Perhaps for you this is true but for the majority of people out there? Why do you think Amazon.com is big? These same wares are normally available locally but most people disreguard the local economy over all.
I buy from Amazon primarily because it is cheaper than bookstores. Plus it has more selection. And it doesn't require that 40-mile drive.
Amazon hasn't stopped me from buying at brick-and-mortar stores, though. I buy all my technical (in other words, O'Reilly) books through Amazon because they're cheaper and easier to find. I buy most of my recreational books in stores because browsing shelves is a lot easier than browsing web sites when it comes to sampling books.
And Steam also pretty much comes out and says that if you don't have a network connection to connect to their server that you're SOL. How long do you think it will be before Steam simply decides that not enough of their marketshare has no broadband access to care? Currently the bandwidth is what's holding these companies back from going to a media-free market. Steam has already shown intent by making some mods 'Download only'. Once the number of non-broadband holders hits a small enough of a market percentage Valve will be more than happy to cut physical products.
I'd wager that we won't live to see a media-free market. It may turn to requiring a special order to get a disk, but until wifi is widely available, reliable, and cheap, there are going to be a lot of portable computers out there without full-time internet access. People will want to have the option, and there will be enough market pressure that they'll give it to them.
Consider that this is long term, this isn't next week, this isn't going to be Half Life 3 that I'm talking about but in a decade I can see it getting to the point where some companies will be more than happy to lose a few customers in order to eliminate the entire middleman structure. It will ultimatly come down to a matter of resources and the physical production of a product is a load that a company will choose not to take on if they can avoid it. The customer loss will have to be significant enough for them to not turn a profit for them to not get rid of it.
Like I said before, if they want to take the physical medium out of the picture, they need to reduce the cost for those people who buy licensed downloads. Make a $50 game available for download at $40. Sell older titles for $7 instead of the $10 I could pay at Wal-Mart.
There are technologies available that would actually make delivery on demand possible for those people willing to pay the cost of a physical disk. If Valve decided to distribute HL3 via the web only, it wouldn't be that great a hurdle for them to set up a system where a license holder could pay $10 to have a disk burned, sleeved, and mailed to them. Most of the process could be automated, so costs would be relatively low. This would have the added benefit of giving a developer a realistic picture of how many consumers are fine with digital-only distribution, and how many want physical media bad enough to pay a little more for it.
While I agree that we're getting ripped off the end reason for not going to the middle man will be because you don't have to. Would you rather download the content or drive to get it? I don't know about you but my closest BestBuy/CompUSA/Circuit City is about 20 miles away and loaded with traffic not to mention the dolts that man these stores... Even tho I'm not saving money I'd still rather buy online and avoid all this bad noise.
I don't every make trips to buy games. I have to go 40 miles to get to anything other than Wal-Mart (not even a "Super"). But when I make the 40-mile drive to do whatever it is I'm going to do, I go half a mile out of my way and swing by Best Buy or some other store while I'm there.
I figure if I'm going to be paying the same price for a game either there or online, I'll do the local economy a favor and keep some of the money here.
Another potential plus to this would be having your purchase "recorded" by the seller in such a way that if you ever lose the content you have bought (say, a HD failure) you should be able to re-download this content with no price to you, a better situation than the infamous "Send us the broken CD and 29.95 for a replacement" policy that many manufacturers have in place.
Valve ties all your CD keys to your Steam login so that once you've installed and registered a game, you have access to reinstall it any time. I'm an avid fan of Steam, primarily for that reason.
It's like the iPod video, only you need a proprietary "universal" disc to watch low-res video on a screen smaller than the palm of your hand.
Or you could buy a cheap portable DVD player at Wal-Mart for $150, have a 7" screen, and watch all the movies you already paid for in a less expensive and more compatible format.
I've never seen a PSP. Seriously. I have never seen a single person even carrying one, and I work for an intermediate school.
Consumers don't want to be confused by products who do more than one thing. Just look at the abysmal PC market (including Macs). I mean, once people find out that these things surf the internet AND send e-mail AND play music AND play movies AND play games AND store/edit images AND let them store all the information they can think to store, they'll run screaming to the other side of the store and buy a notepad, ledger, calculator, typewriter, DVD player, WebTV console, CD player, and game console. These computer things will never catch on.
