. An unopened box has more long term value to me (and most collectors) than an open box item
Only if you don't plan on opening the box.
In which case the contents therein aren't terribly relevant to you except in an abstract sense. Fundamentally, you can't miss the coupon if you don't know its not there.
See price of older games that are new unused vs. used copies of those games.
That usually a case of wanting the manual, and so forth to be in excellent condition. "New unused" implies excellent condition of the contents, while "used" is a gamut from "you couldn't tell it wasn't new" to "The manual is missing, the CD is scratched, and the CD case is full of peanut butter".
There are a few actual collectors, who just want "NIB" mint condition for its own sake. But these people are in the minority. This isn't , for example, star wars figures where you can at least see the contents of the package without opening it.
I love me that new game smell.
All that said, I do agree with you on the point that if they are opening the boxes, it should be disclosed.
Although the CD key can be sealed inside the package. This was common for a while. You opened the box, and there was a manual, and a further shrink-wrapped case which contained the disk and the CDKey.
With the recent switch to those fat dvd cases though, I agree its a potential problem again. Although selling games with CD keys that habitually don't work is a fast track to not selling any games at all.
The most probable reason for this particular change is that Steve's health is failing; and this announcment is a proxy for "Guys, I'm not going to be ok."
When I purchase something that is advertised as "New" I expect it to BE new
You do realize the clothes you buy may even have been tried on by someone else, right?
Do they lose their "new" status too? Or do you after trying on a jacket, demand that they bring you one that no else has tried on?
By opening these boxes and removing whatever the fuck they want, are these games even allowed to be called "new" anymore?
If they opened printer boxes, dropped a usb cable inside, and slapped a sticker that said "USB cable included" on the front you would be deeply offended?
If a game is not still factory sealed...
And this is important why?
I'm going to demand it be sold at the used price point, as this is essentially now an "open box" item.
Yes, it is essentially an "open box" item. That doesn't make it the same as a "used" item.
You can demand whatever you like, but they'll probably just ask you to leave the store. You have no legal right to dictate that they sell open box items for a particular price. They can sell any item in the store for any price. They don't legally have to give discounts for open box items, or even for used items.
Its a description of what the invention does. You can't patent that. You patent the invention itself. There is NO patent protection for "what it does" the patents protect the "how it does it".
It's more like an index of a book that is so extensive one can recreate the book from the index alone (which is what Oracle is complaining about here).
Any implementation of the software based on the API will be completely different from another one. They will have the same interface, and they will accomplish the same things, but they will not be the same.
Or it's like sheet music, or a movie storyboard, etc.
You cannot patent book indexes, sheet music or story boards either. Not every idea is patentable.
This "something that exists" is a creative work. You can't "describe a creative work" in such detail as to duplicate it.
Duplicating its functionality is not duplicating it.
In unversity, I was given an assignment to take X inputs and produce Y outputs. That is essentially an API. Everyone turned in a different program.
APIs do not describe creative works in nearly enough detail as to duplicate them.
This is a variation on the whole "a digital file is just a number, and you can't copyright a number" rhetoric.
No, not at all like that.
An API is an invention. It's something that did not exist until someone created it, like a song, book, or movie.
Like a book? So this little list below:
Foundation Foundation and Empire Second Foundation Foundations Edge Foundation and Earth
Is that an invention? Or simply a description of what exists?
A software library is a set of callable functions. How is a list of the function signatures (the "API") in that library somehow different?
Ah, but perhaps you'll tell me I'm putting the cart before the horse, the API was written first, and the library came after?!
So what? Suppose Asimov, had scribbled the following on a napkin back before he penned Foundation... (And yes set aside for a moment, that Foundation wasn't penned as a novel originally...it's not the point)
Foundation Foundation and Empire Second Foundation Foundations Edge Foundation and Earth
At that point, yes this list of titles was an invention, a work of fiction on its own, the books did not exist, he had yet to write them. Fast forward a few decades... the books are written. And the list, is now a description of what exists, and it would be absurd to argue that people wishing to enumerate his works should be forbidden from writing:
Foundation Foundation and Empire Second Foundation Foundations Edge Foundation and Earth
Simply because he had written this list on a napkin before he started.
