I propose a much better system where the player dies after one hit or tap from a monster. And if the player wishes to be able to survive a second hit, he must either find the nearest mushroom or orange flower hidden away in some box disguised like all the others.
When I was a kid/teenager, pirating was preferred because:
I was poor and even if I wanted the game, I couldn't have it.
I had a lot of free time to do nothing better.
Now there were still games I bought as a kid, but each game was after saving precious allowances over months just to buy a stupid game.
When I was a teenager and working, pirating still occurred because:
I was still poor (money is not infinite).
I still had lots of free time to do absolutely nothing.
However, I will say that legal purchases increased quite a bit for games that were better than others.
Now that I am an adult, and working full time paying for everything. I can afford your crappy games but I know better, I know that most of the time your game sucks so I refuse to buy it unless I can try it either by playing it at a friend's house or pirating it and trying it. If there's a demo I'll try that. But if the quality (time spent for fun received) doesn't justify the asking price ($50 or whatever) then I delete your pirated data from my computer because it isn't worth my time. If it is, I will make a legal purchase to support you and your industry.
Finally there is a phase for some poorer people where they pirate simply to pirate. They collect what they can get for free even though they never use it. It isn't the fact that they are playing your game every day and actually having fun. No, your data just sits on a hard disk somewhere but it is never read. Even if you prevented these people from pirating, they wouldn't buy your product.
The other thing is most of the people pirating (as I've described above) simply can't afford your product. $50 seems like so little yet for someone who's working at McDonalds, $50 is probably a lot. Therefore these people would not buy your game either if they couldn't pirate it because they simply can't afford it either.
So when you see a pirate, each pirated copy does not necessarily mean a sale was lost. Even if you stopped all pirating, you probably wouldn't get good sales, or even worse sales, because the pirates are no longer contributing to word of mouth marketing or hype.
Finally, I will give you the trick to why this is so. If you charge a flat rate for your product, you are alienating out a certain markete while giving another market a price benefit. In a real market, people would not pay a flat rate, instead each purchaser would buy the same product at a different price based on their circumstances. So for example, if I'm as rich as Bill Gates, and I really really am a fan of your product, I probably wouldn't mind throwing you $1000 for your game because I really really like what you did and I feel that your game is worth $1000 I'm throwing at you. Now if I am a poor kid who gets lunch money from my parents and that is it, I'm not going to give you $50 even if I think your product is the shit. As a stupid and poor kid, I don't have the buying power to give you money. But if you lowered your price to $1 or even $2, as a kid, I might be able to make something worth with my birthday and christmas gift money.
So if you are a game developer, sell your product at whatever price the target market you want to hit will pay. If you want poor people to buy your product, sell it for a dollar or two. If you want middle class people to buy your product (be warned, these folks don't have all the free time in the world), sell it for $40 or $50. If you want rich fucks to buy it, sell it for $100 or $1000. Finally if you want to sell to all three markets, then you're going to have to alter your product or marketing in some way: poor people can only download a copy of the game, middle class get a fancy box + cd/dvd + poster or toy, rich bastards get a 5 dvd set, autographed 'gold plated' dvd set and HD movie disk, etc.
But don't come crying when it is obvious your marketing strategy sucks balls and you're whining because you can't deal wi
I think you are approaching the problem wrong. I can't, ever, calculate as fast as a computer can. forget a modern computer, I can't calculate as fast as the oldest computers out there (and I'm betting you can't either). I have no doubt about your inability to beat computers at raw calculation speeds either (and if you could, more processors means you don't).
The brain (and even other animal brains) are capable of doing and learning specific operations. That means two things: much of your brain isn't devoted to your conciousness what what "you" are thinking. A lot of it is devoted to operations that you need to survive and operate in the world. For example let's take vision. Your eye balls are pretty stupid, they just channel the light down to receptors in the back of your eye ball socket. All of the intelligence starts right after the receptor cells detect the light. All of that information is passed to smarter cells that do a shit-ton of processing for you in real-time. One of these operations in your vision pathway is edge detection. That is while you might not be aware of it, your vision pathway is actually parsing and detecting the images you see for edges. There are various "optical illusion" images on the net that play with the weaknesses in how the human vision works.
Another good example with vision is how you are able to perceive depth with a 2D picture. You can say "well you have to eyes and if you triangulate blah blah" well close one eye and see if you can still reach out and pick up your coffee mug. The answer is your vision pathway is doing some processing for you to determine the depth of objects in a 2d picture. That way when you want to pick up your mug, you don't stop and say "well I have to go 30 cms forward, 7 cms down" but rather you just do it. There are patients that have been found who have had this portion of their vision pathway destroyed and are unable to correctly reach out and grab things or tell how far things are. They are still able to identify what kind of object they are seeing, but when asked to reach out and pickup the object, they consistently fail and keep guessing until one of their other senses (touch) enables them to.
But all of that functionality can be emulated if you can just figure out an algorithm and implement it. But the second part that computers haven't touched brains with is learning. A good example of this is if you take a perfectly fine monkey (2 arms, 2 legs) and identify which part of his brain is devoted to his left arm motor functions (controls moving his left arm) and then amputate his left arm or disable it forever, after enough time has passed, the monkey's section of his brain devoted to "left arm motor functions" will be taken over and reused for an adjacent function like say "left leg motor functions". In computers this is basically the equivalent of rewiring your processor to do something different on the fly. To me this is where all of the "genius" is in brains. The ability of neurons to rewire themselves on the fly and get reused for other functions is amazing. And this applies to all types of learning: learning new languages (with no books or teachers), learning to play a specific game well, learning hand writing or touch typing. All of these things your brain is capable of learning how to do without you thinking about it.
I guess that the problem Apple has with this is that when one person starts doing it, then others will follow.
Some wouldn't say that is a problem. Some call that concept competition.
Before you know it, the entire store is full of useless apps selling for ridiculous prices.
Which of course would stop selling because the novelty in owning the app is now worth less. Therefore in order to sell the product something must change. One way to sell is to lower the price, even if it means down to zero. I'll leave finding another way (slashdot calls this the "missing step") to sell the app without lowering the price as an exercise for the readers. If you are unsuccessful in figuring out a solution, go to your nearest college or university and take a marketing class.
This of course makes the entire store look ridiculous, thus lowering the value of the store in total.
It would make the store look stupid like it does right now, but it would wear off over time.
