Ah yes, because you can't buy console games at newegg, or any other online retailer for that matter. Not that it's relevant. What matters is what percentage of sales for PC or consoles is made online. Spare the sarcasm.
And lets be honest, sales from services like Steam and Direct2Drive are rather insignificant compared to that coming from brick and mortar stores, that is if they ever actually released those numbers. This Google News listed story says 1/3 of software sales are made online. Steam accounts for 3 million gamers monthly. There's a bit of obviousness about this question. If you're the type of person that shops for games online, are you more likely a PC gamer or a console gamer? Personally, I've never considered buying console games online. And I haven't bought a PC game in a store in over 5 years. Part of that is the poor selection and high prices in B&M stores. Steam takes that a step further and lets me play while it's downloading.
Not to mention recently you have such time vacuums like World of Warcraft that have been drying up PC gaming dollars that might go elsewhere. I wouldn't exactly call that "drying up." WoW brings in a lot of casual gamers that wouldn't be interested in most other online PC games.
Ah yes, but you know, when I go into a store now, there's only like six games for the PC too. There's your first mistake. You went into a brick and mortar store looking for PC games. Steam? Newegg? Direct2Drive? All eating away at the shelf space. Doesn't mean PC games are any less popular.
For the average person game has come to be equated with First Person Shooter. They are by far the most hyped and talked about types of games, far beyond any other type. I thought that was WoW. Even non-gamers know about WoW. Not that many could even name Counterstrike, Halo, Battlefield, Quake, or Doom.
Maximum of 50k per ad, at least until the user starts interacting with it. Brilliant idea. So it won't load the "Congratulations. You have just won a free iPod Nano" sound until after I roll my mouse over it. I feel so much better about this.
Everything is in a database that allows for quick searching and seamless organization, whether you're using iTunes or not (although it's certainly at its best in the first party app). In tradeoff, you need to have database access to manage the files. Kinda sounds like BS to me. You're managing mp3 ("blob") files with a database. Every file can be identified by its hash, and includes most/all of the metadata in the id3 tag. You should be able to use something like iTunes and quickly transfer the appropriate metadata from the database OR transfer a file manually, with the iPod realizing it doesn't have any metadata from the DB and grabbing it from id3. Even my 32 MB Rio in like '98 could read id3 tags. Why is it so hard for the iPod, other than iTMS tie-in/lock-in?
I made it so that folks could disable contextual ads through a profile setting, and added the ability for them to pay a paltry sum ($10 per year) to remove all ads site-wide. Folks were thrilled to pay a cheap price, I made some good cash, and everyone was happy. It sounds like your regular visitors were the ones most likely to want to remove the ads they see all the time. They wanted to bad enough, and liked the site enough, to pay for the removal of ads. This group of regulars would also be the most likely to spread-the-word and promote your site, increasing page-rank and the number of the second type of visitor:
Oh - and I determined that most of my ad-clicks were unregistered folks who visited my site for the first time - one of those dirty little industry secrets. Those that may have found your site through a search engine, visiting for the first time, were the most likely to actually click on an ad. These people found the site because of the popularity of it that was promoted by your regular members.
It sounds to me like your regular members, who aren't as willing to put up with ads but are willing to pay for a subscription, were actually a huge benefit in bringing in new members, who did view and click on the ads. The regular membership base of a website is the exact wrong people to attack for not wanting to view ads. Without a regular membership base, you don't have a popular website.
You might think it makes it easy to game the system, but I, for one, am glad that it only records your gaming hours when Xfire is running. I mean, I'd never want to tell the whole world to know that I play video games for over 40 hours a week. Wait--no--forget I said anything.
I wonder how the integrated voice chat in WoW's upcoming patch will affect the adoption of Xfire's beta voice chat feature. Even without that, most (at least competitive) gamers are already using Teamspeak or Ventrilo for voice chat. It's already a crowded market, but I guess if Xfire has any compelling features, a one-stop solution might convince many to ditch TS.
...but I can't seem to discover the secret to actively playing a game while IMing multiple friends...that'd be a one way ticket to the graveyard for me. At least with FPS games, you usually have time to type when you respawn. But clans use voice chat exclusively for coordinating strategy while in battle for that reason, and because it is often much easier and quicker to convey information by speaking.
First, as an advantage over non-tabbed, opening links in a new tab keeps the first page loaded and scrolled to the right position where I left off. I can continue reading immediately or switch tabs then switch back. It works great for either.
Second, the advantage over the Opera behavior is that you can queue up a series of pages that are of peripheral interest, without interrupting your reading of the first page. I always have the tabs load in the background for that reason. This works perfectly with an ordered series of pages to view.
Third, the pages are already loaded by the time I want to read them. This is especially useful on pages with lots of images. My connection may be fast, but the server may not be.