How exactly is an API different?
Further, an API is by definition, the method by which other software interfaces with it.
Copyright law has specific exceptions that explicitly and specifically allow reverse engineering and decompiling just to figure out what the interface specification actual is -- in the event that its not readily available/documented so that the discovered interface could be used for interoperability.
It would absolutely absurd if after going through all that trouble to legally protect our ability to discover what the interface is ( (hmm "discover"... as is describe something that exists), to then prohibit us from writing it down or using it, when the express purpose of the section of law was to enable interoperability.
A proof is copyrightable. A proof is deeply the same thing as a comuter program. There are thousands of ways to write the same proof, and the idea of the proof may not be copyrightable. But any partiuclar statement of it is.
Precisely like an API.
You can copyright your expression of the proof, but not the proof itself or even the idea used to make the proof.*1
This is how APIs should be treated. A particular expression or documention of one is clearly copyrightable, but the actual function signatures not so much. And anyone can write there own implementation or documentation of an API without violating copyright, just as anyone can write their own mathematical proof without violating copyright.
*1 -- On a bit of tangent:
A software patent attempts to patent the idea expressed by a computer program, but a computer program, as you noted, is "deeply the same thing" as a mathematical proof which is categorically "not patentable". This is why software patents are infuriating and contentious to me.
No one is predicting the end of the remotes because remotes cost between 5 and 10 dollars and their batteries last months
I should have said "universal remotes". Stuff like the Harmony 700, 900, Onem and beyond. $100-$350 and beyond, usb programmable, touch screens, costs as much as a cellphone and absolutely inferior to a cellphone in terms of specs and performance.
But the UI is a remote. Compared to using a remote control "app" for your phone... well there is just no comparison. The remote is far and away the better device for the job.
Tactile controls, as I noted in another reply, may not be a long lasting advantage. Samsung may release a phone next month with analog sticks and offer it as the "definitive gaming android device" and the others may follow suit very very fast
And they may discontinue it shortly thereafter. And others might release phones with different numbers and placements of buttons.
Samsung X has two analogs a d-pad, and 2 shoulder buttons and a/b/x/y. HTC Y has 1 analog 2 dpads, 4 shoulder buttons, and x/y. Motorola Z has 1 dpad and a/b.
And most phones won't have anything.
That's not really an improvement. And few developers will likely make good use of them.
Wont be long before some one like MadCatz start offering bluetooth cases with very discrete but tactile inputs. I would expect some to show by the end of 2012.
The iControlPad that's out now, is $100, and looks clumsy as hell. You can buy a DS Lite for that, and your well on your way to a PSP or 3DS.
The overlap may not be complete, but this thing already ate into the japanese handheld market share (its not going to happen, it already happened.)
it already happened.) It has been moving so incredibly fast (in less than 3 years) that I would not be shocked if the only advantage vanished by the end of 2012.
Most phones won't have controls developers can count on being present ever. Its an add on accessory at best. Consoles also have a MUCH longer service life. Anyone who would shell out for add on controls, and is willing to carry them around... might as well just buy a console.
"Meanwhile, flash orders have become a hot-button issue in recent weeks amid questions about transparency and fairness on Wall Street. A flash order refers to certain members of exchanges â" often large institutions â" buying and selling information about ongoing stock trades milliseconds before that information is made public. Some big banks and financial companies, using high-speed computer programs, can get a quick, sneak peek at how others investors are trading, giving them a fleeting glimpse into the direction of the market."
Wall Street? That's in the US right? Must be or the SEC wouldn't be involved./sarcasm
They see the orders as they hit the market. They're front running them in the microseconds between the natural order matching that would have occurred anyway.
Then there are devices like the iControlPad. Have your phone when you want it to be just a phone, strap on gaming controls when you want something more than Angry Birds or driving games.
And ease of use on par with the DOS command line. With 4 different modes, only 2 of which work unless you jailbreak the phone. Bluetooth pairing fun on android that requires a separate Bleuz IME to be installed. Manually mapping controls. Interchangeable clamps for different phones - with additional clamps envisioned for your next unit. Separately managed battery.
And then when its all done, you've still got haphazard game support.