Now it is an Apple controlled store, so they are in control of how they want their store to be perceived. So from that perspective (Apple's) you're right that they probably don't want this to happen. But if this were a free market, everything about this product (or lack of product) is perfectly legal.
Usability is mostly a function of what the user is used to (no puns intended).
Yes, consistency is one of the things that affects usability.
I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done, which is in opposition to most of the world.
Which says that there is an aspect about the command line that says it is usable, not necessarily unusable otherwise nobody would ever use it.
I don't really think it's possible to quantify "usability" when to most people it's best rendered as "similarity to Microsoft products."
This is where you're wrong. Usability is quantifiable based on certain metrics you want to measure against. When an interface is designed, there are different users of the interface therefore different needs arise.
For example the command line is one interface that has been successful for a particular purpose but requires a steep learning curve before it can be used correctly. This is okay because what is important is that one has an interface that can be used to probe or maintain a complex system for which designing "easy to use" interfaces would be a gargantuan task. So when one is working from the command line, they expect a high degree of power (do almost anything) that comes with it. The cost is that some of those functions may not be intuitive or may require more steps than necessary had a complete interface been designed. But that is ok because the operations needed on the command line are often unique and covers a huge number of possibilities. So in this case the learning curve is warranted because the knowledge required to perform the task must be learned anyway.
Meanwhile if a user wants to compose a simple email, would the command line interface suffice? Probably not because the details of the command line interface are not necessary in the process of composing and sending an email. What is important is the fact that they can write the email and send it with the fewest hassles. Furthermore if we expand this out to different types of users, we can have a home user and a business user. The home user may not care about integration into their calendar software and other things like easily sending attachments. Meanwhile to a business user, those two operations happen on a daily basis. So for the home user, a simple web mail interface might be sufficient and usable while for the business user it probably won't be. Meanwhile an outlook interface might be perfect for the business user while for the home user it might be a little too much.
So the point here is to identify each user's needs in respect to the task they want to accomplish and in many cases that does not necessarily mean "Microsoft only". Interfaces are everywhere not just in hardware. For example cars with pedals and steering wheels. In almost every car the interface is probably mostly the same. Another example is stereos and music players. Or even your stove in your kitchen. The device I think that is often neglected but needs the biggest usability improvement is the remote control. But maybe soon that will get replaced with an on-screen-display and something like a wii-mote. Anyway the point is that as an interface designer, you can borrow from these other common interfaces (not just the Microsoft ones) to use as metaphors for your new interface. I wouldn't recommend it but that is one option.
The easier route is to use R&D (rob and duplicate) and copy existing interfaces. The problem with this is that sometimes you inherit the faults of whatever you're trying to copy. A good example is OpenOffice. Some people like the interface because it is what they're used to. But for a word processor, I feel that the interface is poorly written such that it leads to poorly authored documents. I've seen countless word documents with foo-bar'ed formatting in the bullets, fonts, and everything. Even the table of contents was put together by hand rather than using th
Your argument assumes that 100% of the taxes goes towards public transportation when that is probably not true.
Also the U.S. has fairly high corporate income taxes. You took Austria's example of 25%. Well the lowest US corporation income tax bracket is 15% for corporate incomes less than $50,000 while taxes for corporate incomes higher than $75,000 at taxed at a minimum of 34% or as high as 39%. (Side note: this is a good reason why many companies are moving outside of the U.S. while still basing operations within the U.S.)
In the early stages you can probably get by with 2 or 3 users as test users. Maybe in the later stages when most of the things have been ironed out will a larger test like 4-8 yield something useful, but after the first 2 or 3 people you'll usually have found 95% of the issues with the interface. Just make sure each user has different background experience but is still going to be a potential user of the software.
Why would the consumer want a fully-functional PC running a slow, innefficient processor like the Atom? Why would an atom-based computer need more than 1 memory dimm, digital video (have you seen Intel's graphics chipsets, they really aren't the greatest), and PCI-express? I don't think the FSB the Atom uses would support PCIe bandwidth. Intel is only protecting the consumer from the inadequacies of the Atom system (that and the 5+ year old northbridge they're using doesn't support many of those technologies).
Because I don't need the CPU power, I need the efficiency. Let's consider a few target markets:
Home email/web browser/word processor user: this person doesn't care about 3D games or high def video. They just care about checking email, browsing the net, and writing a document or two. They don't need a 3ghz quad core cpu with pci express. They just need enough cpu power to display web pages, type up a document, or check email.
Home Server user: this person wants to have a home file server for archiving files and making media available to all other machines within the home. Most of the time this machine is just going to be sitting idle or copying data. CPU resources are not necessary, but efficiency can potentially cut down on the power consumption and noise pollution.
The truth is Intel isn't protecting the customer. That's not what they want. They're protecting their own product lines targeted at other markets from competing with themselves. For example if the atom had no restrictions, there would be little reason for a manufacturer to purchase things like celerons and low end Core2s or Pentiums when they could get the cheaper atom part with comparable specs to meet the need and pass off the savings to the customer in a more marketable price. Intel's true customer is PC makers, board manufacturers, and distributors. Each of these buy chips based on different needs in bulk. The second you offer a replacement to the others at a cheaper price is when you are effectively competing with yourself. The only way Intel can control what is being made with its parts is to put restrictions on how they're used.
Now let's consider for a second the possibilities of the atom. There was a clip of VIA showing their Nano platform running Crysis or some other fancy game with a nvidia 8600gt stuck to it. The game appeared playable. If the atom came with a pci-express x16 slot and you found you could stuff a 9600gt in there and get good performance on a game like World of Warcraft, why would you need to buy any of intel's more expensive parts including fancier motherboard chipsets and cpus? If your only goal was to play WoW you would put the least money into the CPU and dump it all on the video card. The dominance and necessity of the CPU has decreased as specialized processors have taken over the most processor intensive tasks and most CPUs (even the bottom end ones) are good enough for most applications.
What Intel really wants you to do is step up to the Core2 or even Quad core parts with nicer fatter margins than the cheapo low margin atom platform.
Personally I was hoping to build a FreeBSD ZFS home server out of an Atom platform because I was hoping that Intel would eventually provide a low power motherboard and cpu combination to which I could just add hard disks and hard disk controllers. But I guess I'll have to make new plans now that it is apparent Intel doesn't want my money. It's too bad too, because price isn't necessarily my biggest buying requirement, so they could've priced the atom just like the celeron on pentium parts and I would have still bought it because I know I'll never use the CPU's full computation power.
