aspect to the game that many people feel detracts from the fun.
OK, who is this guy and why do all his blog entries show up as news posts on Slashdot?
I mean, he's a pretty good writer with some interesting ideas, but is that all it takes to make the front page? Or has this guy done something that should make his opinions particularly noteworthy to Slashdotters?
Reading TFA doesn't shed too much light. He makes some pretty silly generalizations, and he constructs his argument around some questionable premeses. ("One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general"; isn't it possible that software is a special case because there are fewer material barriers to entry for a private hacker than there are for a dude who invents a better mousetrap but doesn't own a mousetrap factory? "Whenever software meets government, bad things happen, because software changes fast and government changes slow"; what about the Massachusetts government trying to adopt OpenDocument well before the vast majority of private users, corporations, and other "faster" entities?)
If RMS was stampeded by a horde of wild boars tomorrow, I'm sure Sun et al. would just keep doing what they're doing, probably thankful for a slight reduction in background ruckus.
I don't think the corporations need RMS so much as they need the concept and methodologies of open-source. It's not like RMS owns a patent on those. (Rimshot.)
"I published two books (one self, one through a publisher) that I always gave out freely. The books allowed me to do public speaking engagements for a fee, as well as drove people to my print newsletters that I charged for... I publish my blogs for free, and since I started in November my billable rate has only gone up due to the customer base that has appeared around it. Why should I charge for what is basically marketing?"
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're not making money from the books so much as you are from public speaking engagements, print newsletters, and customers for your related business.
There are plenty of writers out there who don't want to do ANY of that. I know one published novelist who's so afraid of public speaking she bit through her lip worrying about an in-class presentation. Print newsletters and other businesses are also not things a novelist would necessarily want to spend time on.
"Intellectual property" can be of at least as much value in our society as is physical property. In a capitalist society, producers often have the capability of restricting production - for example, oil companies sometimes restrict how much oil gets pumped in order to keep gas prices up, which the actually do need to do (to some degree) in order to earn enough money to pay for new research and exploration. "IP" (the scare quotes are for your benefit) is a similar case, IMO - there's a literally infinite supply available of any IP, thanks to digital media, but the supplier (i.e., the creator) restricts the flow of those copies in order to maintain a profit margin. In both cases, the producers' power is ideally held in check by free competition and market forces, but this can require a fair bit of *gasp* government regulation in the form of anti-monopolistic laws.
The problem with the whole "give away your products and charge for support" business model is that the thing you're getting PAID to do isn't what you WANT to do. It's stereotypical but true that many programmers aren't "people persons." They want to PROGRAM, not talk to customers all day.
Beyond that, this business model would seem to put stress in all the wrong places. If you're charging for service, you've actually got a big financial incentive NOT to make your product straightforward and bug-free; the only reason you're even MAKING a product, from a business standpoint, is so that you have something to fix.
It gets even weirder when you try to extend the model to other fields. Musicians, I can almost see, because they can potentially support themselves on income from live performances. (Even this is iffy, though, because it marginalizes some forms of music that don't lend themselves well to live shows, like electronic music.) But is a novelist supposed to give away his books for free (or for the price of distribution)? If so, how is he supposed to make a living? Are we back to the old model of artists finding wealthy patrons and writing sycophantic dedications to them in front of every book?
This isn't to say that free software is never a good idea from a business perspective. There are obviously many cases where developing free and/or open-source software can be in a company's best interest - witness Sun, IBM, etc. But I don't buy the argument that it's a universalizable business model.
"I could care less" is acceptable too, if you take it as sarcasm. E.g.: "Please keep discussing off-topic, trivial idiomatic expressions in a thread about a computer company, because I could certainly care less!"
I'm as tired of the "in other news, the sky is still blue" jokes as much as anyone else, but honestly, I don't think the past week has been significantly worse than many other periods in the past. I guess you can say this one was especially frustrating because servers weren't actually offline, but just ran crappily for a solid week. But compared to the 2000-person queues we saw at release time, this is smooth sailing.
They have been several times in the past. Usually, when service is particularly bad (or noexistent) for a period of time, Blizzard will hand out a free day or two of service to subscribers (extending their subscription period for 24 hours or whatever). Multiply 50 cents a day by a million subscribers (stateside) and that's a pretty significant payment on Blizzard's part. Not exactly as good as just spending the money to FIX THE SERVERS, in my opinion, but it's a nice gesture.