Yep, its for people who like setting things up to play games almost as much as actually playing them.
Oh, and at $75 + $25 shipping, its almost the same price as a Nintendo 3DS.
Yeah, this is gonna be HUGE!:p
Don't get me wrong its pretty cool, and I kind of want one myself now... but I don't think its going to be the future of handheld gaming.
First, I was right that volume is higher and price is better
a) The higher volume has no effect on anything. Its just a phantom reflection of the real volume. If the real trade wasn't made the HFT trade wouldn't exist. The HFT volume didn't add liquidity, it reflected the liquidity that was already there.
b) the price was not better. I got the same price. And the actual buyer would have gotten X instead of X+1, so he paid more than he needed to.
Your order got snapped right away at price X and volume 1000.
And it would have gotten snapped up 1 second later anyway. HFT closes aribrage between orders that are ALREADY in the system; there is no risk... the buyer and seller are ALREADY going to match without the HFT. The HFT is just fast enough to get between them.
HFT is doing nothing of value.
You didn't have to wait for actual buyer to come by and maybe buy it at price X
So I didn't have to wait 0.8 extra seconds, for the buyer who was already there?
Market making traditionally means higher volume and better prices for the normal traders in the market. I see no evidence, even in this trade, that HFT would somehow be different.
Higher volume has no intrinsic value if it only exists in direct relation to existing volume. Its not real liquidity. If I offer 1000 shares at X, and there isn't someone else really buying 1000 shares, then the HFT doesn't touch it either. My trade sits there.
Then a few minutes later an order comes in for 1000 shares at limit price X+1... and then, and only then, does the HFT snatch mine, and then resell it against the buyer.
All it did was complete a trade that was going to complete anyway, when it was going to complete anyway, except that it extracted a penny out of it, because they buyer had to pay X+1 instead of X.
The device is useless without at least 2 or 3 of those premium priced games that are so highly priced because they must be distributed to stores, where the store and every single distributor in between the studio and you wants a large cut of the sale.
You can buy games via the handhelds "app store" for $5-$15 bucks. Granted they aren't the premium experience of the latest tier one titles are for $40 bucks... but then neither is "Angry Birds" .
And if phones do manage to completely wrestle control of the handheld market away from consoles... expect to see $40+ titles in the app store.
Also, decent phones start at $50 today,
$50 + $20/mo. The handheld is still cheaper after 5 months. I still play my 10 year old GBA.
ponder how things will be there by the end of 2012
Good point. The handheld console I buy today will be supported by new games for the next several years.
The handset I buy today will be obsolete in 6 months, and game support on it will be hit and miss after that... probably mostly miss.
Even on the iphone, which is by far the least fragmented smart phone OS and with one of longer support curves, even here many titles will not run on an iphone or iphone 3G. And the3GS lacks the power for some new titles as well.
Good luck getting a new premium game to run on a 2 year old android.
Or work to produce devices that can attach to phone and give them buttons via a bluetooth HID device.
As any console developer will tell you. If the console didn't come with it, there is no point in developing a game that requires it.
Even if someone makes an analog controller + dpad accessory that will bolt on awkwardly to (some small fraction!!) of available handsets and probably won't attach well to any handset realeased 6 months before the accessory launches or any handset release afterwards... virtually nobody is going to have one, and even fewer will develop games that make use of it.
then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system.
Really? Does it make sense to have IT create a centrally managed database hosted form to track the Christmas gift exchange? The lotto pool a few nurses and doctors in the maternity ward run? The checklist on who would be at the softball game?
Someone down in receiving is comparing a few shipping quotes... and wants to summarize the information.
Julie and Sally are swapping some shifts because Sally's mom is really sick, and they want to keep track of the hours...
The cleaning staff have been routinely missing a few items, so someone is running a spreadsheet checklist with all the issues being tracked against the dates to document the issue.
Pretty much everyone needs word processors and spreadsheets, and its asinine to deny them these tools.