For better or worse, people don't like it, so find out why and address those issues. Don't just try to convince people that their opinions are wrong.
First off there are things that Vista does wrong, but there are also things that it does better. The problem they had was they are sitting on years of backwards compatibility and broken concepts that to change them would violate the "consistency" of the OS. This puts them in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
For example, let's talk security and UAC. In the Windows XP world, some applications were written poorly where they assumed that they had full access to pretty much the entire system. That meant something as simple as writing a configuration file to the directory where the application was installed was acceptable. In Vista that changed, installed software should never write configuration files to the directory where it was installed, but instead write to the current user's "home" directory. So in this situation, they couldn't force stricter security without being annoying and alerting the user whenever an application was trying to do something that is perceived as bad (writing new files in the programs directory).
Now the problem with their current marketing strategy with the "Mojave Experiment" is that they are explicitly saying "this is still Vista" behind the scenes as if it is an attempt to "prove" that what is perceived as a bad product is actually a good product. That is a bad idea because you are fighting perception (right or wrong) so regardless of the test results, you still have to correct that image. The truth is that Vista as a brand or product has already taken the grunt of the ridicule, so if you simply gave it a new name and never disclosed to the public that the new product with a new more convincing marketing strategy was still 95% the same as Vista, you'd have a much better chance of gaining market acceptance because all of the prior criticisms will be wiped clean.
A good example of this is a story on of my teachers told me about. He had a friend that went to a foreign country and found jeans that were of comparable quality to jeans sold in the U.S. but for a fraction of the price. He figured he could sell them for $20 (which was half the price of other jeans) in the U.S. and make a ton of money. So he bought as many as he could and shipped them back to the U.S. He loaded a store with the jeans at $20 (remember other jeans are selling at $40) and waited for the money to roll in. But it never happened. What was happening was customers would walk into the store, see this new brand they've never seen before at half the price of the other products and think "there's something wrong with these jeans". So in the end, people were not buying his jeans even though he knew that they were of comparable quality. So after realizing this, he took all the jeans off the shelf, remove the labels and put a new brand on them. He then put them back into the store at $40 each (priced like everything else) and all of the jeans sold. Same exact product, but new marketing strategy and profits are doubled!
Another example is an example of a local supermarket (not one of the big chains). In this supermarket, they sold fish that was pre-packaged into the Styrofoam and plastic wrap packaging so when you bought the fish, you didn't have to have it packaged and you could just put it into your cart. At one focus group they got a complaint that "their fish was not fresh like the other fish markets". But the employee in charge of buying the fish said, "that's a lie, I get those fish from the same distributor every morning as all the other fish markets." So the owners sent a person to go look at how the other fish markets were selling their fish. And they found that the fish were not packaged, but instead displayed without packaging on ice and when the customer wanted to buy a fish, only then was the fish packaged. So in their own supermarket, the owners added a new fish section where they disp
I don't think he does a good job because he doesn't cite good workable examples of the technology in use. He just says "they've done that in DARPA" or some other high tech example. But things like DARPA are bleeding edge or pushing our technology to the limit. Those projects may not be feasible in actual mass production use. You can't simply say mass production will reduce the costs because if that was the solution to everything we would just 'mass produce' everything.
Now on to the battery problem which he glosses over. From the site:
People worry about the battery problem in electric cars. You need lots of batteries to get any kind of decent range, and at the end of your range you must spend hours recharging.
...
An electric robocar need not have this problem. All you care is whether it has the range for the trip you're doing now. In fact, having more range just adds needless weight. When it drops you off, it can go somewhere to charge itself. Perhaps it even goes to a special station where other robots exchange the battery cartridge with a fresh one, charged at night when power was cheap. Or perhaps to a super high-current charging station. You don't care, as you aren't waiting.
Ok, there's a bunch of contradictions here. If we reduce the range on the vehicle to just the necessary range for the trip plus the range to get to the charging station, then we have a car that is charging itself during daytime when rates are high. If we only charge the car at night then we are basically using the car once rather than multiple times which would be no better than a standard driver car of today. If we get even smarter and say we just need to replace the batteries then we still have battery overhead of basically one battery per a trip per a day! Also since the car will only have just enough range, we will keep driving to the nearest station with an empty vehicle (waste of energy) just to refill. Even if you dismissed all those things, found the optimal weight to battery ratio, the optimal charging station distribution station arrangement, optimal timing of charging batteries, optimal battery distribution management system, and the optimal vehicle, now you're still stuck footing the bill for what effectively amounts to a complete infrastructure change and implementation (battery production, vehicle production, charging station building and management, and finally distribution of all of those things).
So no, I don't think he did a good job. Try again.
While he does make this conclusion about U.S. data, he is fair and continues his search to other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. From this page:
Don't Europe and Asia do better?
Much better. This Australian Study cites figures saying that Western Europeans use only 76% of U.S. BTUs/pm in their private transport, and only 38% in their transit -- 2.5 times more efficient. Rich Asians do even better at transit -- they are almost 4 times as efficient in terms of energy/passenger-mile.
While we're at it it also needs spinners. And racing stripes. And a "TYPE-R" sticker. Yep, you may be driving a pile of junk but hey, at least you look cool while you burn through those hydrocarbons!/sarcasm
Google is the web marketing power house. If you visit a site, like say slashdot.org, you'll notice that your browser automatically downloads stuff from google-analytics.com. What this is is user tracking software to track every page you visit on that website. The website (in this case slashdot) then can access a detailed report of visitor tendencies on the website. They've even got fancy charts to show you (the website owner) on average how long a visitor stays and which pages that visitor viewed before leaving.
If you don't want them to track you this closely, you can get firefox along with noscript and blacklist google-analytics.com. The website owner will still have logs of your ip address but it is much harder to come up with an accurate picture of what you're doing from web server logs.
So when you show up to the movie theatre and a coke is $9 is that coke really worth more than the $1.50 two-liter of coke at the grocery store?
And when you go to fill up you gas tank is the 87 octane gas from the station across the street really that much better because it is marked up 10 cents per a gallon?
Or when you go to the electronics store does the logitech zfx990 optical wireless laser gaming mouse with blue-metal design really that much different than the logitech 200 optical mouse?
And how about some desktop ram where one stick of 1gb is selling from some fancy company like OCZ for $60 bucks with aluminum heat spreaders yet an equivalent 1gb stick from no-marketing distributer is selling for $40 (yet when you take the ram back home they have the same memory chips...)?