I don't get it. So Apple is going to split up into Macintosh and iTunes groups. Okay. They're also dumping OSX. Stupid idea, but I'm still following.
Now, they're also apparently working with Dell et al. Hmm. So they're no longer making hardware OR an OS.
I guess in MacRumors Crazyland, there are enough people willing to shell out for iLife to earn more profit than Apple's current business model, eh?
I also like how porting Windows to Macs "spells disaster" for OSX. Because once Mac users get their hands on the smooth, aesthetically appealing, secure, and bug-free experience that is Windows XP, they'll NEVER go back to OSX!!
So you're saying that the reason Word has features that abiword, etc. don't is because people shouldn't WANT those features?
I think it's precisely that attitude - TELLING people what they should use software for rather than ASKING them - that turns people off some open-source projects.
I have a number of word-processing tasks I might want to do on my computer. Being able to write an essay, newsletter, book, or webpage in the SAME program would actually be a VERY nice feature. Why the heck should I have to download half a dozen programs and learn half a dozen different UI's just to perform these closely-related tasks? Because it makes the code cleaner? Why the hell do I, as an end-user, care how clean the code is?
Not that Word is great at all these tasks by any stretch. Honestly, my favorite word processor at the moment is Apple's Pages, which is barely risen out of the 1.0-edition muck. But I can write many kinds of documents, I can export to several important formats, and it's generally very user-friendly and easy to figure out.
My mom's 6-year-old iMac came with OS 9.whatever installed. Upgrading to OSX actually INCREASED system speed a great deal (not to mention vastly improving security and stability).
If OSX is ramping up system specs, it's doing it at such a slow rate that very few users should realistically be affected. I expect my mom's hard drives to fail before she's forced to upgrade the system to meet OS requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, then every webcomic in the universe has had one foot in the grave since 1995!
Increasing the rate of production is all well and good, but how big is the installed base for 360 right now, and how big do they expect it to be by the time PS3 comes out?
I'm especially curious about non-US markets here. Has the 360 been selling ANY units in Japan? Last I heard, the answer was no; what happens if we have the 360 as the runaway winner of this console generation here in the States, but the PS3 or Revolution annihilates it in Japan? It would be kind of a weird dichotomy...
Heh, I think getting them to even add OpenDocument support would take precedence. Their Pages program, for example, has its own proprietary format but can export to HTML, text, PDF, Word... and NOT ODF.
A DS tactical RPG, a la Final Fantasy Tactics.
Seriously, FFT:DS would be an incredibly good idea. A whole extra screen for data readouts? Touchscreen movement rather than awkward scrolling over terrain and through menus? All combined with the awesome portability of FFT:Advance? Sign me up!
Never used the VAIO, but this may have more to do with the aluminum case of the PowerBook than the processor itself. It really lets you FEEL the heat!
You can pee in the urinals to regain health.
I'm not a huge fan of the term myself, but I think the idea is that people tend to group prices into certain mental categories. For example, there might be an "under $1" price point that people think of as basically nothing, so we're willing to spend 75 cents on a game of Tekken or a Snickers bar or something else we don't really care about. And if we think of 2 cents and 57 cents and 99 cents as basically the same amount of money, why wouldn't a company charge 99 cents?
;-)
Same here, I'd imagine. If I'm willing to pay $7 or $8.25 for this mod, I'm almost certainly willing to pay $9.99, because it's all the same "price point" psychologically speaking. I'm not gonna say, "$7.85 would be acceptable, but ten bucks is RIGHT OUT!" So they might as well charge $9.99.
All this is conjecture, of course. Just my $0.99.
Dude, it's a free beta. Nobody "emptored" anything.
Or at least the summary. This isn't a study where the gathered some people who like GTA and people who don't and compared the two groups' behavior. Half the sample group was RANDOMLY ASSIGNED to play GTA, the other half to play the Simpsons game. If the GTA crowd acted more violent and drug-friendly after some time played, then I really don't see how correlation WOULDN'T indicate causation in this case. Unless they randomly selected the GTA players with a beer bong or something.
If you're gonna criticize this study, I'd aim for the small sample size and their extrapolations from the data recorded. The correlation/causation point is moot here.
I mean, stuff like this is annoying enough when you see it moderated +3 Insightful on Slashdot, but now it's getting presented as an informed opinion? Come on.