And probably most important, it fits my way of thinking of nested links on web sites, and I'm so used to it I can't live without it.
See, this is exactly an example of the FUD and ignorance that I'm talking about. There's no way that shortcuts and tab behaviour are better implemented in Firefox than in Opera. Opera blows Firefox out of the water in both regards. That comes down to personal preference, really. I think that focus should always shift to the tab to the right, when the current tab is closed. I think Opera got that one wrong, according to my preference. Reason being, if I'm on a page with a bunch of links, I'll middle click all of them and then cycle through the rest, closing each along the way. Opera frustratingly returns me to the page-o-links every time I close one, and I have to cycle back to it. How that could possibly be "better" is something I haven't figured out.
The *only* reason I don't use Opera as my default browser is tiny interface problems like that that frustrate me. I know it's technically a good browser. But it doesn't feel right. So that doesn't matter.
Excel only handles 255 Columns. It should be noted that if you've designed a database (rather than an Excel abomination) with more than 255 columns, chances are, you're doing it wrong.
And the important part left out with all the sensationalism: the API wouldn't change. It would still be SQL. It would still be an RDBMS. It would essentially just have a different storage engine. Products like MySQL seem to get along just fine supporting multiple options for storage engine. I don't see why an additional option to improve performance in certain cases would obsolete anything.
Actually... if they hadn't been stopped he wouldn't have gotten out. Therefore they were pulled over first, which seems to indicate that the security was on to them at least some what.
And truthfully from a security stand point this makes sense. Only one problem. That's not what happened.
A source inside The Chaser's War on Everything revealed the team never expected to get so far. The skit had been approved by ABC lawyers but was written in the assumption they would be stopped at the first checkpoint.
Instead they were waved through the first on Macquarie St, then a second, which had sniffer dogs, and eventually stopped themselves at Bridge St.
"As they did Chas got out of a car dressed as Osama bin Laden and said something like 'I'm an important world leader why don't I have a seat at the APEC table?'. Apparently that was the first time the police realised it was not authentic and they swooped in and arrested everybody," the source said.
According to the video, they didn't catch on until one of them stepped out dressed as Osama bin Laden. The only reason they were caught was their completely absurd attire. And the security guys pat each other on the back for that. I'm not sure which part is funniest, but I'm definitely laughing.
I've got five 70's, and I got to webcam in on my wedding.
Sir, please put down the internet and step back slowly. How else are you supposed to know what she really looks like?
I don't know if it would work for you, but you could try using Google's Bookmarks.
With Firefox and Google Toolbar, you've got the star button. And in Opera, though a toolbar might be better, it looks like you can use a javascript bookmarklet. Only problem is quickly accessing them again in Opera.
It's kind of like preferring Wikipedia to that 2 year old Encyclopedia Brittanica on the shelf. There are valid reasons to prefer Wikipedia even if you never edit it.
That said, I like Opera. It doesn't feel right for my default browser, but it is good. They've made a couple of small improvements that I've suggested on their blogs. I hope the small Norwegian company continues to do well, with phone browsers and all their other products.
Nasty AMD added to it. The better question is how the fuck did AMD get to write the next iteration of an Intel technology. Shouldn't it be AMD 3DNow!^2? This is like Apple deciding their next HFS filesystem will be versioned NTFS 7.0.
They can battle back and forth with version numbers and see who is first to get to 11, the version number where, for whatever reason, developers are forced to come up with a new versioning scheme. That will throw a wrench in the works. Take that Intel!
Probably watching it on DVD. Plenty of us realize that by pirating our entertainment, we essentially have cut out the ability for them to make more. I pay for cable. I record it on an HTPC. I watch some of the commercials, sometimes. If I miss an ep. I download it from iTunes if it's available and I know I want to keep it. If I don't know, or it's not available, guess where I get it?
I definitely don't wait 6 months to 3 years (!) for the DVD. I only buy DVDs for shows I really like, where I want the whole season. I don't buy DVDs just so I can catch one episode I've missed of a show I'll only watch once. Call me immoral or whatever you like, but I've only got so much entertainment money and it only goes to the shows I like. Some of them get my money or advertising eyes more than once.
That will only work if you already have all those data on your flash drive. Flash drives for end-users are like 16GB today, will people use that for their primary drives? I don't know you have read the FTA but the advertised 160GB HD is a regular HD with a regular flash drive as cache. I hadn't read the article yet, but assumed they were not talking about hybrid drives, which have been around a while. Old news. The article is talking about both pure SSDs and also mentions their existing hybrid drives. It doesn't make clear whether the 160 GB drive is an SSD, but I think that's safe to assume they are talking about a 160 GB SSD, considering the article's title.