The best example of all: are monster audio cables really that much better than a coat hanger?
In general you could say that the more expensive something is, the higher the quality. But this is not always true. A common business practice is to exploit marketing strategies to target special high margin markets. That is someone at monster cable thought that there existed a market of idiots who would pay top dollar for a product that was not necessarily better than the other products on the market. But as long as they had a perception of being better and a price to back it up, then people in this target market would pay up.
The same can be said about cheap products that are advertised to be a "cheap product" when really the margin is low or even negative on the product. Companies sometimes do this to enter a new market first or slurp up market share before the competition can. A good example of this is the original xbox.
But sometimes there are products which end up on the market under priced because businesses didn't do adequate research or a different market (that wasn't targeted) realizes the potential of the product. A good example here is the original Sonic Impact t-amp which was marketed as a portable two speaker amplifier that could run on batteries. Audiophiles eventually came across the amp priced at about $60 (more today since the company realized it was worth more) and initially thought the product might be junk. But when they evaluated the amplifier they found that it could compete with top quality audiophile hardware. While the amplifier didn't have the power to drive a block party, for a living room it was more than enough.
If you want a more popular example you could go back in time to the time when Japanese entered the U.S. automobile and motorcycle market. The price of the Japanese imports were substantially lower yet the quality of the product was better. Harley Davidson almost failed as a company when the Japanese entered the market with their cheaper, more reliable, and sporty bicycles. Harleys suffered in quality because their production lines were flawed (a Harley back then was essentially hand-crafted and new workers were trained on the spot rather than being told to follow documented practices or processes). This resulted in an overpriced product with poor quality compared to the Japanese offerings. Harleys have changed since the company restructured itself and caught up with Japanese manufacturing methods. But it is just another example of price not being a good indicator of quality.
Finally businesses can use these same concepts to increase sales if they're smart. A good example here is a supermarket (I forget the name) that actively tries to listen to customer feedback. When they sold fish, they would package the fish into Styrofoam containers with plastic shrink wrap. Some of the feedback they got was that the fish they sold "was not fresh like the other fish markets". The guy in charge of buying the fish said that that was a lie and that he bought the fish from the same distributor that all the other markets bought the fish from and knew for a fact that they had just died. So the founders sent an employee to the other fish markets to see
But these things also change my life and my lifestyle. I'm sure you're quick to tsk-tsk me and that you get a good belly-laugh out of my awful American selfishness, but it's a serious question that too many people ignore.
Your argument is on the basis that a change in lifestyle will most likely be a negative change. I think that part is wrong. You can't change the present. It might actually be cheaper to keep and use your 5 year old SUV instead of buying a new econobox. It might be cheaper to keep your current 5 bedroom house in suburbia than to move to a city condominium right next to work. That is true because those things exist in the present.
What you can change is the future. That includes making wise decisions when you do need a new light bulb. Making wise decisions when you do plan on going to the grocery store. That is the future and those things you can plan for and are certainly things you can change. Will it impact your lifestyle? Of course. But nobody was guaranteed to have the same lifestyle. Pro athletes go broke within years. Most of the wealthy are self-made and not inherited. Your future lifestyle is and was never guaranteed but you do have some control over it.
Change doesn't have to be bad. What's wrong with potentially taking a train that comes every 10 minutes to work and back Monday to Friday rather than sitting in traffic? What's wrong with buying or moving to a home closer to work when the lease ends or the real estate market stabilizes so now you walk 5 minutes rather than drive for 40 minutes? These things will impact your lifestyle but not as badly as I think it would. You save money, you don't have to drive. Is that not a good trade off to the rising costs of suburbia? Do you seriously expect the world to bend over to protect your lifestyle for you? Or do you honestly think that there are some events that are out of your control and will impact your lifestyle? If you do prefer the suburbia lifestyle, why should you not accept the increased costs to maintain it? That is a significant change to your lifestyle that will impact you even if you do nothing.
I think those are the questions that American's have been able to avoid till today because all of those problems hadn't affected American lives till now. I am an American and I see this everywhere: the laziness to deal with changes in the environment and the willingness to turn a blind eye to a growing problem hoping that somebody else will solve it. As Americans if we want to ensure that even the most basic things are not affected, we need to give up our present wasteful lifestyles and make plans for the future. That means change is inevitable and we must act and respond to those changes as best we can even if it means changes to our lifestyles.
To put it into context my parents would often tell me as a little kid to finish my food or not to waste my food. That meant stuffing food into my mouth even if I was full. And if I didn't the old "people are starving and you're wasting food" fallacy would come up. So yes, people are starving and I can't finish my food. But even if I feed myself more food than I need, my body will not make use of it either, therefore the food is wasted either way. By me eating the excess food or throwing it away, I will have no impact on the starving people of the world because they still aren't getting the extra food that I am eating or wasting. All of that which I described is in the present.
The true problem is that a bad decision was made in the past and we are seeing the results of that bad decision later in time. At some point the decision was made to make, buy, and cook X amount of food. It turned out X was too large for our needs. We can't do anything about that. The consequences will be there no matter what we do today. But we can make it so that the problem doesn't occur in the future to buy less food so that we only consume what we need. So I could still be full and have a clean plate because I would only use what I need. In that sense there was minimal impact to my lifestyle but an increase in efficiency.
The atom processor isn't really more processor for your buck, it is actually less but for a good reason. The atom is designed to be cheap to produce and power efficient. Most benchmarks show it performing about the same are the celeron 900 or a little better. But it does have a significant advantage in the power consumption category. In terms of power efficiency the atom kicks the celeron's ass. So they're really just two different processors. If you don't care about battery life the 900 will work. If you do the 901 would be a better buy. The 901 also comes with bluetooth and a weird new case design if that's worth anything to you.
The article is just a bunch of BS that sounds more like a conspiracy theory than anything.
I'll tell you why Microsoft wants Yahoo in four words: internet search market share.
It is a no-brainer. Google makes a majority of its revenue from ads displayed on its internet search. Why? Because they have 70% of the internet search market share.
Think about this from the marketing perspective. I want to post an online ad to get people to come to my stupid e-store. I can cover 70% of the internet search market if I go with Google, maybe 16% if I go with Yahoo, and maybe 8% or 9% if I go with MSN. Even if I combined both Yahoo and MSN together they wouldn't even reach half of the audience Google touches. By default I would try Google first and if the results (increase in traffic and ultimately sales) were acceptable I wouldn't even bother with Yahoo or MSN. But if you said I could hit 25% with MS/Yahoo combined and only pay once to MS/Yahoo now I might consider advertising there as well.
