"Bedroom coder" are not the words a banker wants to hear when you hit him for a loan.

These days, "loan" is the only word a banker needs to hear to know that you're not qualified to receive one.

After all, if you were financially sound enough to pay back a loan, why would you need one in the first place? [/sarcasm]

Methinks perhaps the pendulum has swung a bit too far, hmm?

Wow, that's incredibly low for Gish, given the publicity it recieved - though I probably shouldn't be surprised, since I didn't buy a copy either.

I can't help but feel that $20 is a bit high for most indie games. Maybe there's some logic to the price point, but personally, I find it a bit high, and I'd be a lot more likely (i.e. more than twice as likely) to buy if the price was halved. $10 seems like something I'm willing to purchase on impulse because I'm curious to spend a couple hours playing it; $20 and I really have to love the idea or demo before I'll shell out.

I think the big publishers correctly realize that they need to make games look attractive at a glance - the problem, IMO, with this game (in TFA), is that it's just not something that grabs you immediately. And even if Madden N+1 is not 10-100x better as a game, it has ultimately brought more pleasure (==> utility or wealth) to the world because it properly marketed itself and looked good enough to get anyone that might enjoy it to buy it. I don't think the game in the article has maximized its own potential, and that's a problem...

I'd personally rather see figures for indie games more along the lines of Droid Assault or Robokill (check these out if you haven't - maybe a shameless plug, but I'm not involved with either, just a fan!), both of which have the kind of immediate traction with a player that an RPG with graphics that were getting stale a decade ago just can't pull off.

I'm not saying you can't have quality without graphical flair, but come on - you've got to look like your making an effort if you really want to move product!

If government got out of the school system entirely you would have lots of schools opening and competing with each other, forcing prices down. It would be in every school's best interest to increase enrollment and student loans with reasonable, market-determined interest rates would become common for poor students.

My main question to this all-too-common line of reasoning: why the hell didn't this happen before the government got into the school business, then? Because until that happened, the masses were uneducated. Our level of education has increased significantly since then, and I see no evidence that it's because of anything other than the fact that a reasonably decent education is freely available to anyone...

My problem with the whole Von Mises set and philosophy is that if you take the arguments seriously and push them to their logical conclusions, they not only suggest that it's better to refrain from taking wealth away from the wealthiest, it's actually better to funnel it towards them in a massively regressive way. The arguments all go towards supporting the view that the incremental utility to society is always higher when a dollar goes into a wealthy person's hand than a poor person's since the wealthy one is more likely to increase production through the use of that dollar than the poor person is (the poor person will merely use the dollar to increase consumption).

I'd be a lot more comfortable with the arguments if they were about finding a balance, rather than pushing an absolute that leads to a ridiculous outcome when you take it all the way to the end of the logical path. Assuming that balance of wealth is a knob we can turn, it's far more productive to figure out what the optimal setting is than it is to blindly push in one direction, and it's intellectually dishonest to try to use arguments that always conclude "Turn it to the right!" no matter what the current state of affairs to argue that we should eliminate the knob altogether...

She is also very smart - has a masters in math, probably could easily answer trivia like how much of the Earth is covered in water. But she is firm in her beliefs and faith is always > reason.

Never trust a mathematician when it comes to science! The problem with mathematicians (especially pure ones, who deal with algebra or analysis - mathematicians don't consider statistics "real" math) is that they are so used to the requirement of rigorous proof that they can easily justify any physical belief to themselves under the theory that the converse can't be proven because we don't have a strict set of axioms backing it up.

Seriously, these guys can be nuts - Serge Lang (the prolific author of many of the most widely used upper level math texts in existence) argued quite strenuously on many occasions that HIV did not necessarily cause AIDS, but that they were merely somewhat correlated. And the guy was no idiot - he was a mathematical genius, but a lifetime of rigor can make people forget that outside of their bubble world, overwhelming evidence should be enough to accept a fact, and you can't insist upon proof when it's impossible to have it.

Interesting trend I've been noticing on /. - so many of the left slanted posts are modded up while the dissenting one are modded down (like the parent of this, as flamebait). I guess I overestimated the community here...

Oh come on. While I 100% agree that there's often a left slant to moderation here, the example you're complaining about was pure unadulterated flamebait:

lol.. Sounds like an Obamic Lemming... I hear they are gettin "buyer's remorse"...lol

You really think that adds anything meaningful to the conversation? Pick your battles, there are far better examples of moderation bias than this one.

Still it blows my mind that people would pirate an iPhone app, let alone a cheap one.

Not that you're not right withthat sentiment, but just wanted to point out: five dollars is real expensive as far as iPhone games go, especially simple puzzle ones. The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.

The moment you charge anything for an app, you slash the number of "purchasers" to about 1/10 to 1/100 of what it would have been if it were free; if you go above $1, you're whittling that down much further unless your game has a whole lot of publicity or a brand name to prop sales up. Apart from Galcon, I can't think of many indie games that became even remotely popular for more than maybe $3 a pop.

I think the optimal price for almost every game on the iPhone (that is, every one without a franchise) is probably $1, but I'd really need to see more data to be sure of that.

Budgeting for over 1000 sales on a simple puzzle game running on a single platform is fantasy land.

Particularly at $5 a pop with no free version to try out...

"Everyone" knows that simple iPhone games have to be $1 or nobody will buy them, and that's doubly true when a cursory look at the game indicates that it's exactly the same color matching game that has been released a hundred times already on the store.