Re:Phones will outperform before the middle of 201
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PS Vita Specs Announced
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· Score: 4, Informative
I just don't see the point of a standalone portable gaming device when we have phones that are running the Unreal 3 engine and
Driving games are quite bearable. A few other genres work... some puzzlers... But playing an FPS on a phone sucks donkey balls. And anything that requires more than one or two buttons is unplayable... Scrolling shooters? 2D-fighters? Platformers... Disasters all of them.
Apple, HTC, Samsung and Googlerola have announced every single phone they sell in 2012 year either matches or exceed every single one of these specs.
1) Except for analog sticks, d-pads, and shoulder buttons. Controls is a spec too. My cellphone can be used as a remote control for my TV too... and its got way higher specs than my universal remote to boot... but nobody is predicting the end of remote's. The remote does the job perfectly... because its a convenient shape, with tactile buttons that are arranged usefully. Cell phones utterly suck at it, with awkward controls.
2) I'm not buying my 7 and 9 year olds cell phones. But a portable console? Yeah, that could happen.
Phones and mobile games are definitely going to eat handheld consoles market share in a major way in the segments they overlap, but that overlap is not complete.
First link when you search for "uses for virtualization".
Additionally not on that list there is dynamic load balancing between different services.
Lets say you have 11 different low load servers (some database servers, some web servers, your voip mailbox system, requiring different operating systems, different users, different support contracts... etc... eg. the telephony contractor has admin remote access to the voip system). Its all virtualized onto 3 physical systems.
It would be a waste of space and money to have 11 physical servers for them. Most of them idle at 6%-10% of CPU most of the time.
Then one of them gets a load spike... you can live migrate it so that you've got the 6 low load servers on two servers, and the busy one on the other hardware with no downtime.
Three days later, one of the other servers gets a load spike... shuffle them around.
Then hardware fails, so you migrate all 11 onto 2 servers while you get it fixed. Thanks to shared storage, the servers running on the failed unit, are rebooted onto the surving ones with minimal downtime. (See, shared storage is particularly useful in tandem with virtualation... but it solves separate problem.)
you not heard of mysql cluster
What would that do for me here? My mysql database load is minimal... I don't even need one servers resources allocated to it, nevermind a cluster of them. I do still want to reduce downtime. Virtualization solves that neatly. Clustering gets me that as well, but in a tremendously inefficient way considering the load I have.
or shared storage
See above.
i would be interested to know which virtualisation solution allows migration to different physical hardware without terminating file copies
Vmware Microsoft Hyper-V Xen
"Administrators can "live migrate" virtual machines between physical hosts across a LAN without loss of availability. During this procedure, the LAN iteratively copies the memory of the virtual machine to the destination without stopping its execution. The process requires a stoppage of around 60â"300 ms to perform final synchronization before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration."
I'd imagine the retailer would just assume a few people are griefing them. They know you bought it just to return it pretty quickly (who on earth would buy the game and then hand it right back unopened?
Or take it home, bring it back next time your in the area. Better still have someone else bring it back... it was a gift, they read the box, and don't want this defective piece of crap.
datacentres use virtualization merely to squeeze more servers out of their existing hardware (equals more paying customers) so virtualization for anything else is really just a fad
Lot more uses than that.
unless you use windows in which case the operating system is the single point of failure).
Funny. But bashing windows servers stopped being funny a while ago.
but the simplest approach would be to disconnect the network cable from the old server and plug it into a ready-configured new replacement.
Really? And the 300 database queries and updates that are being executed on the "old server"? They succeed without issue? No database consistency loss either?
The file download that was in progress? Does it continue uninterrupted?
All the logged in users? They're all magically logged in after you plug into the new server? With all the processes and applications they had going in precisely the same state?
Yeah, no... i don't think so either.
i'm aware of tools like heartbeat and pacemaker for automated/remote failover, but i'm not experienced with that.
Slashdot Mirror
. An unopened box has more long term value to me (and most collectors) than an open box item
Only if you don't plan on opening the box.
In which case the contents therein aren't terribly relevant to you except in an abstract sense. Fundamentally, you can't miss the coupon if you don't know its not there.
See price of older games that are new unused vs. used copies of those games.
That usually a case of wanting the manual, and so forth to be in excellent condition. "New unused" implies excellent condition of the contents, while "used" is a gamut from "you couldn't tell it wasn't new" to "The manual is missing, the CD is scratched, and the CD case is full of peanut butter".
