Kaz Hirai confirms premium level will be added on top of PS3 and PSP’s online service, which will remain free to play online
The truth is that everyone has a hand at sending jobs overseas.
Let’s take a look at the unions and engineers first. The largest single stockholding group in the US is retirement funds… for unions. The pressure to maximize profits, that is causing corporations to look for offshore answers comes directly from those being pressured by the rank and file to make sure that retirement fund is healthy. So the workers being laid off, teachers, government employees. And if those funds start to dip because the stock market is on the skids … like it is now … the union pressure the corporations to up their contributions to the fund.
Second, US workers, including engineers, had a competitive advantage for many years because they had unbridled greed, superior technical competence and lofty ambition. But they have left the field by exchanging ambition for complacency. The attitude is, “we are the best so we must be compensated.” As I have pointed out earlier this week, low cost trumps quality in today’s electronics world. Outsourcing centers have adopted good old American greed and have come close enough to matching US competence to make the choice comparable. They have also adopted the long-term attitude that was once the hallmark of American business. They are willing to sacrifice monetarily in the immediate to establish dominance later. The attitude of entitlement of American workers is making them a poor choice in today’s economy. That attitude is not nationwide. Many workers are taking huge salary cuts in order to stay competitive. That willingness to sacrifice is not, however, taking hold within the electronics world.
Third, government still seems to think that the big stick is a carrot and can’t figure out why US companies are leaving the US for other countries. At a talk in Monterey a couple of years ago, former Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said, “If I get approached by a country that tells me if I move my corporate headquarters to their island, they will give me office space and eliminate my taxes as long as I hire locally, I’d be crazy not to take them up on it.” Watkins pointed out, even before the crash in ‘08, that US government makes no effort to keep US companies in the US.
Fourth, corporate management in the tech sector is lead by sheep. They see a competitor do something and they go do it too, often at the prodding of the board and investors. That’s what got everyone excited about off-shoring in the first place. There was little research done regarding the long term benefits. Now we’re seeing some of the early adopters of the practice rethink their decision. Offshore jobs increased job mobility in India, so companies had to increase the amount of training for workers that might last only 6 months. IP theft in China has cost the electronics industry billions of dollars. The financial justification of going overseas is a lot less viable now than it was 10 years ago, especially when you factor in the significant drop in quality.
IBM Corp. has cut nearly 10,000 jobs this year, according to reports, although Big Blue still refuses to fess up to most of the layoffs.
The Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701, an IBM union, claims IBM has implemented 17 separate layoffs for a total of 9,308 jobs this year, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. That’s been known for some time.
Here’s what is new: Big Blue is expected to cut a total of 16,000 jobs this year, many of which are in the United States, according to the union. This comes at a time when IBM is thriving despite the downturn.
Some readings of Activision’s figures for the game suggest that the average selling price of MW2 was actually lower than that for Grand Theft Auto IV, which carried a perfectly normal SRP. For Activision, of course, this is perfectly fine. It’s not all that bothered about how much consumers paid for the game - as long as retailers paid the inflated trade price, then the publisher laughs all the way to the bank, regardless of how much those retailers then chose to debase their own margins in order to remain competitive. One wonders whether this had been Activision’s plan all along. From the moment that the price hike was announced, commentators sucked in their breath and marveled at what an immense risk the publisher seemed to be taking with a goose that had previously been guaranteed to lay golden eggs. Yet it may well be that Activision knew perfectly well that retailers would never sell Modern Warfare 2 at full price. Anticipating the price war that broke out between supermarkets and online retailers - with specialist stores unwillingly caught in the crossfire - it knew that it could gouge its “partners” with a higher trade price, confident in the knowledge that consumers would not feel the sting. If that is the case, then one side of the industry can only take its hats off to Activision’s clever maneuvering, even while the retailers who have just helped to inflate the company’s quarterly figures lick their wounds and glower. They’ll get their own back, of course - MW2 will turn profits for companies like GAME, GameStop and GameStation for months and even years to come as copies cycle through the second hand market - but right now, Activision is the victor, having sneakily managed to hammer retail margins for one of the biggest releases of the year into the ground. However, everyone knows that this isn’t a situation which will be repeated too often. Supermarkets will only treat a small minority of extremely high-profile, seasonal releases as loss leaders, and specialist retailers simply can’t take this kind of margin squeeze indefinitely. The next publisher to try and shove its SRP up may well find that retailers are not prepared to soak up the difference this time - leaving it in the exposed position of passing the price hike on to consumers for the first time, and almost certainly doing so with a far less attractive and anticipated product than MW2.