To even get a FREE app, one needs an iTunes account, which needs, yes you guessed it, a credit card (or some form of payment means)

If you're using an iPhone, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that you already have an iTunes account set up and linked to the phone. Frankly, I don't know anyone that has the phone but not an iTunes account linked to it...the phone's not worth much without it, so I wouldn't see the point (the tiny group of jailbreakers aside).

The fact that you only need to punch in your iTunes password to make a purchase is exactly what makes the iPhone a viable marketplace for paid games, I don't think it's particularly hurting anything.

Let's see you do better. The people that yap about broken business models generally aren't doing anything better, or anything at all. As far as I can tell, it's just hot air used to make excuses, I've never seen anyone that cite "broken business model" suggest a better alternative.

Well, the alternative is to get the hell out of the business. Luckily, these things have a way of resolving themselves - if the content producers can't figure out how to make a profit distributing shows on the internet, then they will be forced out of business as the demand for internet TV increases. The point is, their current actions likely don't help their bottom lines at all, and in all likelihood merely slightly delay the inevitable transition.

The ultimate irony is that the increased availability and better user experience provided by web distribution will probably ultimately be more profitable than the current TV model is, as it will draw a lot more eyeballs to the ads (and allow for niche programming that could not be allowed to take up a prime time spot - Firefly would probably still be alive if Internet distribution was the norm and your profit merely had to surpass your expenses). This could be accelerated if they got behind it, and prices would come into line far more quickly, but instead they are fighting against it, which is probably hurting them (and us!) significantly in the long term even if it's slightly helping in the short.

Guys like the parent just think everything should be given to him for free, at the same time he expects his boss at work to pay his paycheck on time and get annual raises no matter what his performance is like.

If you're not getting an annual raise, then you're getting an effective annual cut, so I think that's a perfectly reasonable assumption (unless your performance has been truly awful)...such are the wonders of inflation.

I read some speculation somewhere that Hulu is actually being pressured by the content owners to stop Boxee because there is less advertising revenue from web streaming than there is for live TV.

There are three options as to why this is the case:

1. Advertisers are overpaying for TV ads
2. Advertisers are underpaying for streaming ads
3. Internet eyeballs are actually worth less to advertisers than TV eyeballs

Anyone care to speculate? Personally, I'd suspect that it's a lot of 1) and a little of 2), but I could be wrong. In any case I highly doubt that 3) is primarily to blame - when I see ads on Hulu, I actually sit through and watch them, whereas on TV the ad breaks are more than long enough to switch the channel/go grab some food/etc.

Internet TV is something that the networks and content producers should be rushing to embrace, not fighting. If it means less advertising revenue, then they really have to fight that head on and try to either bring about fairer prices or increase the value of each view, not try to push the issue to the future. I know for a fact that a lot of companies are starting to sit out of the TV ad bidding process altogether this year because they realize they can get better ROI from internet ads. That more have not realized this is most likely a matter of inertia, and once they do, I'd expect to see some price normalization across the board, with internet ads coming up and TV ones coming down (besides, with internet ads you can actually tell when people click through, which makes it easier to measure the impact that the ad has).

Next in line is to start actually putting shows up on the net before the torrents get there, as an awful lot of people will happily sit through some ads, but if the show is not up yet, will equally happily hit the Pirate Bay to get it. The 1 day to 1 week lag time means that most of the real hard core fans have likely already gotten illegal copies, and this is certainly eating into revenue from sites like Hulu.

Bah. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and most conceptions of God are severely extraordinary yet come with absolutely no proof.

The idea that the burden of proof lies on Dawkins is flat out wrong, and the other side of the argument has not offered any evidence to start a reasonable debate, so frankly, Dawkins battle has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with PR. Hence I don't really care if his tactics are underhanded or not.

Agree with you that C#- and C-derived languages in general- aren't perfect though. *Every damn one* uses the same mistake-prone choice of "=" as the assignment operator.

At least Java throws an error when you accidentally leave off the second '=' in a '==' comparison; the real problem is that the purer C derived languages let assignments act as values, and cast them automatically to booleans without complaint.

Then again, it's easy enough to set up warnings for that type of thing, so...

The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job.

In my experience, people think Visual Basic sucks specifically because of the fact that it's easy to use for inexperienced coders. They've had to deal with (i.e. inherit, maintain, and fix) tons of crap code created by people that program just enough to get by, and that type of code just doesn't show up as much in C because of the steeper learning curve.

You really don't understand true pain until you've had to maintain a significant codebase created primarily by aspiring non-programmers in the financial industry that thought learning VBA would increase their employment prospects. Unfortunately these people slip through the resume screens and get jobs coding all the time because the recruiters can tick off the VBA box, completely overlooking the fact that their "extensive" VBA experience amounts to a 2 week "Intro to Excel Programming" course at the local community college, and a lot of these places don't even make people write code during interviews.

Not to say that similar stuff doesn't happen with C or Java, but...anecdotally, at least, the overall quality of Visual Basic code that I've seen tends to be extremely low, probably more on par with your typical basement PHP code than anything else. That's not a reason not to use it if it's the right tool for the job, of course, but it is a reason to initially put most VB programmers into the "suck" bin until proven otherwise, especially if that's all they know how to do.

FWIW, even though I program a lot of Java, and I find that for many purposes it's the best tool for the job (esp. when C# is not a realistic option or when Java libraries are more mature than the alternatives), the same thing holds true there - if it's all someone knows how to do, they're probably not very good.