So again, the MS/Yahoo acquisition is all about internet search market share.
Slashdot Mirror
I propose a much better system where the player dies after one hit or tap from a monster. And if the player wishes to be able to survive a second hit, he must either find the nearest mushroom or orange flower hidden away in some box disguised like all the others.
reboot your computer at least 3 times?
Here's an honest (non anonymous) answer:
When I was a kid/teenager, pirating was preferred because:
Now there were still games I bought as a kid, but each game was after saving precious allowances over months just to buy a stupid game.
When I was a teenager and working, pirating still occurred because:
However, I will say that legal purchases increased quite a bit for games that were better than others.
Now that I am an adult, and working full time paying for everything. I can afford your crappy games but I know better, I know that most of the time your game sucks so I refuse to buy it unless I can try it either by playing it at a friend's house or pirating it and trying it. If there's a demo I'll try that. But if the quality (time spent for fun received) doesn't justify the asking price ($50 or whatever) then I delete your pirated data from my computer because it isn't worth my time. If it is, I will make a legal purchase to support you and your industry.
Finally there is a phase for some poorer people where they pirate simply to pirate. They collect what they can get for free even though they never use it. It isn't the fact that they are playing your game every day and actually having fun. No, your data just sits on a hard disk somewhere but it is never read. Even if you prevented these people from pirating, they wouldn't buy your product.
The other thing is most of the people pirating (as I've described above) simply can't afford your product. $50 seems like so little yet for someone who's working at McDonalds, $50 is probably a lot. Therefore these people would not buy your game either if they couldn't pirate it because they simply can't afford it either.
So when you see a pirate, each pirated copy does not necessarily mean a sale was lost. Even if you stopped all pirating, you probably wouldn't get good sales, or even worse sales, because the pirates are no longer contributing to word of mouth marketing or hype.
Finally, I will give you the trick to why this is so. If you charge a flat rate for your product, you are alienating out a certain markete while giving another market a price benefit. In a real market, people would not pay a flat rate, instead each purchaser would buy the same product at a different price based on their circumstances. So for example, if I'm as rich as Bill Gates, and I really really am a fan of your product, I probably wouldn't mind throwing you $1000 for your game because I really really like what you did and I feel that your game is worth $1000 I'm throwing at you. Now if I am a poor kid who gets lunch money from my parents and that is it, I'm not going to give you $50 even if I think your product is the shit. As a stupid and poor kid, I don't have the buying power to give you money. But if you lowered your price to $1 or even $2, as a kid, I might be able to make something worth with my birthday and christmas gift money.
So if you are a game developer, sell your product at whatever price the target market you want to hit will pay. If you want poor people to buy your product, sell it for a dollar or two. If you want middle class people to buy your product (be warned, these folks don't have all the free time in the world), sell it for $40 or $50. If you want rich fucks to buy it, sell it for $100 or $1000. Finally if you want to sell to all three markets, then you're going to have to alter your product or marketing in some way: poor people can only download a copy of the game, middle class get a fancy box + cd/dvd + poster or toy, rich bastards get a 5 dvd set, autographed 'gold plated' dvd set and HD movie disk, etc.
But don't come crying when it is obvious your marketing strategy sucks balls and you're whining because you can't deal wi
Reboot at least 3 times.
I think you are approaching the problem wrong. I can't, ever, calculate as fast as a computer can. forget a modern computer, I can't calculate as fast as the oldest computers out there (and I'm betting you can't either). I have no doubt about your inability to beat computers at raw calculation speeds either (and if you could, more processors means you don't).
The brain (and even other animal brains) are capable of doing and learning specific operations. That means two things: much of your brain isn't devoted to your conciousness what what "you" are thinking. A lot of it is devoted to operations that you need to survive and operate in the world. For example let's take vision. Your eye balls are pretty stupid, they just channel the light down to receptors in the back of your eye ball socket. All of the intelligence starts right after the receptor cells detect the light. All of that information is passed to smarter cells that do a shit-ton of processing for you in real-time. One of these operations in your vision pathway is edge detection. That is while you might not be aware of it, your vision pathway is actually parsing and detecting the images you see for edges. There are various "optical illusion" images on the net that play with the weaknesses in how the human vision works.
Another good example with vision is how you are able to perceive depth with a 2D picture. You can say "well you have to eyes and if you triangulate blah blah" well close one eye and see if you can still reach out and pick up your coffee mug. The answer is your vision pathway is doing some processing for you to determine the depth of objects in a 2d picture. That way when you want to pick up your mug, you don't stop and say "well I have to go 30 cms forward, 7 cms down" but rather you just do it. There are patients that have been found who have had this portion of their vision pathway destroyed and are unable to correctly reach out and grab things or tell how far things are. They are still able to identify what kind of object they are seeing, but when asked to reach out and pickup the object, they consistently fail and keep guessing until one of their other senses (touch) enables them to.
But all of that functionality can be emulated if you can just figure out an algorithm and implement it. But the second part that computers haven't touched brains with is learning. A good example of this is if you take a perfectly fine monkey (2 arms, 2 legs) and identify which part of his brain is devoted to his left arm motor functions (controls moving his left arm) and then amputate his left arm or disable it forever, after enough time has passed, the monkey's section of his brain devoted to "left arm motor functions" will be taken over and reused for an adjacent function like say "left leg motor functions". In computers this is basically the equivalent of rewiring your processor to do something different on the fly. To me this is where all of the "genius" is in brains. The ability of neurons to rewire themselves on the fly and get reused for other functions is amazing. And this applies to all types of learning: learning new languages (with no books or teachers), learning to play a specific game well, learning hand writing or touch typing. All of these things your brain is capable of learning how to do without you thinking about it.
I guess that the problem Apple has with this is that when one person starts doing it, then others will follow.
Some wouldn't say that is a problem. Some call that concept competition.
Before you know it, the entire store is full of useless apps selling for ridiculous prices.
Which of course would stop selling because the novelty in owning the app is now worth less. Therefore in order to sell the product something must change. One way to sell is to lower the price, even if it means down to zero. I'll leave finding another way (slashdot calls this the "missing step") to sell the app without lowering the price as an exercise for the readers. If you are unsuccessful in figuring out a solution, go to your nearest college or university and take a marketing class.
This of course makes the entire store look ridiculous, thus lowering the value of the store in total.