There are a few actual collectors, who just want "NIB" mint condition for its own sake. But these people are in the minority. This isn't , for example, star wars figures where you can at least see the contents of the package without opening it.
I love me that new game smell.
All that said, I do agree with you on the point that if they are opening the boxes, it should be disclosed.
Fair enough.
Although the CD key can be sealed inside the package. This was common for a while. You opened the box, and there was a manual, and a further shrink-wrapped case which contained the disk and the CDKey.
With the recent switch to those fat dvd cases though, I agree its a potential problem again. Although selling games with CD keys that habitually don't work is a fast track to not selling any games at all.
but I don't see how this is sad at all.
The most probable reason for this particular change is that Steve's health is failing; and this announcment is a proxy for "Guys, I'm not going to be ok."
When I purchase something that is advertised as "New" I expect it to BE new
You do realize the clothes you buy may even have been tried on by someone else, right?
Do they lose their "new" status too? Or do you after trying on a jacket, demand that they bring you one that no else has tried on?
By opening these boxes and removing whatever the fuck they want, are these games even allowed to be called "new" anymore?
If they opened printer boxes, dropped a usb cable inside, and slapped a sticker that said "USB cable included" on the front you would be deeply offended?
If a game is not still factory sealed...
And this is important why?
I'm going to demand it be sold at the used price point, as this is essentially now an "open box" item.
Yes, it is essentially an "open box" item. That doesn't make it the same as a "used" item.
You can demand whatever you like, but they'll probably just ask you to leave the store. You have no legal right to dictate that they sell open box items for a particular price. They can sell any item in the store for any price. They don't legally have to give discounts for open box items, or even for used items.
An API is part of the invention.
Its a description of what the invention does. You can't patent that. You patent the invention itself. There is NO patent protection for "what it does" the patents protect the "how it does it".
It's more like an index of a book that is so extensive one can recreate the book from the index alone (which is what Oracle is complaining about here).
Any implementation of the software based on the API will be completely different from another one. They will have the same interface, and they will accomplish the same things, but they will not be the same.
Or it's like sheet music, or a movie storyboard, etc.
You cannot patent book indexes, sheet music or story boards either. Not every idea is patentable.
This "something that exists" is a creative work. You can't "describe a creative work" in such detail as to duplicate it.
Duplicating its functionality is not duplicating it.
In unversity, I was given an assignment to take X inputs and produce Y outputs. That is essentially an API. Everyone turned in a different program.
APIs do not describe creative works in nearly enough detail as to duplicate them.
This is a variation on the whole "a digital file is just a number, and you can't copyright a number" rhetoric.
No, not at all like that.
An API is an invention. It's something that did not exist until someone created it, like a song, book, or movie.
Like a book? So this little list below:
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundations Edge
Foundation and Earth
Is that an invention? Or simply a description of what exists?
A software library is a set of callable functions. How is a list of the function signatures (the "API") in that library somehow different?
Ah, but perhaps you'll tell me I'm putting the cart before the horse, the API was written first, and the library came after?!
So what? Suppose Asimov, had scribbled the following on a napkin back before he penned Foundation... (And yes set aside for a moment, that Foundation wasn't penned as a novel originally...it's not the point)
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundations Edge
Foundation and Earth
At that point, yes this list of titles was an invention, a work of fiction on its own, the books did not exist, he had yet to write them. Fast forward a few decades... the books are written. And the list, is now a description of what exists, and it would be absurd to argue that people wishing to enumerate his works should be forbidden from writing:
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundations Edge
Foundation and Earth
Simply because he had written this list on a napkin before he started.
How exactly is an API different?
Further, an API is by definition, the method by which other software interfaces with it.
Copyright law has specific exceptions that explicitly and specifically allow reverse engineering and decompiling just to figure out what the interface specification actual is -- in the event that its not readily available/documented so that the discovered interface could be used for interoperability.
It would absolutely absurd if after going through all that trouble to legally protect our ability to discover what the interface is ( (hmm "discover"... as is describe something that exists), to then prohibit us from writing it down or using it, when the express purpose of the section of law was to enable interoperability.
