On the one hand virtual shopfronts always felt like a novelty that would play itself out really quickly. On the other hand, smartphones and tablets have kind of made the concept of a virtual world we all travel to in order to interact/transact obsolete. In a way, people still browse virtual shopfronts and do business there, but they don't need to log onto a central server and instead of "virtual shopfronts" we call them "apps".
Exactly. There has been plenty of study to suggest that when you introduce a metric and measure it, the metric will grow (as people identify what you're measuring and become good at finding clever ways to maximise the scores). The huge problem is that the overall goals of a company can't be summed up with a handful of simple metrics. If you focus on price, quality goes down, focus on quality and price goes up, or employees have to work more hours to deliver low price and high quality so morale goes down, turnover increases and your other costs of business (recruitment, training) go up. The answer is good management who understand the problems of the employees and are good at delivering solutions - "gamification" (ugh) is basically just a band aid on the problem of bad management.
A handful of people would actually choose to be at work if they never had to be, therefore to me the answer to how to motivate is to either give people the opportunity to not be at work (flexi-time works great if people have to do killer overtime but they know they get friday off, or as someone else suggested, earn X reward badges, get a day off, etc) or to make being at work more fun (free drinks/snacks, a break out area with some comfy seats and a few games, all incredibly cheap stuff that makes people feel less trapped at work - again if you want to tie it into a reward system let people earn more breakout time).
Except they probably paid a consultancy firm enough to buy everyone in the business free beer/pizza for a year for them to come up with this cardboard crap. I know which I'd prefer.
Indeed, meanwhile most capitalist economies are in the toilet at the moment because there was too much emphasis on freedom and removing the restrictions that kept the predatory excesses of big business in check.
Hindsight is not required to realise that if you stagnate at the top, someone will eventually leapfrog your position. The problem is the business model that says, as a director, avoid risk and costs for research and development, increase short term profit churn, sell out the company's future and guarantee a golden parachute for yourself (ideally landing in one of the competitors who are about to take your former company down).
Yep, the first wave of mass consumer smartphones came along and RIM basically laughed them off because they didn't offer all the functionality business users want. What they didn't see coming was how quickly those phones would incorporate that functionality. They should have used their advantage in the market place to develop more innovative features but, like so many companies who find themselves at the top of their sector, they sat back and became complacent.
Generally if the sensor on the car fails it will flag up an issue - you drive it to the garage, they check and find the engine is not the issue and replace the sensor. In other words you have the right amount of failover to ensure that you get your sensors checked but don't end up wrecking your engine without significantly increasing the cost with redundancy systems. If those sensors were handling pedestrian detection you can bet on having a lot more in the way of failover, additional sensors, tests running specifically to determine if the sensors are working, etc. There are also lots of situations where self driving cars would be capable of taking over from humans sooner rather than later - motorway driving for instance, is reasonably predictable, it's also boring and liable to cause drivers to stop paying attention, I'd be happy to see computers driving us on motorways in the near future even if we're decades away from them handling the school run.
Most likely an autonomous car can react quicker to an obstacle running in front of it faster than a human can.
With the added bonus that if the computer doesn't react fast enough, it won't drive off and leave the pedestrian bleeding in the road to protect its insurance premiums or hide the fact that it's had a few drinks before setting off.
Tens of thousands of people die from utterly avoidable road accidents every year, but you'd throw out the technology to prevent that just because it can't anticipate an event that might happen once in a lifetime? You'd happily let tens of thousands die because of the minute risk of one person dying in a scenario the car hadn't been configured to deal with (even if it was then trivial to make that configuration for future uses)? That seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Compare that to a pair of forward facing eyes, with an elaborate system of mirrors to try and allow them to see behind the car as well as in front. Lots more blind spots, and they can only look in one direction at a time.
And there are lots of drivers incapable (at least for periods) of even managing that. The one huge benefit of this system is that it never gets distracted by something on the radio, or the phone ringing, or wondering what to pick up for dinner, or by the idiot who just cut it up. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of accidents are caused by momentary lapses in judgement (there will be a lot that are caused by plain old bad driving, but over time experience, the legal system, and ultimately crashes, should weed those out).