It would make the store look stupid like it does right now, but it would wear off over time.
Now it is an Apple controlled store, so they are in control of how they want their store to be perceived. So from that perspective (Apple's) you're right that they probably don't want this to happen. But if this were a free market, everything about this product (or lack of product) is perfectly legal.
If he uses a mac, safari doesn't show the status bar by default.
What industry are you in?
Usability is mostly a function of what the user is used to (no puns intended).
Yes, consistency is one of the things that affects usability.
I find working from a command line to be the most efficient way to get things done, which is in opposition to most of the world.
Which says that there is an aspect about the command line that says it is usable, not necessarily unusable otherwise nobody would ever use it.
I don't really think it's possible to quantify "usability" when to most people it's best rendered as "similarity to Microsoft products."
This is where you're wrong. Usability is quantifiable based on certain metrics you want to measure against. When an interface is designed, there are different users of the interface therefore different needs arise.
For example the command line is one interface that has been successful for a particular purpose but requires a steep learning curve before it can be used correctly. This is okay because what is important is that one has an interface that can be used to probe or maintain a complex system for which designing "easy to use" interfaces would be a gargantuan task. So when one is working from the command line, they expect a high degree of power (do almost anything) that comes with it. The cost is that some of those functions may not be intuitive or may require more steps than necessary had a complete interface been designed. But that is ok because the operations needed on the command line are often unique and covers a huge number of possibilities. So in this case the learning curve is warranted because the knowledge required to perform the task must be learned anyway.
Meanwhile if a user wants to compose a simple email, would the command line interface suffice? Probably not because the details of the command line interface are not necessary in the process of composing and sending an email. What is important is the fact that they can write the email and send it with the fewest hassles. Furthermore if we expand this out to different types of users, we can have a home user and a business user. The home user may not care about integration into their calendar software and other things like easily sending attachments. Meanwhile to a business user, those two operations happen on a daily basis. So for the home user, a simple web mail interface might be sufficient and usable while for the business user it probably won't be. Meanwhile an outlook interface might be perfect for the business user while for the home user it might be a little too much.
So the point here is to identify each user's needs in respect to the task they want to accomplish and in many cases that does not necessarily mean "Microsoft only". Interfaces are everywhere not just in hardware. For example cars with pedals and steering wheels. In almost every car the interface is probably mostly the same. Another example is stereos and music players. Or even your stove in your kitchen. The device I think that is often neglected but needs the biggest usability improvement is the remote control. But maybe soon that will get replaced with an on-screen-display and something like a wii-mote. Anyway the point is that as an interface designer, you can borrow from these other common interfaces (not just the Microsoft ones) to use as metaphors for your new interface. I wouldn't recommend it but that is one option.
The easier route is to use R&D (rob and duplicate) and copy existing interfaces. The problem with this is that sometimes you inherit the faults of whatever you're trying to copy. A good example is OpenOffice. Some people like the interface because it is what they're used to. But for a word processor, I feel that the interface is poorly written such that it leads to poorly authored documents. I've seen countless word documents with foo-bar'ed formatting in the bullets, fonts, and everything. Even the table of contents was put together by hand rather than using th
Your argument assumes that 100% of the taxes goes towards public transportation when that is probably not true.
Also the U.S. has fairly high corporate income taxes. You took Austria's example of 25%. Well the lowest US corporation income tax bracket is 15% for corporate incomes less than $50,000 while taxes for corporate incomes higher than $75,000 at taxed at a minimum of 34% or as high as 39%. (Side note: this is a good reason why many companies are moving outside of the U.S. while still basing operations within the U.S.)
And it means green.
Go here to understand how to read hiragana. If the characters don't appear right you may need a japanese font installed.
In the early stages you can probably get by with 2 or 3 users as test users. Maybe in the later stages when most of the things have been ironed out will a larger test like 4-8 yield something useful, but after the first 2 or 3 people you'll usually have found 95% of the issues with the interface. Just make sure each user has different background experience but is still going to be a potential user of the software.
Why would the consumer want a fully-functional PC running a slow, innefficient processor like the Atom? Why would an atom-based computer need more than 1 memory dimm, digital video (have you seen Intel's graphics chipsets, they really aren't the greatest), and PCI-express? I don't think the FSB the Atom uses would support PCIe bandwidth. Intel is only protecting the consumer from the inadequacies of the Atom system (that and the 5+ year old northbridge they're using doesn't support many of those technologies).
Because I don't need the CPU power, I need the efficiency. Let's consider a few target markets:
The truth is Intel isn't protecting the customer. That's not what they want. They're protecting their own product lines targeted at other markets from competing with themselves. For example if the atom had no restrictions, there would be little reason for a manufacturer to purchase things like celerons and low end Core2s or Pentiums when they could get the cheaper atom part with comparable specs to meet the need and pass off the savings to the customer in a more marketable price. Intel's true customer is PC makers, board manufacturers, and distributors. Each of these buy chips based on different needs in bulk. The second you offer a replacement to the others at a cheaper price is when you are effectively competing with yourself. The only way Intel can control what is being made with its parts is to put restrictions on how they're used.
Now let's consider for a second the possibilities of the atom. There was a clip of VIA showing their Nano platform running Crysis or some other fancy game with a nvidia 8600gt stuck to it. The game appeared playable. If the atom came with a pci-express x16 slot and you found you could stuff a 9600gt in there and get good performance on a game like World of Warcraft, why would you need to buy any of intel's more expensive parts including fancier motherboard chipsets and cpus? If your only goal was to play WoW you would put the least money into the CPU and dump it all on the video card. The dominance and necessity of the CPU has decreased as specialized processors have taken over the most processor intensive tasks and most CPUs (even the bottom end ones) are good enough for most applications.
What Intel really wants you to do is step up to the Core2 or even Quad core parts with nicer fatter margins than the cheapo low margin atom platform.
Personally I was hoping to build a FreeBSD ZFS home server out of an Atom platform because I was hoping that Intel would eventually provide a low power motherboard and cpu combination to which I could just add hard disks and hard disk controllers. But I guess I'll have to make new plans now that it is apparent Intel doesn't want my money. It's too bad too, because price isn't necessarily my biggest buying requirement, so they could've priced the atom just like the celeron on pentium parts and I would have still bought it because I know I'll never use the CPU's full computation power.
For better or worse, people don't like it, so find out why and address those issues. Don't just try to convince people that their opinions are wrong.
