Consoles are typically a loss-leader, with software being the major source of cash-flow-- third-party software in particular. The third-party developer foots all the bills for their game, including per-unit licensing (and often production, given Nintendo's history of proprietary media) fees that go straight to Nintendo. With in-house developed games, Nintendo theoretically has to worry about breaking even on those titles.
The Wii's cheap, and everyone loves Mario, but when the average Wii owner is only buying a couple of games a year, and typically games that Nintendo spent a whole lot of money developing, they're not making enough off the Wii as they should be.
(Personally, I think the Wii has always been more of a sideline or test-bed for the next generation of consoles, given that Nintendo has been dominating the very lucrative handheld market for ages.)
If the characters and writing in Firefly were as bad as they were in Resurrection, I'm glad that I never bothered with that show. Seriously, Resurrection was a Saturday night D&D game brought to the big screen, complete with hilariously crippled dwarf, sociopathic and poorly portrayed 'heroes', and Sigourney Weaver playing the DM's oversexed Mary Sue.
Songbird is just as terrible on Windows. There's nothing like having your music player just stop playing in the middle of a song, refuse to start back up unless you kill the process and restart it, only to have to repeat five or ten minutes later.
Worse than iTunes, after years of active development. That's an impressive feat.
I agree entirely. This was not an oversight-- it was an intentional attempt to leverage their other products to force users to interact with Buzz, in the hopes that they would adopt it as the short-IM service of choice. That there were so many hoops to jump through, before they started to backpedal, speaks volumes of their intent toward it. Buzz was something that you could turn off in one place, then turn off in another, but by the time you found it in a third and fourth place, you just didn't give a shit any more.
Personally, I've been using the original Gmail client because of 'functionality' like this that I can't otherwise turn off. Their tag-along Jabber app is useless to me, and I would really like to slap whoever made the fucking HUGE tooltips that pop up when you mouse over an address in the bells and whistles version of the client.
Wave is a conferencing/collaboration tool, not an e-mail replacement. Like Orkut, Gmail jabber support, and Google's IMVU clone, it's basically died on the vine.
Each time they add something like this to Gmail, I get a little closer to just abandoning their web interface completely.
Laziness, nothing. They'll probably just bolt this 'functionality' onto a UI that really wasn't designed for it and nobody will bother to use it. You know, just like they jammed Jabber in.
...this one is incredibly flawed. Different nation-states have different rules for licensing virtually everything (but not everything virtual, apparently) and getting any sort of concordance is highly unlikely.
It's not surprising at all, actually. MMO subscriptions are per-month, not strictly metered use like they were in the days of Compuserve. The less you actually play, the better it is for the company-- you're drawing fewer resources, and extending the time it would take you to reach whatever milestone you set for quitting.
Every last Bioware RPG has played straight to cliches. EA may be a bastard to work with (and they certainly are), but put the blame for paint-by-numbers plot writing where it belongs.
They've done the same thing with previous titles, like Omikron: the Nomad Soul. Basically they give you a demo that looks like it has an incredible amount of detail and flexibility, then put you on a poorly scripted rail shortly after the first area.
I wouldn't know, because after dealing with the fucking thing several times I just gave up on the goddamn site. Seriously-- when they started gating their bloody comics section, and the second half of already pretty poor articles vanished behind 'day passes' and interstitial video ads, my interest in dealing with them as a site vanished.
I think the author of that article's thinking of Neuromancer. The metaverse is nothing more than a reskinned cyberspace, care of William Gibson's old typewriter.
On another note, if you're looking to science fiction as a predictive medium, look deeper than the shiny chrome and blinkenlichten. Technology is a sideline in good sci-fi: it's the cultural commentary that makes the work visionary. Or did people seriously think that Fahrenheit 451 was supposed to presage the development of six-legged robot dogs?
Linden Labs is a for-profit entity. Most of their income from Second Life comes from two sources: people renting virtual 'land' (who quite often use that area for storefronts), and people buying in-game currency so that they can buy in-game clothing and realistically vibrating penises.
People who hunt out the freebies, as opposed to shelling out a few real-world dollars for something that might be better, are a drain on both Linden Labs' resources and a frustration for the people who pay upwards of a hundred dollars a month for their shopping plaza islands, and who encourage more spending on in-game currency.
Freebies lose the company money. Charging extra to list them is simply recouping costs. Deleting posts that point to third-party catalogues is pissing into a forest fire.
Don't like it, don't read it. Christ, the only reason why I read user comments on CNN, or Amazon reviews, or anything else where the wisdom of the masses extrudes itself is an urge to rubberneck. It isn't as if they're touting these commentaries as fact-- it's just a poorly moderated scribble board, and it says so on the flap.
