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Piracy

App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million 202

An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.

Comment Stop with the damn shaky cam! (Score 1) 705

I saw D9 last night and had a very difficult time enjoying it. That was mostly due to being motion sick from the camera work. That is a first for me. If you get even the slightest bit of motion sickness, wait until this one is out on DVD, or sit as far back as you possibly can in the theatre.

Note to directors: Using shaky cam throughout an entire feature length film doesn't make your film look gritty and documentary like. It makes you look like an amateur.

Input Devices

Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus 153

Parz writes "In June, Nintendo will be releasing a peripheral called MotionPlus. This small device attaches to the bottom of the Wii-mote and acts as a more sophisticated motion-sensor to the controller as it currently stands. Its goal is to bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations that they bring to life on-screen. Gameplayer got some hands-on time with the device, and they are extremely impressed." The MotionPlus will only affect new games; Nintendo has said they have no plans to add support for older titles. Virtua Tennis 2009 will be the first game to support it, and Eurogamer has a look at the game both with and without the MotionPlus.

Comment 3rd Option (Score 2, Informative) 31

I think there is a third option that you should consider. Use a co-lo facility. Instead of trying to build your own data center (which is outrageously expensive,) or have someone else manage everything (which is unreliable,) put the servers in an existing data center and manage them in house. I am part of a hosting initiative at my company (we host environments for some of our customers,) and we've either priced out or tried the first two options. We are in the process of spending millions to move from a managed hosting center to a co-lo facility. We have found a 3rd party organization that can handle the hardware portion (if a drive fails they change it out at the data center, they change tapes out during backups etc.) We decided how much of the system they manage, and we take care of the rest. That way I don't spend my time dealing with updating windows and creating users. I spend it managing the databases and applications which I specialize in.

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