First off there are things that Vista does wrong, but there are also things that it does better. The problem they had was they are sitting on years of backwards compatibility and broken concepts that to change them would violate the "consistency" of the OS. This puts them in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.
For example, let's talk security and UAC. In the Windows XP world, some applications were written poorly where they assumed that they had full access to pretty much the entire system. That meant something as simple as writing a configuration file to the directory where the application was installed was acceptable. In Vista that changed, installed software should never write configuration files to the directory where it was installed, but instead write to the current user's "home" directory. So in this situation, they couldn't force stricter security without being annoying and alerting the user whenever an application was trying to do something that is perceived as bad (writing new files in the programs directory).
Now the problem with their current marketing strategy with the "Mojave Experiment" is that they are explicitly saying "this is still Vista" behind the scenes as if it is an attempt to "prove" that what is perceived as a bad product is actually a good product. That is a bad idea because you are fighting perception (right or wrong) so regardless of the test results, you still have to correct that image. The truth is that Vista as a brand or product has already taken the grunt of the ridicule, so if you simply gave it a new name and never disclosed to the public that the new product with a new more convincing marketing strategy was still 95% the same as Vista, you'd have a much better chance of gaining market acceptance because all of the prior criticisms will be wiped clean.
A good example of this is a story on of my teachers told me about. He had a friend that went to a foreign country and found jeans that were of comparable quality to jeans sold in the U.S. but for a fraction of the price. He figured he could sell them for $20 (which was half the price of other jeans) in the U.S. and make a ton of money. So he bought as many as he could and shipped them back to the U.S. He loaded a store with the jeans at $20 (remember other jeans are selling at $40) and waited for the money to roll in. But it never happened. What was happening was customers would walk into the store, see this new brand they've never seen before at half the price of the other products and think "there's something wrong with these jeans". So in the end, people were not buying his jeans even though he knew that they were of comparable quality. So after realizing this, he took all the jeans off the shelf, remove the labels and put a new brand on them. He then put them back into the store at $40 each (priced like everything else) and all of the jeans sold. Same exact product, but new marketing strategy and profits are doubled!
Another example is an example of a local supermarket (not one of the big chains). In this supermarket, they sold fish that was pre-packaged into the Styrofoam and plastic wrap packaging so when you bought the fish, you didn't have to have it packaged and you could just put it into your cart. At one focus group they got a complaint that "their fish was not fresh like the other fish markets". But the employee in charge of buying the fish said, "that's a lie, I get those fish from the same distributor every morning as all the other fish markets." So the owners sent a person to go look at how the other fish markets were selling their fish. And they found that the fish were not packaged, but instead displayed without packaging on ice and when the customer wanted to buy a fish, only then was the fish packaged. So in their own supermarket, the owners added a new fish section where they disp
XP won't even run well on 256MB of RAM.
I don't think he does a good job because he doesn't cite good workable examples of the technology in use. He just says "they've done that in DARPA" or some other high tech example. But things like DARPA are bleeding edge or pushing our technology to the limit. Those projects may not be feasible in actual mass production use. You can't simply say mass production will reduce the costs because if that was the solution to everything we would just 'mass produce' everything.
Now on to the battery problem which he glosses over. From the site:
People worry about the battery problem in electric cars. You need lots of batteries to get any kind of decent range, and at the end of your range you must spend hours recharging.
...
An electric robocar need not have this problem. All you care is whether it has the range for the trip you're doing now. In fact, having more range just adds needless weight. When it drops you off, it can go somewhere to charge itself. Perhaps it even goes to a special station where other robots exchange the battery cartridge with a fresh one, charged at night when power was cheap. Or perhaps to a super high-current charging station. You don't care, as you aren't waiting.
Ok, there's a bunch of contradictions here. If we reduce the range on the vehicle to just the necessary range for the trip plus the range to get to the charging station, then we have a car that is charging itself during daytime when rates are high. If we only charge the car at night then we are basically using the car once rather than multiple times which would be no better than a standard driver car of today. If we get even smarter and say we just need to replace the batteries then we still have battery overhead of basically one battery per a trip per a day! Also since the car will only have just enough range, we will keep driving to the nearest station with an empty vehicle (waste of energy) just to refill. Even if you dismissed all those things, found the optimal weight to battery ratio, the optimal charging station distribution station arrangement, optimal timing of charging batteries, optimal battery distribution management system, and the optimal vehicle, now you're still stuck footing the bill for what effectively amounts to a complete infrastructure change and implementation (battery production, vehicle production, charging station building and management, and finally distribution of all of those things).
So no, I don't think he did a good job. Try again.
While he does make this conclusion about U.S. data, he is fair and continues his search to other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. From this page:
While we're at it it also needs spinners. And racing stripes. And a "TYPE-R" sticker. Yep, you may be driving a pile of junk but hey, at least you look cool while you burn through those hydrocarbons! /sarcasm
I'd like to have a public transit system that actually works so I can sell my car and only rent one when I truly do need it.
Google is the web marketing power house. If you visit a site, like say slashdot.org, you'll notice that your browser automatically downloads stuff from google-analytics.com. What this is is user tracking software to track every page you visit on that website. The website (in this case slashdot) then can access a detailed report of visitor tendencies on the website. They've even got fancy charts to show you (the website owner) on average how long a visitor stays and which pages that visitor viewed before leaving.
If you don't want them to track you this closely, you can get firefox along with noscript and blacklist google-analytics.com. The website owner will still have logs of your ip address but it is much harder to come up with an accurate picture of what you're doing from web server logs.
a unique interface can encourage unique new kinds of fun
So that's why it is up up down down left right left right select start!
So when you show up to the movie theatre and a coke is $9 is that coke really worth more than the $1.50 two-liter of coke at the grocery store?
And when you go to fill up you gas tank is the 87 octane gas from the station across the street really that much better because it is marked up 10 cents per a gallon?
Or when you go to the electronics store does the logitech zfx990 optical wireless laser gaming mouse with blue-metal design really that much different than the logitech 200 optical mouse?
And how about some desktop ram where one stick of 1gb is selling from some fancy company like OCZ for $60 bucks with aluminum heat spreaders yet an equivalent 1gb stick from no-marketing distributer is selling for $40 (yet when you take the ram back home they have the same memory chips...)?
The best example of all: are monster audio cables really that much better than a coat hanger?