Otherwise any of those enhancements could only and probably are already done preemptively by application, like your file explorer keeping a thumbnails file and your media player pre-fetching your playlist. Which work the same way for either flash or HD I was referring to the generation of thumbnails, or even the indexing of a directory, displaying dates, filesizes, dimensions, etc. All of that would be faster. Of course thumbnails are cached. Most media players do not pre-fetch the next file.
Your OS/filesystem is smart enough to allocate big files on a continuous space, you'd only have fragmentation problems with that kind of files if your HD is almost full. Where the problem is the size of the HD and the solution isn't flash disks because they're much smaller. As long as I've owned a computer, my hard drive has always been almost full. At 1.3 TB, it is always almost full. What's the point in having the space if it is not used? Heh.
Flash is better for random access which is not very important for end-user, that's why end user doesn't care about SCSI, since for them HD is just storage as it supposed to be. It should result in a more responsive system with lower latency. Quick seek times would mean that generating thumbnails for a directory or any type of indexing of small files should be fast. Jumping to the next mp3 or video in a playlist should be quicker. Actually, the only time most users care about sequential access is when dealing with large files such as video files, when converting or copying them. Even then, if the large files are fragmented, seek time is still important.
"URGE" always seemed to me to be one of the ugliest, dumbest-sounding names of all the music download services available. They wanted "SQUIRT" but Ballmer already called dibs on that one.
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It sounds to me like your regular members, who aren't as willing to put up with ads but are willing to pay for a subscription, were actually a huge benefit in bringing in new members, who did view and click on the ads. The regular membership base of a website is the exact wrong people to attack for not wanting to view ads. Without a regular membership base, you don't have a popular website.
You might think it makes it easy to game the system, but I, for one, am glad that it only records your gaming hours when Xfire is running. I mean, I'd never want to tell the whole world to know that I play video games for over 40 hours a week. Wait--no--forget I said anything.
...but I can't seem to discover the secret to actively playing a game while IMing multiple friends...that'd be a one way ticket to the graveyard for me. At least with FPS games, you usually have time to type when you respawn. But clans use voice chat exclusively for coordinating strategy while in battle for that reason, and because it is often much easier and quicker to convey information by speaking.There's a few reasons.
First, as an advantage over non-tabbed, opening links in a new tab keeps the first page loaded and scrolled to the right position where I left off. I can continue reading immediately or switch tabs then switch back. It works great for either.
Second, the advantage over the Opera behavior is that you can queue up a series of pages that are of peripheral interest, without interrupting your reading of the first page. I always have the tabs load in the background for that reason. This works perfectly with an ordered series of pages to view.
Third, the pages are already loaded by the time I want to read them. This is especially useful on pages with lots of images. My connection may be fast, but the server may not be.
And probably most important, it fits my way of thinking of nested links on web sites, and I'm so used to it I can't live without it.
Thanks for your insight. But I realize what it is doing. I just don't like it. The workaround is a waste of time.
The *only* reason I don't use Opera as my default browser is tiny interface problems like that that frustrate me. I know it's technically a good browser. But it doesn't feel right. So that doesn't matter.
And the important part left out with all the sensationalism: the API wouldn't change. It would still be SQL. It would still be an RDBMS. It would essentially just have a different storage engine. Products like MySQL seem to get along just fine supporting multiple options for storage engine. I don't see why an additional option to improve performance in certain cases would obsolete anything.
And truthfully from a security stand point this makes sense. Only one problem. That's not what happened.
According to the video, they didn't catch on until one of them stepped out dressed as Osama bin Laden. The only reason they were caught was their completely absurd attire. And the security guys pat each other on the back for that. I'm not sure which part is funniest, but I'm definitely laughing.
I don't know if it would work for you, but you could try using Google's Bookmarks.
With Firefox and Google Toolbar, you've got the star button.
And in Opera, though a toolbar might be better, it looks like you can use a javascript bookmarklet. Only problem is quickly accessing them again in Opera.
It's kind of like preferring Wikipedia to that 2 year old Encyclopedia Brittanica on the shelf. There are valid reasons to prefer Wikipedia even if you never edit it.
That said, I like Opera. It doesn't feel right for my default browser, but it is good. They've made a couple of small improvements that I've suggested on their blogs. I hope the small Norwegian company continues to do well, with phone browsers and all their other products.
They can battle back and forth with version numbers and see who is first to get to 11, the version number where, for whatever reason, developers are forced to come up with a new versioning scheme. That will throw a wrench in the works. Take that Intel!
I definitely don't wait 6 months to 3 years (!) for the DVD. I only buy DVDs for shows I really like, where I want the whole season. I don't buy DVDs just so I can catch one episode I've missed of a show I'll only watch once. Call me immoral or whatever you like, but I've only got so much entertainment money and it only goes to the shows I like. Some of them get my money or advertising eyes more than once.
I do something similar. Use LiveHTTPHeaders extension, look for a URL in a header with FLV mime-type, copy/paste/save as...