A proof is copyrightable. A proof is deeply the same thing as a comuter program. There are thousands of ways to write the same proof, and the idea of the proof may not be copyrightable. But any partiuclar statement of it is.
Precisely like an API.
You can copyright your expression of the proof, but not the proof itself or even the idea used to make the proof.*1
This is how APIs should be treated. A particular expression or documention of one is clearly copyrightable, but the actual function signatures not so much. And anyone can write there own implementation or documentation of an API without violating copyright, just as anyone can write their own mathematical proof without violating copyright.
*1 -- On a bit of tangent:
A software patent attempts to patent the idea expressed by a computer program, but a computer program, as you noted, is "deeply the same thing" as a mathematical proof which is categorically "not patentable". This is why software patents are infuriating and contentious to me.
It's obviously "the work of an author".
So is a mathemtatical proof.
But they aren't copyrightable either.
It teaches at least one useful physics lesson:
past a certain point increasing launch angle starts to reduce distance travelled.
with the corollary:
there are multiple firing solutions with different trajectories that will arrive at the same point.
No one is predicting the end of the remotes because remotes cost between 5 and 10 dollars and their batteries last months
I should have said "universal remotes". Stuff like the Harmony 700, 900, Onem and beyond. $100-$350 and beyond, usb programmable, touch screens, costs as much as a cellphone and absolutely inferior to a cellphone in terms of specs and performance.
But the UI is a remote. Compared to using a remote control "app" for your phone... well there is just no comparison. The remote is far and away the better device for the job.
Tactile controls, as I noted in another reply, may not be a long lasting advantage. Samsung may release a phone next month with analog sticks and offer it as the "definitive gaming android device" and the others may follow suit very very fast
And they may discontinue it shortly thereafter. And others might release phones with different numbers and placements of buttons.
Samsung X has two analogs a d-pad, and 2 shoulder buttons and a/b/x/y. HTC Y has 1 analog 2 dpads, 4 shoulder buttons, and x/y. Motorola Z has 1 dpad and a/b.
And most phones won't have anything.
That's not really an improvement. And few developers will likely make good use of them.
Wont be long before some one like MadCatz start offering bluetooth cases with very discrete but tactile inputs. I would expect some to show by the end of 2012.
The iControlPad that's out now, is $100, and looks clumsy as hell. You can buy a DS Lite for that, and your well on your way to a PSP or 3DS.
The overlap may not be complete, but this thing already ate into the japanese handheld market share (its not going to happen, it already happened.)
it already happened.) It has been moving so incredibly fast (in less than 3 years) that I would not be shocked if the only advantage vanished by the end of 2012.
Most phones won't have controls developers can count on being present ever. Its an add on accessory at best. Consoles also have a MUCH longer service life. Anyone who would shell out for add on controls, and is willing to carry them around... might as well just buy a console.
But what market would this be? Not a US or European one since that activity would be insider trading and subject to considerable penalty from the SEC.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32910725/ns/business-us_business/t/sec-proposes-banning-flash-trading/#.TlLZoM2yDVk
"Meanwhile, flash orders have become a hot-button issue in recent weeks amid questions about transparency and fairness on Wall Street. A flash order refers to certain members of exchanges â" often large institutions â" buying and selling information about ongoing stock trades milliseconds before that information is made public. Some big banks and financial companies, using high-speed computer programs, can get a quick, sneak peek at how others investors are trading, giving them a fleeting glimpse into the direction of the market."
Wall Street? That's in the US right? Must be or the SEC wouldn't be involved. /sarcasm
If you masturbate you didn't spill an innocent life, you committed genocide!!! :P
Even if you had sex for the purposes of procreation and even if you succeeded... you still wasted "hundreds of life seeds"
It might have gotten snapped up 1 second later
It WOULD have gotten snapped up 1 second later.
They see the orders as they hit the market. They're front running them in the microseconds between the natural order matching that would have occurred anyway.
Then there are devices like the iControlPad. Have your phone when you want it to be just a phone, strap on gaming controls when you want something more than Angry Birds or driving games.