Researchers used an IBM supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Lab to model the movement of data through a structure with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, which allowed them to see how information “percolates” through a system that’s comparable to a feline cerebral cortex. The work is part of a federally funded effort to study what’s known as cognitive computing, starting with what IBM project manager Dharmendra Modha calls “reverse-engineering the human brain,” or designing a new computer by first getting a better understanding of how the brain works. “The brain is amazing,” said Modha, a computer scientist who can wax poetic about the capabilities of human gray matter. “The brain has awe-inspiring capabilities. It can react or interact with complex, real-world environments, in a context-dependent way. And yet it consumes less power than a light bulb and it occupies less space than a two-liter bottle of soda.” A key difference between human brains and traditional computers, Modha says, is that current computers are designed on a model that differentiates between processing and storing data, which can lead to a lag in updating information. The brain works on a more complex physical structure that can integrate and react to a constant stream of sights, sounds and other sensory information.
The WSJ highlights the DMCA legal battle between Texas Instruments and calc hackers.
Nintendo understands that its basic problem was with its software. It didn’t manage to keep a solid, high-quality feed of top titles pouring into the market over the first half of this year, leaving the Wii to rest on the laurels of Wii Sports and Wii Fit when what the market really needed were new things to reignite interest. A huge number of the Wii’s owners are downstream consumers, uncommitted newcomers to the gaming market, and after an immensely promising start, Nintendo failed to deliver the kind of software that encourages those people to swim upstream and get more deeply involved in gaming.
It’s not, by any means, too late. Those people aren’t going anywhere. Their Wii consoles may continue to gather dust and they may continue to buy only a minimal amount of software, if any at all, but it’s highly unlikely that they will migrate to the offerings of any of Nintendo’s rivals or dispose of the consoles entirely. Nintendo still has a window of opportunity to engage those consumers by offering them software and experiences which appeal to them and encourage them back into the market.
A COMPLETE index to all the Calvin and Hobbes strips. No actual comics, but this is a great searchable archive.
Put simply, the goal here is to clean install Windows 7 on a virgin, unused PC. You can boot and run Setup with the Upgrade media for Windows 7, but when you go to activate, it won’t work.
Thanks to Kevin Fisher and a bit of testing, I have a simple workaround that does work.
After performing the clean install, ensure that there are no Windows Updates pending that would require a system reboot. (You’ll see an orange shield icon next to Shutdown in the Start Menu if this is the case).
Then, open regedit.exe with Start Menu Search and navigate to:
HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
Change MediaBootInstall from “1” to “0”.
Open the Start Menu again and type cmd to display a shortcut to the Command Line utility. Right-click this shortcut and choose “Run as administrator.” Handle the UAC prompt.
In the command line window, type: slmgr /rearm
Then tap ENTER, close the command line window and reboot. When Windows 7 reboots, run the Activate Windows utility, type in your product key and activate windows.
Voila!
A couple of notes here.
Others have reported that simply installing Windows 7 using Upgrade Media and then activating just works. It certainly doesn’t hurt to try this, but my guess is that there was a version of Windows on the hard drive that Setup detected, thus making the install and activation work properly.
I have not tested this yet, but I assume if you launch Setup from within your previous version of Windows, choose Custom, reboot, and then wipe out the previous Windows version during Setup, that that will work as well.
And I’m just about positive that the old “install twice” hack from Vista will work too.
A list of settings that can be applied to the Perl script Perltidy
Despite attempts to balance difficulty for a wide range of people, the players will still experience failure. More importantly, many of these folks will stop playing because of these failures. It’s rare for people to leave a restaurant because they don’t like the food, and it’s not too common for people to walk out of a movie because it’s bad — but game players do put down the controller and leave the game all the time. What’s worse, when game players have a negative experience, they are likely to tell their friends, family, and community.
When someone quits a game prematurely, we haven’t just lost a player; we’ve created a detractor.
For Batman: Arkham Asylum, how hard was it to resist the temptation of throwing in Batmobile driving segments? I thought it was interesting what you guys did with the Batmobile, but Batman has these great vehicles like that and the Batwing. Was there some debate whether or not to include those in the game? It would seem like obvious to have a driving or a flying segment.
SH: We didn’t have a flying or driving section in the game, that’s true. There was a lot of discussion about that. Obviously, the vehicles are a part of Batman. We decided that we would make vehicles a part of the story, so rescuing the Batmobile plays a significant part, and the Batwing delivers the Line Launcher.
What we don’t want to do is take on too much. Some of the things that we really wanted to achieve were for Batman himself, so we didn’t want to overstretch with a driving section with its own mechanic and requirements, and take that development time away from the things that were important for Batman himself.
That was what really drove that decision. We had a lot of discussions about it, but at the end of the day, anything that is going to compromise the quality of what we were doing was something that we wouldn’t take on if it was going to compromise the quality of the other components. We wanted to make sure that what we deliver and what you play is of the highest possible quality.
Rocksteady’s Sefton Hill Unmasks Batman: Arkham Asylum