You're showing a breathtaking middle-class, First World bias in that assumption about reproductive goals. There are still plenty of places where the odds of a single child surviving to adulthood are tragically poor, and where having a number of children to help with the family business is advantageous.
Then the buyer goes to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or another big box store that can afford to have computer and console games and accessories as a sideline, instead of a specialty shop that may or may not have what you want in stock. If the big box doesn't have it, chances are the little boutique won't if you didn't pre-order it either.
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Seriously? Some console economics 101 was worth three mod points to shout down? Bravo.
The Wii's cheap, and everyone loves Mario, but when the average Wii owner is only buying a couple of games a year, and typically games that Nintendo spent a whole lot of money developing, they're not making enough off the Wii as they should be.
(Personally, I think the Wii has always been more of a sideline or test-bed for the next generation of consoles, given that Nintendo has been dominating the very lucrative handheld market for ages.)
My favourite in this genre remains Rom Check Fail.
He's really not as bright as he thinks he is, is he?
If the characters and writing in Firefly were as bad as they were in Resurrection, I'm glad that I never bothered with that show. Seriously, Resurrection was a Saturday night D&D game brought to the big screen, complete with hilariously crippled dwarf, sociopathic and poorly portrayed 'heroes', and Sigourney Weaver playing the DM's oversexed Mary Sue.
Worse than iTunes, after years of active development. That's an impressive feat.
Now we just have to harness this, and we won't have to worry about low-lying coastal areas being swept away by flooding and rising oceans!
Personally, I've been using the original Gmail client because of 'functionality' like this that I can't otherwise turn off. Their tag-along Jabber app is useless to me, and I would really like to slap whoever made the fucking HUGE tooltips that pop up when you mouse over an address in the bells and whistles version of the client.
Each time they add something like this to Gmail, I get a little closer to just abandoning their web interface completely.
I don't think you're a troll, but I do think that conflating national affiliation with cultural identity doesn't work.
Laziness, nothing. They'll probably just bolt this 'functionality' onto a UI that really wasn't designed for it and nobody will bother to use it. You know, just like they jammed Jabber in.
...this one is incredibly flawed. Different nation-states have different rules for licensing virtually everything (but not everything virtual, apparently) and getting any sort of concordance is highly unlikely.
Yeah, right. Since when have facts ever got in the way of a 'good' conspiracy theory?
MXO, on the other hand, was forced on SOE as part of an agreement for the rest of Warner's licenses.
It's not surprising at all, actually. MMO subscriptions are per-month, not strictly metered use like they were in the days of Compuserve. The less you actually play, the better it is for the company-- you're drawing fewer resources, and extending the time it would take you to reach whatever milestone you set for quitting.
Every last Bioware RPG has played straight to cliches. EA may be a bastard to work with (and they certainly are), but put the blame for paint-by-numbers plot writing where it belongs.
They've done the same thing with previous titles, like Omikron: the Nomad Soul. Basically they give you a demo that looks like it has an incredible amount of detail and flexibility, then put you on a poorly scripted rail shortly after the first area.
I wouldn't know, because after dealing with the fucking thing several times I just gave up on the goddamn site. Seriously-- when they started gating their bloody comics section, and the second half of already pretty poor articles vanished behind 'day passes' and interstitial video ads, my interest in dealing with them as a site vanished.
It's a reference to a stunt that Stephen Colbert encouraged.
On another note, if you're looking to science fiction as a predictive medium, look deeper than the shiny chrome and blinkenlichten. Technology is a sideline in good sci-fi: it's the cultural commentary that makes the work visionary. Or did people seriously think that Fahrenheit 451 was supposed to presage the development of six-legged robot dogs?
People who hunt out the freebies, as opposed to shelling out a few real-world dollars for something that might be better, are a drain on both Linden Labs' resources and a frustration for the people who pay upwards of a hundred dollars a month for their shopping plaza islands, and who encourage more spending on in-game currency.
Freebies lose the company money. Charging extra to list them is simply recouping costs. Deleting posts that point to third-party catalogues is pissing into a forest fire.
Yes, I can. Unfortunately, it looks like kdawson can't.
Don't like it, don't read it. Christ, the only reason why I read user comments on CNN, or Amazon reviews, or anything else where the wisdom of the masses extrudes itself is an urge to rubberneck. It isn't as if they're touting these commentaries as fact-- it's just a poorly moderated scribble board, and it says so on the flap.
You're showing a breathtaking middle-class, First World bias in that assumption about reproductive goals. There are still plenty of places where the odds of a single child surviving to adulthood are tragically poor, and where having a number of children to help with the family business is advantageous.
Then the buyer goes to Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or another big box store that can afford to have computer and console games and accessories as a sideline, instead of a specialty shop that may or may not have what you want in stock. If the big box doesn't have it, chances are the little boutique won't if you didn't pre-order it either.