Obviously, some people don't care enough about OSX's eye candy, security, stability, etc. to make it worth paying a bit extra for. Even MORE obviously, these people aren't Apple's target market.
PRE-Boot Camp, Apple has maybe 5% of the overall home PC market, right? So that's 1 in 20 people willing to give up all the games and productivity applications that are PC-exclusive just for the shiny graphics and Mac applications this guy is poo-pooing. How many MORE people will be willing to buy a Mac now that they can still run those Windows games and applications on it?
I think part of the issue is that these pundits won't consider Apple a success until they have more market share than Dell. But honestly, even if Apple only goes up to 10% of the total market share, that's DOUBLE their sales - and they've presumably got a much better margin on their boxes than Dell and pals, because of the infamous "Apple premium."
With Boot Camp, Apple customers win because they can suddenly run a huge library of new applications. Apple itself wins because it can sell computers to all those borderline "switchers" who see the ability to run AutoCAD or Half-Life 2 or whatever as a mandatory system feature. Hell, even Microsoft wins because it gets to sell a few non-OEM copies of Windows at crazy markup prices. The only people HURT by Boot Camp are (1) the Apple harcore who have too much invested in their corporate loyalties, and (2) those of us still on PPC Macs, who can expect to see our application support slowly wither and die.
I wonder if Apple will still be charging a couple bucks an episode when viewers now have the choice of getting a commercial-loaded copy for free instead.
It'd be nice if the ad-supported version were available for free through iTMS, but that would probably require ABC to actually pay APPLE per download to cover bandwidth costs and overhead, which might be problematic.
Anyway, if Apple doesn't work out SOME kind of new deal, it seems safe to say their $2 iTMS episodes aren't gonna be selling very well anymore, except among the video iPod loyalists.
"again, I'd love to know why level scaling doesnt suck because I haven't seen any reasons yet."
One reason is something you touched on - because leveling in Oblivion is as easy as holding down the "C" button, there would be no challenge to the game if you could beat everything just by gaining more levels. It would add a "grind" aspect to the game that many people feel detracts from the fun.
OK, who is this guy and why do all his blog entries show up as news posts on Slashdot?
I mean, he's a pretty good writer with some interesting ideas, but is that all it takes to make the front page? Or has this guy done something that should make his opinions particularly noteworthy to Slashdotters?
Reading TFA doesn't shed too much light. He makes some pretty silly generalizations, and he constructs his argument around some questionable premeses. ("One thing I do feel pretty certain of is that if you're against software patents, you're against patents in general"; isn't it possible that software is a special case because there are fewer material barriers to entry for a private hacker than there are for a dude who invents a better mousetrap but doesn't own a mousetrap factory? "Whenever software meets government, bad things happen, because software changes fast and government changes slow"; what about the Massachusetts government trying to adopt OpenDocument well before the vast majority of private users, corporations, and other "faster" entities?)
So anyway, who is this guy?
If RMS was stampeded by a horde of wild boars tomorrow, I'm sure Sun et al. would just keep doing what they're doing, probably thankful for a slight reduction in background ruckus.
I don't think the corporations need RMS so much as they need the concept and methodologies of open-source. It's not like RMS owns a patent on those. (Rimshot.)
"I published two books (one self, one through a publisher) that I always gave out freely. The books allowed me to do public speaking engagements for a fee, as well as drove people to my print newsletters that I charged for... I publish my blogs for free, and since I started in November my billable rate has only gone up due to the customer base that has appeared around it. Why should I charge for what is basically marketing?"
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're not making money from the books so much as you are from public speaking engagements, print newsletters, and customers for your related business.
There are plenty of writers out there who don't want to do ANY of that. I know one published novelist who's so afraid of public speaking she bit through her lip worrying about an in-class presentation. Print newsletters and other businesses are also not things a novelist would necessarily want to spend time on.
"Intellectual property" can be of at least as much value in our society as is physical property. In a capitalist society, producers often have the capability of restricting production - for example, oil companies sometimes restrict how much oil gets pumped in order to keep gas prices up, which the actually do need to do (to some degree) in order to earn enough money to pay for new research and exploration. "IP" (the scare quotes are for your benefit) is a similar case, IMO - there's a literally infinite supply available of any IP, thanks to digital media, but the supplier (i.e., the creator) restricts the flow of those copies in order to maintain a profit margin. In both cases, the producers' power is ideally held in check by free competition and market forces, but this can require a fair bit of *gasp* government regulation in the form of anti-monopolistic laws.