And ease of use on par with the DOS command line. With 4 different modes, only 2 of which work unless you jailbreak the phone. Bluetooth pairing fun on android that requires a separate Bleuz IME to be installed. Manually mapping controls. Interchangeable clamps for different phones - with additional clamps envisioned for your next unit. Separately managed battery.
And then when its all done, you've still got haphazard game support.
Yep, its for people who like setting things up to play games almost as much as actually playing them.
Oh, and at $75 + $25 shipping, its almost the same price as a Nintendo 3DS.
Yeah, this is gonna be HUGE! :p
Don't get me wrong its pretty cool, and I kind of want one myself now... but I don't think its going to be the future of handheld gaming.
First, I was right that volume is higher and price is better
a) The higher volume has no effect on anything. Its just a phantom reflection of the real volume. If the real trade wasn't made the HFT trade wouldn't exist. The HFT volume didn't add liquidity, it reflected the liquidity that was already there.
b) the price was not better. I got the same price. And the actual buyer would have gotten X instead of X+1, so he paid more than he needed to.
Your order got snapped right away at price X and volume 1000.
And it would have gotten snapped up 1 second later anyway. HFT closes aribrage between orders that are ALREADY in the system; there is no risk... the buyer and seller are ALREADY going to match without the HFT. The HFT is just fast enough to get between them.
HFT is doing nothing of value.
You didn't have to wait for actual buyer to come by and maybe buy it at price X
So I didn't have to wait 0.8 extra seconds, for the buyer who was already there?
Market making traditionally means higher volume and better prices for the normal traders in the market. I see no evidence, even in this trade, that HFT would somehow be different.
Higher volume has no intrinsic value if it only exists in direct relation to existing volume. Its not real liquidity. If I offer 1000 shares at X, and there isn't someone else really buying 1000 shares, then the HFT doesn't touch it either. My trade sits there.
Then a few minutes later an order comes in for 1000 shares at limit price X+1... and then, and only then, does the HFT snatch mine, and then resell it against the buyer.
All it did was complete a trade that was going to complete anyway, when it was going to complete anyway, except that it extracted a penny out of it, because they buyer had to pay X+1 instead of X.
The device is useless without at least 2 or 3 of those premium priced games that are so highly priced because they must be distributed to stores, where the store and every single distributor in between the studio and you wants a large cut of the sale.
You can buy games via the handhelds "app store" for $5-$15 bucks. Granted they aren't the premium experience of the latest tier one titles are for $40 bucks... but then neither is "Angry Birds" .
And if phones do manage to completely wrestle control of the handheld market away from consoles... expect to see $40+ titles in the app store.
Also, decent phones start at $50 today,
$50 + $20/mo. The handheld is still cheaper after 5 months. I still play my 10 year old GBA.
ponder how things will be there by the end of 2012
Good point. The handheld console I buy today will be supported by new games for the next several years.
The handset I buy today will be obsolete in 6 months, and game support on it will be hit and miss after that... probably mostly miss.
Even on the iphone, which is by far the least fragmented smart phone OS and with one of longer support curves, even here many titles will not run on an iphone or iphone 3G. And the3GS lacks the power for some new titles as well.
Good luck getting a new premium game to run on a 2 year old android.
You need a cell phone contract for your 7 and 9 year old?
Or work to produce devices that can attach to phone and give them buttons via a bluetooth HID device.
As any console developer will tell you. If the console didn't come with it, there is no point in developing a game that requires it.
Even if someone makes an analog controller + dpad accessory that will bolt on awkwardly to (some small fraction!!) of available handsets and probably won't attach well to any handset realeased 6 months before the accessory launches or any handset release afterwards... virtually nobody is going to have one, and even fewer will develop games that make use of it.
then it makes sense for other less important forms to be done in the same or a similar system.
Really? Does it make sense to have IT create a centrally managed database hosted form to track the Christmas gift exchange? The lotto pool a few nurses and doctors in the maternity ward run? The checklist on who would be at the softball game?
Someone down in receiving is comparing a few shipping quotes... and wants to summarize the information.
Julie and Sally are swapping some shifts because Sally's mom is really sick, and they want to keep track of the hours...