Additionally, once all cars have this system, it won't even need to allow for lag for the driver behind to react, it can broadcast a signal to brake and a whole row of cars can instantly come to a halt, so an end to one car braking and causing a massive pile up. I suppose the car doesn't care what the obstacle is that's suddenly appeared, an obstacle is an obstacle, but watching some of the videos, the system paints various obstacles in either yellow or red, pedestrians red. I assume this is some kind of risk assessment or prioritisation - i.e. if a child runs out in front of the car the system will prefer to scrape the parked car next to it than hit the person. To make this kind of judgement in sub second time in a 360 degree arc is exactly the reason why computers will make better drivers than humans in the future.
What is this mental disease that makes people think we should fight to have billions and billions of people live forever?
I think it's called "humanity". You are right that it's cold logic, the head and not the heart, that will solve these issues, but for most people it's not so easy to divorce the two concepts; to know you have enough to live comfortably and to watch children starve.
So you trade other goods and use some of the profits to buy in food and some to improve your own land for growing in the future. Independence doesn't have to come all at once but you have to start somewhere. Besides, lots of richer countries don't produce nearly enough food to feed themselves without relying on some imports.
Indeed, and the glaringly obvious answer if people are starving now and refuse to or are incapable of working is that you pay them to do the work in food. Instead of charities just gifting food and medical aid, use it to incentivise a work force to work towards the kind of improvements that will lift large parts of the continent out of danger. Let's not rely on the corrupt governments to instigate these improvements, empower the people to create their own better future.
Don't forget that Sony were also worried about cannibalising what they saw as the real future of portable music - MiniDisc. The holy grail for Sony seems always to be to own the consumable part of the market (Betamax, MiniDisc, CD, DVD, BDR, not to mention their various portable gaming formats, etc - they've had their thumb in pretty much every pie to some extent).
Particularly nauseating given how well they've demonstrated they'll look after your personal information. My last Sony purchase was a PS1. Admittedly the last time I tried it about 12 years ago it was still working, but only if I stood it upside down so the lid rested on the ground. Sony used to be the watchword for quality, then sometime in the 90s they figured they could trade on the name but reduce quality to boost profits.
This is almost always the issue when the board aren't properly invested in the long term future of the company. The approach is always: gut the company, make a fast buck now, then jump ship (hopefully before it sinks). There's no incentive to invest in new technology, there's no incetive to take risks with different approaches - why would the board care about that when they can just milk what they've got for profits right now then move to a company that's already done the hard work and investment later. It's the sickness at the core of most of our business, a natural side effect of the transition from family owned business (where you were leaving a legacy to your offspring) to global megacorps, where your next bonus is all that counts.
The regularity of the occurence is the most baffling part, though. I don't frequent Game stores all that often but I've almost always encountered used prices either more than new, the same as, or even when lower it's only one or two pounds on a £40 game (with the loss of any included DLC, the risk that the disk is scratched, etc). Back in the days when Gamestation was independent they used to do some great deals on pre-owned games, since Game took over the trend has been constantly upwards almost to the point where there's no real difference. I can understand the desire for more profits but surely this turns a lot of customers away.
Excellent journal entries, I'd advise anyone with a little time to go read them. On the credit front, my GF was one of the lucky ones. She'd pre-ordered Mass Effect 3 for me and when we received notification that they couldn't meet the order as they'd been refused stock (and gave us a £5 voucher to make up for it) I instantly realised we were talking days or weeks rather than months or years left on the clock for Game and told her to cash the voucher and her ~£25 of loyalty points in.
I can understand how people would be annoyed at having missed out, but on the other hand I'd be extremely wary of sinking more than you're willing to lose into any company in this economy (or in fact, in general - I hate buying big ticket items that have a long time to deliver like sofas, etc, leaving several hundred pounds invested in a company in the hope they'll be able to deliver). I can imagine a lot of those same people still have HMV vouchers/credit, for instance and will learn little from this experience.