I thought the whole point of the iPod was that it was easy to use. The clickwheel was supposed to be this great innovation that really completed the UI and let users easily navigate long menus with just their thumbs. Is getting rid of the clickwheel and adopting a touchscreen really a good idea?
Buying online, there's no middle-man to add his own profit. There's no store, so no cost associated with the building or the employees. There's no product, so it wasn't designed, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Yet I have NEVER seen an online-only sale direct from the publisher/developer sell for significantly less than I would pay in a retail store.
They want to kill the retail game market? Let me buy the game for the same price they would have sold it to Wal-Mart. If you want to get rid of the middle man, give me a reason to get rid of him.
It's ridiculous now, if you live in an urban area. Why not walk to the store and back? If you're able-bodied and live less than a couple of miles from the town centre, you have no excuse.
Today, it's raining and 35 degrees outside.
In three or four months, it'll be pushing 100 degrees with 90+% humidity.
When you regularly walk "a couple of miles" in weather like we get, let me know.
I think the only permission anybody ought to need in order to eavesdrop on a communication is the owner of the wire. If you're contracting with the owner of the wire for services, and privacy is important to you, make that part of the contract.
Let me call the phone company right quick and ask that my DSL contract be amended to express that they will not allow someone to tap the lines. I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Or save yourself some effort and money and simply encrypt your communications. It's nearly effortless. It won't cost you anything (money wise) for the software.
Because everyone automatically knows how to encrypt e-mails.
Also, I take exception with the summary that "some surveillance of your email has been permitted." The article says, "the Justice Department asked a federal magistrate judge to approve monitoring of an unnamed person's e-mail correspondents." I sincerely doubt that I am that person or one of his correspondents, unless he is a spammer. I recognize this could affect me in the future because a precedent has been set...
I agree with this. If I'm reading this right, the government is investigating a particular person and is asking for permission to monitor that particular person's e-mail correspondents. It's like tapping the phones of everyone who calls/is called by a mob boss. The precedent creates a slippery slope, but we haven't fallen down every time we've hit one of those.
Complaining about this is tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway and then demanding a law be passed to protect your privacy from your neighbor or the police car driving by. For crying out loud! Isn't some burden on you to secure your own privacy? This is not so far from the DMCA requiring legal protection against breaking "protection mechanisms" that are not effective in the slightest. Why in the world would you trust the government enough to expect them to take responsibility for securing your privacy?
No, complaining about this is more like making love to your wife in your bedroom and realizing there's some perv in the bushes outside your window. E-mails are NOT broadcasts, it requires some effort and intrusion to tap someone's e-mail. A girl in a slinky dress is NOT asking to be raped, a house without bars on the windows is NOT asking to be robbed, and unencrypted e-mail is NOT an invitation to intercept and open it. It's smart to lock your car.
If you leave your car running while you run into to the store and it's gone when you come out, I'll call you a dope for making it so easy, but I'll still call the thief a scumbag for stealing someone's car.
Title from TFA: "A report warns of security vulnerabilities, raising the question of whether the open-source model can provide bullet-proof software"
What you might say: We get reports of security vulnerabilities on Microsoft products on a weekly basis, and there is unfortunately no such thing as bullet-proof software. Just recently Microsoft opted not to release an automatic update related to a virus before the virus went active, which would indicate that, contrary to what comes out of the PR department, Microsoft's commitment to security is not significant.
(I know the last sentence can be somewhat deceptive and there's more to the story, but if they're going to flap their lips when they're clueless, I doubt they'll catch it).
Wrap up with: No, Linux isn't perfect. There is a risk of vulnerability in every product. Microsoft, Apple, Unix, Linux, all of them carry some risk. It's our job to assess the risks and find the safest, most secure software that meets the company's productivity needs. It's what we do every day.
Re:I'm not going to Vista, I swear
on
Halo 2 Only on Vista
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I skipped ME and 2k for gaming purposes. They both sucked for it.
I have my concerns that Vista is going to be the next ME. I seriously doubt it, but I wouldn't put it past the boys at Redmond to hand us another debacle. So, I'm going to wait 6 months before I even consider upgrading.
I'm not buying a Mac, though. I like my games too much:D
The problem with the adapters is that Bungie limited the turn speeds in Halo 2 so that keyboard/mouse users wouldn't have a speed advantage over the thumbstick users. It's why I don't own a copy of Halo 2 and why I won't have a subscription to XBOX Live any time soon.