In general you could say that the more expensive something is, the higher the quality. But this is not always true. A common business practice is to exploit marketing strategies to target special high margin markets. That is someone at monster cable thought that there existed a market of idiots who would pay top dollar for a product that was not necessarily better than the other products on the market. But as long as they had a perception of being better and a price to back it up, then people in this target market would pay up.
The same can be said about cheap products that are advertised to be a "cheap product" when really the margin is low or even negative on the product. Companies sometimes do this to enter a new market first or slurp up market share before the competition can. A good example of this is the original xbox.
But sometimes there are products which end up on the market under priced because businesses didn't do adequate research or a different market (that wasn't targeted) realizes the potential of the product. A good example here is the original Sonic Impact t-amp which was marketed as a portable two speaker amplifier that could run on batteries. Audiophiles eventually came across the amp priced at about $60 (more today since the company realized it was worth more) and initially thought the product might be junk. But when they evaluated the amplifier they found that it could compete with top quality audiophile hardware. While the amplifier didn't have the power to drive a block party, for a living room it was more than enough.
If you want a more popular example you could go back in time to the time when Japanese entered the U.S. automobile and motorcycle market. The price of the Japanese imports were substantially lower yet the quality of the product was better. Harley Davidson almost failed as a company when the Japanese entered the market with their cheaper, more reliable, and sporty bicycles. Harleys suffered in quality because their production lines were flawed (a Harley back then was essentially hand-crafted and new workers were trained on the spot rather than being told to follow documented practices or processes). This resulted in an overpriced product with poor quality compared to the Japanese offerings. Harleys have changed since the company restructured itself and caught up with Japanese manufacturing methods. But it is just another example of price not being a good indicator of quality.
Finally businesses can use these same concepts to increase sales if they're smart. A good example here is a supermarket (I forget the name) that actively tries to listen to customer feedback. When they sold fish, they would package the fish into Styrofoam containers with plastic shrink wrap. Some of the feedback they got was that the fish they sold "was not fresh like the other fish markets". The guy in charge of buying the fish said that that was a lie and that he bought the fish from the same distributor that all the other markets bought the fish from and knew for a fact that they had just died. So the founders sent an employee to the other fish markets to see
But these things also change my life and my lifestyle. I'm sure you're quick to tsk-tsk me and that you get a good belly-laugh out of my awful American selfishness, but it's a serious question that too many people ignore.
Your argument is on the basis that a change in lifestyle will most likely be a negative change. I think that part is wrong. You can't change the present. It might actually be cheaper to keep and use your 5 year old SUV instead of buying a new econobox. It might be cheaper to keep your current 5 bedroom house in suburbia than to move to a city condominium right next to work. That is true because those things exist in the present.
What you can change is the future. That includes making wise decisions when you do need a new light bulb. Making wise decisions when you do plan on going to the grocery store. That is the future and those things you can plan for and are certainly things you can change. Will it impact your lifestyle? Of course. But nobody was guaranteed to have the same lifestyle. Pro athletes go broke within years. Most of the wealthy are self-made and not inherited. Your future lifestyle is and was never guaranteed but you do have some control over it.
Change doesn't have to be bad. What's wrong with potentially taking a train that comes every 10 minutes to work and back Monday to Friday rather than sitting in traffic? What's wrong with buying or moving to a home closer to work when the lease ends or the real estate market stabilizes so now you walk 5 minutes rather than drive for 40 minutes? These things will impact your lifestyle but not as badly as I think it would. You save money, you don't have to drive. Is that not a good trade off to the rising costs of suburbia? Do you seriously expect the world to bend over to protect your lifestyle for you? Or do you honestly think that there are some events that are out of your control and will impact your lifestyle? If you do prefer the suburbia lifestyle, why should you not accept the increased costs to maintain it? That is a significant change to your lifestyle that will impact you even if you do nothing.
I think those are the questions that American's have been able to avoid till today because all of those problems hadn't affected American lives till now. I am an American and I see this everywhere: the laziness to deal with changes in the environment and the willingness to turn a blind eye to a growing problem hoping that somebody else will solve it. As Americans if we want to ensure that even the most basic things are not affected, we need to give up our present wasteful lifestyles and make plans for the future. That means change is inevitable and we must act and respond to those changes as best we can even if it means changes to our lifestyles.
To put it into context my parents would often tell me as a little kid to finish my food or not to waste my food. That meant stuffing food into my mouth even if I was full. And if I didn't the old "people are starving and you're wasting food" fallacy would come up. So yes, people are starving and I can't finish my food. But even if I feed myself more food than I need, my body will not make use of it either, therefore the food is wasted either way. By me eating the excess food or throwing it away, I will have no impact on the starving people of the world because they still aren't getting the extra food that I am eating or wasting. All of that which I described is in the present.
The true problem is that a bad decision was made in the past and we are seeing the results of that bad decision later in time. At some point the decision was made to make, buy, and cook X amount of food. It turned out X was too large for our needs. We can't do anything about that. The consequences will be there no matter what we do today. But we can make it so that the problem doesn't occur in the future to buy less food so that we only consume what we need. So I could still be full and have a clean plate because I would only use what I need. In that sense there was minimal impact to my lifestyle but an increase in efficiency.
The atom processor isn't really more processor for your buck, it is actually less but for a good reason. The atom is designed to be cheap to produce and power efficient. Most benchmarks show it performing about the same are the celeron 900 or a little better. But it does have a significant advantage in the power consumption category. In terms of power efficiency the atom kicks the celeron's ass. So they're really just two different processors. If you don't care about battery life the 900 will work. If you do the 901 would be a better buy. The 901 also comes with bluetooth and a weird new case design if that's worth anything to you.
The article is just a bunch of BS that sounds more like a conspiracy theory than anything.
I'll tell you why Microsoft wants Yahoo in four words: internet search market share.
It is a no-brainer. Google makes a majority of its revenue from ads displayed on its internet search. Why? Because they have 70% of the internet search market share.
Think about this from the marketing perspective. I want to post an online ad to get people to come to my stupid e-store. I can cover 70% of the internet search market if I go with Google, maybe 16% if I go with Yahoo, and maybe 8% or 9% if I go with MSN. Even if I combined both Yahoo and MSN together they wouldn't even reach half of the audience Google touches. By default I would try Google first and if the results (increase in traffic and ultimately sales) were acceptable I wouldn't even bother with Yahoo or MSN. But if you said I could hit 25% with MS/Yahoo combined and only pay once to MS/Yahoo now I might consider advertising there as well.
So again, the MS/Yahoo acquisition is all about internet search market share.