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  bowen How you doin'? Registered User regular

  July 2008 edited July 2008

  That is quite cool. I wonder what would happen if they artificially created human DNA and let it grow to term. That's still cool.

  bowen on July 2008

  not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me

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  Elki get busy Moderator, ClubPA mod

  July 2008 edited July 2008

  Cool, but this isn't linksville.
  
  

  Tycho wrote:

  The problem with games isn't that they cost too much. I'm not an economist or anything, but I'm willing to bet that regular old, non-collector games cost more or less what they used to in real dollars. What's more, the technically savvy have been getting games for free as long as there have been games, and this will only get worse as prices go up. No, I'm afraid we won't be joining this boycott, or any other boycott, or signing any petitions, or wearing a silly suit and walking back and forth, or any of that shit. Activities like this will only anger our corporate overlords, causing them to activate dormant volcanoes in our midst and bury us in molten rock. So if you're into magma or whatever, you know, hey.

  
  
  
  

  The reason we never go in for feel good, change the world adventures isn't just cynicism. Okay, maybe some cynicism.
  
  The problem with the games I buy is that they're fucking broken. There was a spat on here recently about consoles and PCs, which is better, and I'll be straight with you when I say that the last few days have tried my resolve as a diehard PC enthusiast. These were my choices last Saturday night. A, I could keep banging my head against Unreal Tournament 2003, the brand new game I bought whose inexplicable crashes to the desktop put my remaining hair follicles in full rout. Or B, I could just turn on my PS2 and play Sly Cooper, which from beginning to end never gave me a moment's pain. The issue becomes more ridiculous when you realize that Unreal wasn't crashing because it was poorly conceived or produced, but because there was a known issue with the copy protection method that keeps legitimate owners out of the game. I hate to keep harping on that, but my Inbox is full of people who got screwed by this right alongside me, and I feel like their avatar. Infogrames put something they knew would break the game for some people on there, they had to know, because they'd just had the same issue with Neverwinter Nights. Of course, you're only going to see that on forums and in tech support correspondence - such is the state of PC gaming and the news covering it, that a publisher can commit an act of this kind with full cognizance and it's totally fine.
  
  I suppose it's off topic, but it may be of some comfort to you in these dark times. Popcap put something out to give back to all the linguaphiles that have supported them over the years. Obviously, I'm down. Or should I say... Well, down?
  
  (CW)TB out.
  
  i'm the best there's ever been

  Gabe wrote:

  Thanks for all the help! You guys kick ass.
  
  I just realized I didn't actually talk much about the sidekick itself. I don't know what to say other than, it is exactly what I need from a device of its kind. I can check my e-mail, surf the web, and chat via AIM. It's got a calendar, address book, games and all kinds of other stuff. Oh, and it's a goddamned cell phone. If you want to ad cwGabe to your AIM list you can chat with me. I only have AIM on the sidekick so the only times you will see me on is when I am using it. So when I'm waiting for a movie to start or in a boring meeting I'll sign in. Oh I almost forgot it's also got a tiny camera. Here are a couple pictures I took with it. The fist is me stuck in traffic on the 405. The second is a picture of the Nintendo store over at their headquarters in Redmond.
  
  One last quick item. VGD is having a huge import game sale right now. You can score some pretty sweet deals if you stop by in the next week.
  
  -Gabe out

  Tycho wrote:

  Yeah, he neglected to mention that he sends me pictures from that thing all the time, presumably to remind me that I don't have one - "This is me at Nintendo, having fun. This is me at a stoplight, my ringtones are the best." I haven't said anything about it recently, because I can't think of a way to write it that doesn't sound like I'm giving Danger a blowjob.
  
  However!
  
  You are welcome to check out seasoned, reasoned and reasonable coverage from Danger Info or this forum review at FatWallet. They have very nice things to say, by and large.
  
  They're out up here now, apparently. Would I pay forty dollars a month to tell Gabriel that he's a cockhole anywhere, anytime? Yes.
  
  (CW)TB

  Gabe wrote:

  Jorge Desormeaux - economics student extraodrinaire - had what I thought was an interesting perspective on FairPlay.
  
  "Technically speaking, the Fairplay people raise some good points. Fixed costs such as R&D or productive plants shouldn't factor in when determining a company's price strategy, and should only be evaluated when a company makes decisions regarding those fixed costs- such as increasing the R&D budget, building (or not building) a new plant, etc. The main problem with their initiative is that they have no hard facts to show that a price decrease would indeed boost revenue. While it does seem reasonable to think it would, at the time the whole "Hey, what about taking away the rich people's wealth and splitting it across the table so everyone can be happy!" idea sounded reasonable to some people as well. Essentially, the argument rests on the price-responsiveness of the consumers' demand for video games- that's to say, whether a % change in price causes a bigger % change in video game sales. If the % decrease in price causes a smaller % increase in sales, then lowering prices would be a pretty lousy idea- indeed, the industry should increase their prices if they wanted to make more money. If a high price-responsiveness (a.k.a. elasticity) could be seriously proven to exist, even a half-witted executive would have to agree that lowering the price is a good idea.
  
  But, that kind of research needs econometric demand estimations and a whole lot of stuff that certainly isn't free or easy to do. It would have to be research specific to the topic, because video game players as a group have a number of special characteristics. For instance, they tend to be relatively young, which means they tend not to have either a dependable or stable income level. If income constraints are a real barrier to video game consumption, then we could assume that there would be a high price-sensitivity. But it could also be argued that parents tend to buy games for their kids when they can't do so themselves, and in such a case the parent's income could be significantly higher so that they wouldn't really care if the price changes. So you'd have to determine who buys the games and the proportions in which they do so... and so on. It's pretty hard.
  
  So basically, while interesting, stylized facts like the ones they show in their page don't amount to anything unless they have something hard to back it up, and I don't think they will produce anything hard anytime soon, considering the difficulty and expense involved. It really should be the video game industry's job to puzzle this out, but there's not all that much we can do if they decide not to. The whole 'abstain from buying for a week' idea is pretty ineffective.
  
  All this aside from the broken games issue, of course. "
  
  (CW)TB

  Elki on July 2008

  

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