That's one of the big reasons that MS isn't supporting the mouse for the 360...PC gamers would dominate the online play while console-only gamers with their gamepads would be wondering how the other guy moves so fast (and probably screaming HAX!). Rather than put up with a nonintuitive, relatively slow interface, I just stick with the PC for my FPS gaming. And RTS. And flight sims.
It was a Black Friday sale, so the price might be a fair bit lower than normal. It's a Magnavox that was listed as supporting 480p. Not that there's a significant visual difference between i and p to the casual viewer (me) in 99% of what will be seen on TV and in movies.
Oh, the average Joe would love it...I don't know anyone who has looked at an HD demonstration and not been impressed. The thing is, they aren't impressed enough to buy an HDTV, HD-DVD/BLU-RAY, and replace all their movies at a premium price.
Seriously, that's the only benefit of blu-ray as a video format. it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution. For those people who want to see the pores on Will Smith's nose in Hitch, it's quite impressive.
I'm just not enough of a videophile to care. And with the upcoming format war (HD-DVD vs BLU-RAY) I'm going to sit back and wait either for a clear winner to emerge, or for someone to invent a dual-format player so that I don't have to care what format I'm buying.
At least it's looking like both formats will have backwards-compatible players so that standard DVDs won't require a seperate player.
$400 for an 27" HDTV monitor with no tuner. $150 for a comparable 27" analog.
Those are actual best in-store prices after a day of shopping...there's always someone who has a link to show that there's an HDTV for $xxx cheaper than what I listed, but I couldn't have walked out of a store with it that day so it's not really relevant.
Two months ago I bought an analog TV because it was cost effective. I have absolutely nothing in my entertainment center that justifies spending $250 more on a TV, as the picture won't be improved at all on my current hardware. I have no intention of running out and buying a new, more expensive video player just so I can buy movies on a new, more expensive video format. 480p looks perfectly fine to me.
Yes yes, I know a lot of people really are running out and buying HDTVs, but did you notice the first cut-off date for the all-digital switch has come and gone? That's because your average consumer--NOT the ones who own multiple large screens--doesn't want to spend several hundred dollars they don't see a need to spend.
I'm waiting for HDTV monitors to reach a more realistic price. I figure if I hold out for the same TV I looked at two months ago to get down to $250, I'll break even and have a spare TV. Early adoption is expensive...waiting til a technology is the mainstream standard is far more economical.
I'm waiting for the version with an integrated 2 MP camera. That way everyone can take pictures without anyone else knowing and it won't be limited just to those people who can cleverly conceal their cell phones.
Aren't you guys looking forward to browsing a forum and seeing thousands more bad pictures of random moderately attractive women doing everyday things? I know I am.
Not too long ago, MS released several billion (I think) dollars to their stockholders.
I'm not convinced that hoarding some cash is a bad idea for a business. Clearly MS isn't sticking every penny they make into the bank, but if they were to take all of that cash and reinvest it in a venture that goes nowhere they're in a worse spot than before. By having a large amount of money readily available, it makes the company more stable on the long-term because they remove their sensitivity to market fluctuations.
Microsoft could have several very bad years before they had to start trimming their organization. Compare that to other companies that start laying people off during six-month slumps and you see where it's beneficial.
The Shuffle was an experiment that didn't go the way Apple hoped. Sure it's useful for certain applications, but do you think the typical buyer thinks "hey, I'll get this iPod Mini for when I'm waiting in line at the DMV and this iPod Shuffle for when I'm working out"? I get how not everyone wants/needs the gizmos, but there just aren't enough people who can justify buying two iPods, or want to buy just one without an LCD.
A 1 GB Shuffle will hold 160+ songs if you don't rip them at too high a bitrate. Your average consumer would be more than happy with that as their primary player...but 160 songs without a screen to preview songs might prompt someone to look at another product. Like maybe something not made by Apple.
My Samsung is solid. It's been dropped, thrown, even chewed on by a toddler. I have it with me when I'm doing yardwork, working out, et cetera. It also has an LCD...so it can be done without making the device delicate.
Apple's the one killing the Shuffle, not me. I like the form factor and some of the features of the Shuffle, but the lack of an LCD turned me off from it. They're aborting the product pretty early, which would indicate to me that they're not getting the sales numbers they wanted. They could bring it back as a new iPod without the Shuffle "you nver know what will play next" gimmick that I think really put a lot of people off...I think it would be a lot more effective at grabbing the SFF/budget corner of the market and having the iPod line completely dominate the arena.