But the point is it's also a terrible use of expensive shop space. Why pay so much rent if all you're going to do is fill it all with empty boxes? I don't need to see 20 copies of the same empty box side by side on a shelf. Just have one box and a bunch of "Take this token to the counter to buy" things behind it. That way you instantly claim back masses of floor space for things like demo units that instantly give you a killer advantage over both superstores (who just want churn) and the internet. Same deal with used games, I don't want to wade through 300 used games to find the one I want, replace that with a system whereby used games get scanned in and I can just run a search on a terminal and instantly see if what I want is in stock (and even better, they could tie it into a bunch of services like "view similar titles" that might get them some residual sales of games I'd not previously heard about). Again, massive win for the customer plus reclaim a bunch of valuable floor space. None of this stuff is rocket science, you can't just hope to run a shop as though it's the 80s where customers had no real alternatives on the high street and the internet/supermarkets never happened.
Not to mention the shops are awful for browsing. What they need is some system where I can pick up a game I've not seen/heard about, scan it at a booth and pull up gameplay video, reviews, etc, even be able to try it out before I buy. Having 20 copies of an identical empty box with three lines of blurb and an artist rendition of the game tells me nothing as a potential customer. They should be doing more of what tabletop game stores do. Run game nights with leagues and competitions, help people connect with other local gamers who enjoy the same types of games, turn it from somewhere you only go if you want the game right now and everywhere else on the high street is sold out to somewhere you actively want to go and spend time. They could do most of this with volunteers (give them some kind of loyalty rewards/discount vouchers for helping out) and it needn't cost them much at all. That's how a bricks and mortar game store differentiates itself from internet/supermarket stores. Cramming people in like cattle and filling all available space with stuffed Yoshi dolls isn't going to cut it.
I wonder if it's to do with capacity at peak times. Perhaps having two or three stores during their peak run up to Christmas generates enough additional profit (or at least they were hoping it would but it sounds like they miscalculated) to cover the surplus stores for the rest of the year (and since they can't just rent and outfit the stores they need for those three months, it's better to have them open than closed so long as they're breaking even). The Game and Gamestation proximity thing is easier to explain, as they were originally competitors and Game bought Gamestation out. Likely they had sufficiently long leases on some of the Gamestation stores that, again, it made more sense to keep them open and breaking even than close them but still pay rent.
Slashdot Mirror
On the one hand virtual shopfronts always felt like a novelty that would play itself out really quickly. On the other hand, smartphones and tablets have kind of made the concept of a virtual world we all travel to in order to interact/transact obsolete. In a way, people still browse virtual shopfronts and do business there, but they don't need to log onto a central server and instead of "virtual shopfronts" we call them "apps".
I'd be more motivated by milk, cookies and nap time (especially nap time) than pointless gold stars.
Exactly. There has been plenty of study to suggest that when you introduce a metric and measure it, the metric will grow (as people identify what you're measuring and become good at finding clever ways to maximise the scores). The huge problem is that the overall goals of a company can't be summed up with a handful of simple metrics. If you focus on price, quality goes down, focus on quality and price goes up, or employees have to work more hours to deliver low price and high quality so morale goes down, turnover increases and your other costs of business (recruitment, training) go up. The answer is good management who understand the problems of the employees and are good at delivering solutions - "gamification" (ugh) is basically just a band aid on the problem of bad management.
A handful of people would actually choose to be at work if they never had to be, therefore to me the answer to how to motivate is to either give people the opportunity to not be at work (flexi-time works great if people have to do killer overtime but they know they get friday off, or as someone else suggested, earn X reward badges, get a day off, etc) or to make being at work more fun (free drinks/snacks, a break out area with some comfy seats and a few games, all incredibly cheap stuff that makes people feel less trapped at work - again if you want to tie it into a reward system let people earn more breakout time).
Except they probably paid a consultancy firm enough to buy everyone in the business free beer/pizza for a year for them to come up with this cardboard crap. I know which I'd prefer.
Indeed, meanwhile most capitalist economies are in the toilet at the moment because there was too much emphasis on freedom and removing the restrictions that kept the predatory excesses of big business in check.
Hindsight is not required to realise that if you stagnate at the top, someone will eventually leapfrog your position. The problem is the business model that says, as a director, avoid risk and costs for research and development, increase short term profit churn, sell out the company's future and guarantee a golden parachute for yourself (ideally landing in one of the competitors who are about to take your former company down).