The cleaning staff have been routinely missing a few items, so someone is running a spreadsheet checklist with all the issues being tracked against the dates to document the issue.
Pretty much everyone needs word processors and spreadsheets, and its asinine to deny them these tools.
I just don't see the point of a standalone portable gaming device when we have phones that are running the Unreal 3 engine and
Driving games are quite bearable. A few other genres work... some puzzlers... But playing an FPS on a phone sucks donkey balls. And anything that requires more than one or two buttons is unplayable... Scrolling shooters? 2D-fighters? Platformers... Disasters all of them.
Apple, HTC, Samsung and Googlerola have announced every single phone they sell in 2012 year either matches or exceed every single one of these specs.
1) Except for analog sticks, d-pads, and shoulder buttons. Controls is a spec too. My cellphone can be used as a remote control for my TV too... and its got way higher specs than my universal remote to boot... but nobody is predicting the end of remote's. The remote does the job perfectly ... because its a convenient shape, with tactile buttons that are arranged usefully. Cell phones utterly suck at it, with awkward controls.
2) I'm not buying my 7 and 9 year olds cell phones. But a portable console? Yeah, that could happen.
Phones and mobile games are definitely going to eat handheld consoles market share in a major way in the segments they overlap, but that overlap is not complete.
http://blog.inetu.net/2009/03/7-great-uses-for-virtualization/
First link when you search for "uses for virtualization".
Additionally not on that list there is dynamic load balancing between different services.
Lets say you have 11 different low load servers (some database servers, some web servers, your voip mailbox system, requiring different operating systems, different users, different support contracts... etc... eg. the telephony contractor has admin remote access to the voip system). Its all virtualized onto 3 physical systems.
It would be a waste of space and money to have 11 physical servers for them. Most of them idle at 6%-10% of CPU most of the time.
Then one of them gets a load spike... you can live migrate it so that you've got the 6 low load servers on two servers, and the busy one on the other hardware with no downtime.
Three days later, one of the other servers gets a load spike... shuffle them around.
Then hardware fails, so you migrate all 11 onto 2 servers while you get it fixed. Thanks to shared storage, the servers running on the failed unit, are rebooted onto the surving ones with minimal downtime. (See, shared storage is particularly useful in tandem with virtualation... but it solves separate problem.)
you not heard of mysql cluster
What would that do for me here? My mysql database load is minimal... I don't even need one servers resources allocated to it, nevermind a cluster of them. I do still want to reduce downtime. Virtualization solves that neatly. Clustering gets me that as well, but in a tremendously inefficient way considering the load I have.
or shared storage
See above.
i would be interested to know which virtualisation solution allows migration to different physical hardware without terminating file copies
Vmware
Microsoft Hyper-V
Xen
"Administrators can "live migrate" virtual machines between physical hosts across a LAN without loss of availability.
During this procedure, the LAN iteratively copies the memory of the virtual machine to the destination without stopping its execution. The process requires a stoppage of around 60â"300 ms to perform final synchronization before the virtual machine begins executing at its final destination, providing an illusion of seamless migration."
I'd imagine the retailer would just assume a few people are griefing them. They know you bought it just to return it pretty quickly (who on earth would buy the game and then hand it right back unopened?
Or take it home, bring it back next time your in the area. Better still have someone else bring it back... it was a gift, they read the box, and don't want this defective piece of crap.
datacentres use virtualization merely to squeeze more servers out of their existing hardware (equals more paying customers) so virtualization for anything else is really just a fad
Lot more uses than that.
unless you use windows in which case the operating system is the single point of failure).
Funny. But bashing windows servers stopped being funny a while ago.
but the simplest approach would be to disconnect the network cable from the old server and plug it into a ready-configured new replacement.
Really? And the 300 database queries and updates that are being executed on the "old server"? They succeed without issue? No database consistency loss either?
The file download that was in progress? Does it continue uninterrupted?
All the logged in users? They're all magically logged in after you plug into the new server? With all the processes and applications they had going in precisely the same state?
Yeah, no... i don't think so either.
i'm aware of tools like heartbeat and pacemaker for automated/remote failover, but i'm not experienced with that.
Or virtualization. :p
They do if it happens often enough, and the return is always for the same reason.