(not that I think that iPod gaining marketshare is a good thing...I'm tired of "iPod" being the generic term for MP3 player these days)
While it's clear that many members of the media don't grasp basic computer concepts beyond using Windows/MacOS for web surfing and office applications, this has very little to do with their ignorance of the gaming community and games as an entertainment medium.
This is all about ratings. If they ran a story that took a fair and balanced look at gaming and its pros and cons, nobody would pay attention. Gamers wouldn't pay attention because they understand it, anti-game advocates wouldn't like it because it didn't share their irrational bias, and the average viewer/reader wouldn't care because they wouldn't feel it was relevant or interesting. But if they run a sensational story about how games *might* be dangerous to *some* people who have *other problems* that are aggravated by excessive, obsessive gaming, people pay attention, the get ratings, and advertisers give them more money.
The public are the ones who need help. Help the people, you help the media. This applies to just about everything: Schools? Fix the parents, you fix the education problems. Environmental concerns? Get the people to care, corporations will follow the money and give the people what they want.
As best I can figure it, what happens is a manager tells a supervisor what skills are needed, the supervisor tells HR what levels of each skill are needed, and HR sticks arbitrary numbers in place of the skill levels because they don't have a clue what they're looking at.
"5 years of..." is the mantra of the human resources department. 5 years makes you experienced, 10 years qualifies you to lead a group, 15 years qualifies you to lead the department. I recall passing up one ad that required 15 years of Windows NT/2000 administration experience in 2001. I remember wondering if maybe NT was really that old and I'd missed something.
If we're lucky, this will push employers to scale down their listed requirements to something realistic. Like others here, I've never landed a job where I met anywhere near the listed requirements.
...that is, anywhere but on the internet, wouldn't this be called "extortion"?
disclaimer: This is a real question, not rhetorical. I could admittedly be wrong.
My parents' Yahoo address has been filtered when they sent something to my address. They mass-emailed pictures of my son to about fifty people, and all the Yahoo users had to dig it out of their junk mail folders to view it. When Yahoo's spam filters are that restrictive, one must wonder just how many people will simply stop sending to Yahoo.
I'm not affected by this any more. $5 a month for domain hosting means never having to worry about good e-mail getting flagged as spam.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy from Amazon primarily because it is cheaper than bookstores. Plus it has more selection. And it doesn't require that 40-mile drive.
Amazon hasn't stopped me from buying at brick-and-mortar stores, though. I buy all my technical (in other words, O'Reilly) books through Amazon because they're cheaper and easier to find. I buy most of my recreational books in stores because browsing shelves is a lot easier than browsing web sites when it comes to sampling books.
And Steam also pretty much comes out and says that if you don't have a network connection to connect to their server that you're SOL. How long do you think it will be before Steam simply decides that not enough of their marketshare has no broadband access to care? Currently the bandwidth is what's holding these companies back from going to a media-free market. Steam has already shown intent by making some mods 'Download only'. Once the number of non-broadband holders hits a small enough of a market percentage Valve will be more than happy to cut physical products.
I'd wager that we won't live to see a media-free market. It may turn to requiring a special order to get a disk, but until wifi is widely available, reliable, and cheap, there are going to be a lot of portable computers out there without full-time internet access. People will want to have the option, and there will be enough market pressure that they'll give it to them.
Consider that this is long term, this isn't next week, this isn't going to be Half Life 3 that I'm talking about but in a decade I can see it getting to the point where some companies will be more than happy to lose a few customers in order to eliminate the entire middleman structure. It will ultimatly come down to a matter of resources and the physical production of a product is a load that a company will choose not to take on if they can avoid it. The customer loss will have to be significant enough for them to not turn a profit for them to not get rid of it.
Like I said before, if they want to take the physical medium out of the picture, they need to reduce the cost for those people who buy licensed downloads. Make a $50 game available for download at $40. Sell older titles for $7 instead of the $10 I could pay at Wal-Mart.