Yep, the first wave of mass consumer smartphones came along and RIM basically laughed them off because they didn't offer all the functionality business users want. What they didn't see coming was how quickly those phones would incorporate that functionality. They should have used their advantage in the market place to develop more innovative features but, like so many companies who find themselves at the top of their sector, they sat back and became complacent.
Generally if the sensor on the car fails it will flag up an issue - you drive it to the garage, they check and find the engine is not the issue and replace the sensor. In other words you have the right amount of failover to ensure that you get your sensors checked but don't end up wrecking your engine without significantly increasing the cost with redundancy systems. If those sensors were handling pedestrian detection you can bet on having a lot more in the way of failover, additional sensors, tests running specifically to determine if the sensors are working, etc. There are also lots of situations where self driving cars would be capable of taking over from humans sooner rather than later - motorway driving for instance, is reasonably predictable, it's also boring and liable to cause drivers to stop paying attention, I'd be happy to see computers driving us on motorways in the near future even if we're decades away from them handling the school run.
Most likely an autonomous car can react quicker to an obstacle running in front of it faster than a human can.
With the added bonus that if the computer doesn't react fast enough, it won't drive off and leave the pedestrian bleeding in the road to protect its insurance premiums or hide the fact that it's had a few drinks before setting off.
Tens of thousands of people die from utterly avoidable road accidents every year, but you'd throw out the technology to prevent that just because it can't anticipate an event that might happen once in a lifetime? You'd happily let tens of thousands die because of the minute risk of one person dying in a scenario the car hadn't been configured to deal with (even if it was then trivial to make that configuration for future uses)? That seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Compare that to a pair of forward facing eyes, with an elaborate system of mirrors to try and allow them to see behind the car as well as in front. Lots more blind spots, and they can only look in one direction at a time.
And there are lots of drivers incapable (at least for periods) of even managing that. The one huge benefit of this system is that it never gets distracted by something on the radio, or the phone ringing, or wondering what to pick up for dinner, or by the idiot who just cut it up. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of accidents are caused by momentary lapses in judgement (there will be a lot that are caused by plain old bad driving, but over time experience, the legal system, and ultimately crashes, should weed those out).
Additionally, once all cars have this system, it won't even need to allow for lag for the driver behind to react, it can broadcast a signal to brake and a whole row of cars can instantly come to a halt, so an end to one car braking and causing a massive pile up. I suppose the car doesn't care what the obstacle is that's suddenly appeared, an obstacle is an obstacle, but watching some of the videos, the system paints various obstacles in either yellow or red, pedestrians red. I assume this is some kind of risk assessment or prioritisation - i.e. if a child runs out in front of the car the system will prefer to scrape the parked car next to it than hit the person. To make this kind of judgement in sub second time in a 360 degree arc is exactly the reason why computers will make better drivers than humans in the future.
What is this mental disease that makes people think we should fight to have billions and billions of people live forever?
I think it's called "humanity". You are right that it's cold logic, the head and not the heart, that will solve these issues, but for most people it's not so easy to divorce the two concepts; to know you have enough to live comfortably and to watch children starve.
So you trade other goods and use some of the profits to buy in food and some to improve your own land for growing in the future. Independence doesn't have to come all at once but you have to start somewhere. Besides, lots of richer countries don't produce nearly enough food to feed themselves without relying on some imports.
Indeed, and the glaringly obvious answer if people are starving now and refuse to or are incapable of working is that you pay them to do the work in food. Instead of charities just gifting food and medical aid, use it to incentivise a work force to work towards the kind of improvements that will lift large parts of the continent out of danger. Let's not rely on the corrupt governments to instigate these improvements, empower the people to create their own better future.
And flushing customer confidence down the toilet is a better alternative?
Don't forget that Sony were also worried about cannibalising what they saw as the real future of portable music - MiniDisc. The holy grail for Sony seems always to be to own the consumable part of the market (Betamax, MiniDisc, CD, DVD, BDR, not to mention their various portable gaming formats, etc - they've had their thumb in pretty much every pie to some extent).
Particularly nauseating given how well they've demonstrated they'll look after your personal information. My last Sony purchase was a PS1. Admittedly the last time I tried it about 12 years ago it was still working, but only if I stood it upside down so the lid rested on the ground. Sony used to be the watchword for quality, then sometime in the 90s they figured they could trade on the name but reduce quality to boost profits.