The problem with the whole "give away your products and charge for support" business model is that the thing you're getting PAID to do isn't what you WANT to do. It's stereotypical but true that many programmers aren't "people persons." They want to PROGRAM, not talk to customers all day.
Beyond that, this business model would seem to put stress in all the wrong places. If you're charging for service, you've actually got a big financial incentive NOT to make your product straightforward and bug-free; the only reason you're even MAKING a product, from a business standpoint, is so that you have something to fix.
It gets even weirder when you try to extend the model to other fields. Musicians, I can almost see, because they can potentially support themselves on income from live performances. (Even this is iffy, though, because it marginalizes some forms of music that don't lend themselves well to live shows, like electronic music.) But is a novelist supposed to give away his books for free (or for the price of distribution)? If so, how is he supposed to make a living? Are we back to the old model of artists finding wealthy patrons and writing sycophantic dedications to them in front of every book?
This isn't to say that free software is never a good idea from a business perspective. There are obviously many cases where developing free and/or open-source software can be in a company's best interest - witness Sun, IBM, etc. But I don't buy the argument that it's a universalizable business model.
"I could care less" is acceptable too, if you take it as sarcasm. E.g.: "Please keep discussing off-topic, trivial idiomatic expressions in a thread about a computer company, because I could certainly care less!"
I know this is Slashdot, but can we at least have our grammar Nazis spell "grammatically" correctly?
I expect my broadband internet to be at LEAST 95% reliable, and I don't pay much more for that than I do for my WoW subscription.
I expect Google and Slashdot to be 100% reliable, and I pay NOTHING for them.
Why should I hold Blizzard to lower standards?
The question, apparently, is "What is the third moment of the Riemann zeta function?"
I'm as surprised as you are.
I'm as tired of the "in other news, the sky is still blue" jokes as much as anyone else, but honestly, I don't think the past week has been significantly worse than many other periods in the past. I guess you can say this one was especially frustrating because servers weren't actually offline, but just ran crappily for a solid week. But compared to the 2000-person queues we saw at release time, this is smooth sailing.
They have been several times in the past. Usually, when service is particularly bad (or noexistent) for a period of time, Blizzard will hand out a free day or two of service to subscribers (extending their subscription period for 24 hours or whatever). Multiply 50 cents a day by a million subscribers (stateside) and that's a pretty significant payment on Blizzard's part. Not exactly as good as just spending the money to FIX THE SERVERS, in my opinion, but it's a nice gesture.
I don't get it. So Apple is going to split up into Macintosh and iTunes groups. Okay. They're also dumping OSX. Stupid idea, but I'm still following.
Now, they're also apparently working with Dell et al. Hmm. So they're no longer making hardware OR an OS.
I guess in MacRumors Crazyland, there are enough people willing to shell out for iLife to earn more profit than Apple's current business model, eh?
I also like how porting Windows to Macs "spells disaster" for OSX. Because once Mac users get their hands on the smooth, aesthetically appealing, secure, and bug-free experience that is Windows XP, they'll NEVER go back to OSX!!
So you're saying that the reason Word has features that abiword, etc. don't is because people shouldn't WANT those features?
I think it's precisely that attitude - TELLING people what they should use software for rather than ASKING them - that turns people off some open-source projects.
I have a number of word-processing tasks I might want to do on my computer. Being able to write an essay, newsletter, book, or webpage in the SAME program would actually be a VERY nice feature. Why the heck should I have to download half a dozen programs and learn half a dozen different UI's just to perform these closely-related tasks? Because it makes the code cleaner? Why the hell do I, as an end-user, care how clean the code is?
Not that Word is great at all these tasks by any stretch. Honestly, my favorite word processor at the moment is Apple's Pages, which is barely risen out of the 1.0-edition muck. But I can write many kinds of documents, I can export to several important formats, and it's generally very user-friendly and easy to figure out.
My mom's 6-year-old iMac came with OS 9.whatever installed. Upgrading to OSX actually INCREASED system speed a great deal (not to mention vastly improving security and stability).
If OSX is ramping up system specs, it's doing it at such a slow rate that very few users should realistically be affected. I expect my mom's hard drives to fail before she's forced to upgrade the system to meet OS requirements.