There are technologies available that would actually make delivery on demand possible for those people willing to pay the cost of a physical disk. If Valve decided to distribute HL3 via the web only, it wouldn't be that great a hurdle for them to set up a system where a license holder could pay $10 to have a disk burned, sleeved, and mailed to them. Most of the process could be automated, so costs would be relatively low. This would have the added benefit of giving a developer a realistic picture of how many consumers are fine with digital-only distribution, and how many want physical media bad enough to pay a little more for it.
I don't every make trips to buy games. I have to go 40 miles to get to anything other than Wal-Mart (not even a "Super"). But when I make the 40-mile drive to do whatever it is I'm going to do, I go half a mile out of my way and swing by Best Buy or some other store while I'm there.
I figure if I'm going to be paying the same price for a game either there or online, I'll do the local economy a favor and keep some of the money here.
Another potential plus to this would be having your purchase "recorded" by the seller in such a way that if you ever lose the content you have bought (say, a HD failure) you should be able to re-download this content with no price to you, a better situation than the infamous "Send us the broken CD and 29.95 for a replacement" policy that many manufacturers have in place.
Valve ties all your CD keys to your Steam login so that once you've installed and registered a game, you have access to reinstall it any time. I'm an avid fan of Steam, primarily for that reason.
It's like the iPod video, only you need a proprietary "universal" disc to watch low-res video on a screen smaller than the palm of your hand.
Or you could buy a cheap portable DVD player at Wal-Mart for $150, have a 7" screen, and watch all the movies you already paid for in a less expensive and more compatible format.
I've never seen a PSP. Seriously. I have never seen a single person even carrying one, and I work for an intermediate school.
You buy the DVD, sell the UMD on eBay to someone who doesn't want/need the DVD, and you both get a discount.
Consumers don't want to be confused by products who do more than one thing. Just look at the abysmal PC market (including Macs). I mean, once people find out that these things surf the internet AND send e-mail AND play music AND play movies AND play games AND store/edit images AND let them store all the information they can think to store, they'll run screaming to the other side of the store and buy a notepad, ledger, calculator, typewriter, DVD player, WebTV console, CD player, and game console. These computer things will never catch on.
I thought the whole point of the iPod was that it was easy to use. The clickwheel was supposed to be this great innovation that really completed the UI and let users easily navigate long menus with just their thumbs. Is getting rid of the clickwheel and adopting a touchscreen really a good idea?
Yeah, but we aren't seeing the savings.
Buying online, there's no middle-man to add his own profit. There's no store, so no cost associated with the building or the employees. There's no product, so it wasn't designed, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Yet I have NEVER seen an online-only sale direct from the publisher/developer sell for significantly less than I would pay in a retail store.
They want to kill the retail game market? Let me buy the game for the same price they would have sold it to Wal-Mart. If you want to get rid of the middle man, give me a reason to get rid of him.
Today, it's raining and 35 degrees outside.
In three or four months, it'll be pushing 100 degrees with 90+% humidity.
When you regularly walk "a couple of miles" in weather like we get, let me know.
Let me call the phone company right quick and ask that my DSL contract be amended to express that they will not allow someone to tap the lines. I'm sure they'll get right on that.
Or save yourself some effort and money and simply encrypt your communications. It's nearly effortless. It won't cost you anything (money wise) for the software.
Because everyone automatically knows how to encrypt e-mails.
Also, I take exception with the summary that "some surveillance of your email has been permitted." The article says, "the Justice Department asked a federal magistrate judge to approve monitoring of an unnamed person's e-mail correspondents." I sincerely doubt that I am that person or one of his correspondents, unless he is a spammer. I recognize this could affect me in the future because a precedent has been set ...
I agree with this. If I'm reading this right, the government is investigating a particular person and is asking for permission to monitor that particular person's e-mail correspondents. It's like tapping the phones of everyone who calls/is called by a mob boss. The precedent creates a slippery slope, but we haven't fallen down every time we've hit one of those.
Complaining about this is tantamount to making love to your wife in your open front doorway and then demanding a law be passed to protect your privacy from your neighbor or the police car driving by. For crying out loud! Isn't some burden on you to secure your own privacy? This is not so far from the DMCA requiring legal protection against breaking "protection mechanisms" that are not effective in the slightest. Why in the world would you trust the government enough to expect them to take responsibility for securing your privacy?
No, complaining about this is more like making love to your wife in your bedroom and realizing there's some perv in the bushes outside your window. E-mails are NOT broadcasts, it requires some effort and intrusion to tap someone's e-mail. A girl in a slinky dress is NOT asking to be raped, a house without bars on the windows is NOT asking to be robbed, and unencrypted e-mail is NOT an invitation to intercept and open it. It's smart to lock your car.