This is almost always the issue when the board aren't properly invested in the long term future of the company. The approach is always: gut the company, make a fast buck now, then jump ship (hopefully before it sinks). There's no incentive to invest in new technology, there's no incetive to take risks with different approaches - why would the board care about that when they can just milk what they've got for profits right now then move to a company that's already done the hard work and investment later. It's the sickness at the core of most of our business, a natural side effect of the transition from family owned business (where you were leaving a legacy to your offspring) to global megacorps, where your next bonus is all that counts.
The regularity of the occurence is the most baffling part, though. I don't frequent Game stores all that often but I've almost always encountered used prices either more than new, the same as, or even when lower it's only one or two pounds on a £40 game (with the loss of any included DLC, the risk that the disk is scratched, etc). Back in the days when Gamestation was independent they used to do some great deals on pre-owned games, since Game took over the trend has been constantly upwards almost to the point where there's no real difference. I can understand the desire for more profits but surely this turns a lot of customers away.
Excellent journal entries, I'd advise anyone with a little time to go read them. On the credit front, my GF was one of the lucky ones. She'd pre-ordered Mass Effect 3 for me and when we received notification that they couldn't meet the order as they'd been refused stock (and gave us a £5 voucher to make up for it) I instantly realised we were talking days or weeks rather than months or years left on the clock for Game and told her to cash the voucher and her ~£25 of loyalty points in.
I can understand how people would be annoyed at having missed out, but on the other hand I'd be extremely wary of sinking more than you're willing to lose into any company in this economy (or in fact, in general - I hate buying big ticket items that have a long time to deliver like sofas, etc, leaving several hundred pounds invested in a company in the hope they'll be able to deliver). I can imagine a lot of those same people still have HMV vouchers/credit, for instance and will learn little from this experience.
But the point is it's also a terrible use of expensive shop space. Why pay so much rent if all you're going to do is fill it all with empty boxes? I don't need to see 20 copies of the same empty box side by side on a shelf. Just have one box and a bunch of "Take this token to the counter to buy" things behind it. That way you instantly claim back masses of floor space for things like demo units that instantly give you a killer advantage over both superstores (who just want churn) and the internet. Same deal with used games, I don't want to wade through 300 used games to find the one I want, replace that with a system whereby used games get scanned in and I can just run a search on a terminal and instantly see if what I want is in stock (and even better, they could tie it into a bunch of services like "view similar titles" that might get them some residual sales of games I'd not previously heard about). Again, massive win for the customer plus reclaim a bunch of valuable floor space. None of this stuff is rocket science, you can't just hope to run a shop as though it's the 80s where customers had no real alternatives on the high street and the internet/supermarkets never happened.
Not to mention the shops are awful for browsing. What they need is some system where I can pick up a game I've not seen/heard about, scan it at a booth and pull up gameplay video, reviews, etc, even be able to try it out before I buy. Having 20 copies of an identical empty box with three lines of blurb and an artist rendition of the game tells me nothing as a potential customer. They should be doing more of what tabletop game stores do. Run game nights with leagues and competitions, help people connect with other local gamers who enjoy the same types of games, turn it from somewhere you only go if you want the game right now and everywhere else on the high street is sold out to somewhere you actively want to go and spend time. They could do most of this with volunteers (give them some kind of loyalty rewards/discount vouchers for helping out) and it needn't cost them much at all. That's how a bricks and mortar game store differentiates itself from internet/supermarket stores. Cramming people in like cattle and filling all available space with stuffed Yoshi dolls isn't going to cut it.
I wonder if it's to do with capacity at peak times. Perhaps having two or three stores during their peak run up to Christmas generates enough additional profit (or at least they were hoping it would but it sounds like they miscalculated) to cover the surplus stores for the rest of the year (and since they can't just rent and outfit the stores they need for those three months, it's better to have them open than closed so long as they're breaking even). The Game and Gamestation proximity thing is easier to explain, as they were originally competitors and Game bought Gamestation out. Likely they had sufficiently long leases on some of the Gamestation stores that, again, it made more sense to keep them open and breaking even than close them but still pay rent.