If you leave your car running while you run into to the store and it's gone when you come out, I'll call you a dope for making it so easy, but I'll still call the thief a scumbag for stealing someone's car.
Or, to save time:
"Google uses Linux, and their stock price is $3xx."
Title from TFA: "A report warns of security vulnerabilities, raising the question of whether the open-source model can provide bullet-proof software"
What you might say: We get reports of security vulnerabilities on Microsoft products on a weekly basis, and there is unfortunately no such thing as bullet-proof software. Just recently Microsoft opted not to release an automatic update related to a virus before the virus went active, which would indicate that, contrary to what comes out of the PR department, Microsoft's commitment to security is not significant.
(I know the last sentence can be somewhat deceptive and there's more to the story, but if they're going to flap their lips when they're clueless, I doubt they'll catch it).
Wrap up with: No, Linux isn't perfect. There is a risk of vulnerability in every product. Microsoft, Apple, Unix, Linux, all of them carry some risk. It's our job to assess the risks and find the safest, most secure software that meets the company's productivity needs. It's what we do every day.
I skipped ME and 2k for gaming purposes. They both sucked for it.
:D
I have my concerns that Vista is going to be the next ME. I seriously doubt it, but I wouldn't put it past the boys at Redmond to hand us another debacle. So, I'm going to wait 6 months before I even consider upgrading.
I'm not buying a Mac, though. I like my games too much
That's one of the big reasons that MS isn't supporting the mouse for the 360...PC gamers would dominate the online play while console-only gamers with their gamepads would be wondering how the other guy moves so fast (and probably screaming HAX!). Rather than put up with a nonintuitive, relatively slow interface, I just stick with the PC for my FPS gaming. And RTS. And flight sims.
It was a Black Friday sale, so the price might be a fair bit lower than normal. It's a Magnavox that was listed as supporting 480p. Not that there's a significant visual difference between i and p to the casual viewer (me) in 99% of what will be seen on TV and in movies.
Well crap. I was thinking it was 12 times, instead of ~7. That's what I get for being lazy and not doing the math.
Can we just call it dramatic license then?
Oh, the average Joe would love it...I don't know anyone who has looked at an HD demonstration and not been impressed. The thing is, they aren't impressed enough to buy an HDTV, HD-DVD/BLU-RAY, and replace all their movies at a premium price.
Why, it has more pixels of course!
Seriously, that's the only benefit of blu-ray as a video format. it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution. For those people who want to see the pores on Will Smith's nose in Hitch, it's quite impressive.
I'm just not enough of a videophile to care. And with the upcoming format war (HD-DVD vs BLU-RAY) I'm going to sit back and wait either for a clear winner to emerge, or for someone to invent a dual-format player so that I don't have to care what format I'm buying.
At least it's looking like both formats will have backwards-compatible players so that standard DVDs won't require a seperate player.
Kind of like HDTVs.
$400 for an 27" HDTV monitor with no tuner.
$150 for a comparable 27" analog.
Those are actual best in-store prices after a day of shopping...there's always someone who has a link to show that there's an HDTV for $xxx cheaper than what I listed, but I couldn't have walked out of a store with it that day so it's not really relevant.
Two months ago I bought an analog TV because it was cost effective. I have absolutely nothing in my entertainment center that justifies spending $250 more on a TV, as the picture won't be improved at all on my current hardware. I have no intention of running out and buying a new, more expensive video player just so I can buy movies on a new, more expensive video format. 480p looks perfectly fine to me.
Yes yes, I know a lot of people really are running out and buying HDTVs, but did you notice the first cut-off date for the all-digital switch has come and gone? That's because your average consumer--NOT the ones who own multiple large screens--doesn't want to spend several hundred dollars they don't see a need to spend.
I'm waiting for HDTV monitors to reach a more realistic price. I figure if I hold out for the same TV I looked at two months ago to get down to $250, I'll break even and have a spare TV. Early adoption is expensive...waiting til a technology is the mainstream standard is far more economical.
I mean, there are just so many original titles at the store.
Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Civilization 4, Age of Empires 3, Empire Earth 2, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, The Sims 2...oh, wait. I think I see your point.
I'm waiting for the version with an integrated 2 MP camera. That way everyone can take pictures without anyone else knowing and it won't be limited just to those people who can cleverly conceal their cell phones.
Aren't you guys looking forward to browsing a forum and seeing thousands more bad pictures of random moderately attractive women doing everyday things? I know I am.
Not too long ago, MS released several billion (I think) dollars to their stockholders.
I'm not convinced that hoarding some cash is a bad idea for a business. Clearly MS isn't sticking every penny they make into the bank, but if they were to take all of that cash and reinvest it in a venture that goes nowhere they're in a worse spot than before. By having a large amount of money readily available, it makes the company more stable on the long-term because they remove their sensitivity to market fluctuations.
Microsoft could have several very bad years before they had to start trimming their organization. Compare that to other companies that start laying people off during six-month slumps and you see where it's beneficial.
I hate lanyards :)
The Shuffle was an experiment that didn't go the way Apple hoped. Sure it's useful for certain applications, but do you think the typical buyer thinks "hey, I'll get this iPod Mini for when I'm waiting in line at the DMV and this iPod Shuffle for when I'm working out"? I get how not everyone wants/needs the gizmos, but there just aren't enough people who can justify buying two iPods, or want to buy just one without an LCD.
A 1 GB Shuffle will hold 160+ songs if you don't rip them at too high a bitrate. Your average consumer would be more than happy with that as their primary player...but 160 songs without a screen to preview songs might prompt someone to look at another product. Like maybe something not made by Apple.
My Samsung is solid. It's been dropped, thrown, even chewed on by a toddler. I have it with me when I'm doing yardwork, working out, et cetera. It also has an LCD...so it can be done without making the device delicate.
Apple's the one killing the Shuffle, not me. I like the form factor and some of the features of the Shuffle, but the lack of an LCD turned me off from it. They're aborting the product pretty early, which would indicate to me that they're not getting the sales numbers they wanted. They could bring it back as a new iPod without the Shuffle "you nver know what will play next" gimmick that I think really put a lot of people off...I think it would be a lot more effective at grabbing the SFF/budget corner of the market and having the iPod line completely dominate the arena.
(not that I think that iPod gaining marketshare is a good thing...I'm tired of "iPod" being the generic term for MP3 player these days)
While it's clear that many members of the media don't grasp basic computer concepts beyond using Windows/MacOS for web surfing and office applications, this has very little to do with their ignorance of the gaming community and games as an entertainment medium.
This is all about ratings. If they ran a story that took a fair and balanced look at gaming and its pros and cons, nobody would pay attention. Gamers wouldn't pay attention because they understand it, anti-game advocates wouldn't like it because it didn't share their irrational bias, and the average viewer/reader wouldn't care because they wouldn't feel it was relevant or interesting. But if they run a sensational story about how games *might* be dangerous to *some* people who have *other problems* that are aggravated by excessive, obsessive gaming, people pay attention, the get ratings, and advertisers give them more money.
The public are the ones who need help. Help the people, you help the media. This applies to just about everything: Schools? Fix the parents, you fix the education problems. Environmental concerns? Get the people to care, corporations will follow the money and give the people what they want.
As best I can figure it, what happens is a manager tells a supervisor what skills are needed, the supervisor tells HR what levels of each skill are needed, and HR sticks arbitrary numbers in place of the skill levels because they don't have a clue what they're looking at.
"5 years of..." is the mantra of the human resources department. 5 years makes you experienced, 10 years qualifies you to lead a group, 15 years qualifies you to lead the department. I recall passing up one ad that required 15 years of Windows NT/2000 administration experience in 2001. I remember wondering if maybe NT was really that old and I'd missed something.
If we're lucky, this will push employers to scale down their listed requirements to something realistic. Like others here, I've never landed a job where I met anywhere near the listed requirements.
...that is, anywhere but on the internet, wouldn't this be called "extortion"?
disclaimer: This is a real question, not rhetorical. I could admittedly be wrong.
My parents' Yahoo address has been filtered when they sent something to my address. They mass-emailed pictures of my son to about fifty people, and all the Yahoo users had to dig it out of their junk mail folders to view it. When Yahoo's spam filters are that restrictive, one must wonder just how many people will simply stop sending to Yahoo.
I'm not affected by this any more. $5 a month for domain hosting means never having to worry about good e-mail getting flagged as spam.