To put it yet another way, why buy "new" games? Especially console games.

Brand new games cost roughly $60 here in the US. If you are looking to buy used, a store like GameStop will often re-sell a used copy for just under whatever the new price is, thus a customer can potentially save 5-10 dollars on the used version vs the new version. GameStop (last I checked) also has a decent return policy on their used games, it can be returned up to a week after purchase for a full refund.

First scenario, a friend of mine will simply buy the game used, play it, beat it, and if he really enjoys it he keeps it. If not, he returns it for a full refund. Awesome. I'm sure that loophole will be closed at some point, but whatever.

Second scenario, is that games always get cheaper over time. I rarely play console games, but a game came out last year I had my eye on. It wasn't a great game, and the reviews clearly pointed out that it wasn't worth the $60 price tag. I agreed, and waited the price down to $30, and I actually wanted to own the game (hence I didn't go with scenario one).

In other words, people are flocking to used games because the time/fun to money ratio just isn't working for most people. $60 per game gets expensive, especially with some of the games being of poor quality/time versus other options. I have no problem paying more for a truly in-depth game, but these days many games are "copy-paste" jobs that end up being sequels or knock-offs of other games trying to charge full price when it really isn't worth it. You would think by the third time a company is about to release, effectively, the same game for the third time they would figure that out.

If you re-read your post, you do not feel any cognitive dissonance at all here?

The police raided the owners of the wireless device. By your own analogous example, they would also raid you, using said video of your car as evidence that you committed hit and run (just as they would want to use IP addresses as stronger evidence than a license plate).

It is far more reasonable to interview or request access to the router/car (whichever example we are referring to here), but that is clearly not what is going on.

It is the ever so popular release train model. It sounds really good on paper, and management usually jumps on the bandwagon, however this type of release model is suited towards web deployments, NOT desktop applications. The scheduling looks very slick, doesn't it? It does until you realize you are just doing costly releases at regular intervals while the big ticket items usually end up getting delayed to future versions, and what you release is of low quality because everyone is in a hurry to "make the train" so they can jump to the next iteration. The pretty charts and graphs have schedules, but no features on them, and that's the issue. A release should be planned to deliver a set of features, not planned to release on day X regardless of what is in it (maybe nothing!).

For a web app, it works fairly well. For desktop software (which all browsers are), it is a bad idea.

Except bandwidth is not a resource. Water, electricity, and gasoline are examples of resources paid for by consumption, because once the resource is expended it is gone. Hence the reason why those are paid for by the amount used.

Bandwidth is similar to renting. You pay your rent whether you are there or not and this ensures that it is there when you want it. "Renting" does not use up the residence for the next guy who rents the place after you (under most circumstances). So, the parallels to other utilities are pointless comparisons. The comparison to current cable TV is valid, except your post ignores any "resource" argument, instead citing advertisers. There are many other valid comparisons as well, such as monthly subscriptions to newspapers, gaming services (MMOs, others), and entertainment such as NetFlix.

I do not think the idea of pay per MB/GB (or whatever) is a good idea in the slightest. The average technical savvy of an end user is simply not sufficient enough to handle it, and there were examples of this pay-per-usage already for mobile phones with data plans (some of the early iPhones always accessing the internet, racking up a bill in a month of 1000+ dollars unknown to the phone owner). I do not dispute that those who abuse bandwidth, (un)knowingly or not, should not be limited in some fashion, but monetarily is the wrong way to go here.

I attended a college where the most popular professor of CS there taught part time and ran his own software business on the side. Of course, it helped that he taught some of the advance courses and was able to cherry pick the better students for part time positions. As a result, his classes and teaching style was real world oriented in terms of producing quality code, but the soft skills of a) delving into an existing code base b) using a SCCS (source code control system) or c) bug tracking systems were completely lacking in all my time spent doing CS.

I ended up learning the topics in this article on the job, and various companies are going to approach these systems differently. How an organization deals with some of these issues can reveal what the mindset and culture are handled in a company. While I think the lessons here are valuable, as far as the "practical student" goes, the vast majority of assignments are one-time throw-away. So it is no surprise to me that while interesting, the skills learned may be quickly lost as the day to day college student doing CS work will write one program for one assignment before moving on to write another program for a completely different assignment.

What I am most curious about, and what I did not see covered in interviews (or maybe I missed it), is how difficult it was to get SC2 to be "done". From my perspective, SC2 is an SC1 remake, with the WC3/TFT engine + lots of extra customization via the map/unit editor. I even attended Blizzcon years ago when they were showing it off, and even then I looked at it and said "yeah, Starcraft on the Warcraft 3 RTS engine, ship it next year?" in 2007 IIRC. From what I understand the big hold up was the "new" battle.net system, and that ended up holding up the game longer than it may have otherwise.

A comment I read above regarding the UI, having played the various Blizzard RTS games, I was really thinking they would put in some kind of HUD overlay on the game so that the mini-map, which is SO important, would be more prominent than a little box in the corner of the screen. Blizzard usually has a theme of making a game more casual friendly, easier to pick up and see what is going on, but sticking with the SC1 interface a decade+ later seems like a failing to me.

Anyone else read the description and instantly remember that Calculus was invented by Newton/Leibniz around the same time? Replace "technology" with "math" or "any scientific discipline" and it pretty much can hold true in a fair handful of instances throughout history.

It is a serious question. Take a look at the things you buy. Why isn't that item "Made in America"? Can you find a class of goods that are primarily "Made in America" anymore? I would have a tough time doing so, "software" (if we could call it a good) would probably be one of our biggest "Made in America" products, but most of the items on my person or in my home will not be made in this country.

American businesses will just make their factories in other countries as long as it is vastly cheaper to do so. And since there are exceedingly few American manufacturers, even if you or I wanted to consider and give preference to American made items, we just simply don't have that option most of the time.

All things being equal, I can't really blame the guys who open up the factories in foreign countries for cheap labor. There's simply no downside. They can get away with paying their workers crap wages and dealing with fewer laws. What is the incentive for such people to open a plant/factory/shop here in the US instead of somewhere else? Is there any? How could we give them one?

I'm really asking out of ignorance. I do not know the answers to the above.

I'll briefly mention that I was gifted an iPod nano, but I was well aware of the clumsiness of iTunes and I have always avoided it like the plague after using it years ago. I found an open source python script which would allow me to just drag whatever mp3s on the device I wished and it randomized them for me. I would highly suggest it.

Anyway, about rewrites of software. They hardly ever happen and in the vast majority of cases they do not work out for the better. OS X was an exception, but lets face it, OS 9 was a piece of absolute crap compared to other modern day operating systems and Apple has an entire team devoted to their OS which was aware of this. They even saved themselves some work by using some OSS *nix code (the guts of OS X runs on a BSD variant and a Mach kernel, but my memory is fuzzy).

That brings me to my over-arching theme, such that, a rewrite of a "successful" application is a very difficult sell. OS 9 was not what anyone would call successful. iTunes could be described as successful given its usage. Sure, those of us here are going to scoff at it, I think we expect more, but until Apple sees some sort of sales hit or massive negative backlash about it, the management will likely stay the course.

This brings me to my next point, the rewrite of any application will likely have an equivalent and/or reduced feature set. In some cases that is good (for cleaner, crisper software), however if you take this proposal to non-tech-savvy management, they will interpret the request along the lines of: spend X man years, Y million dollars, and end up with the same product that only works slightly better. The obvious follow up question from management then comes in: "well, can we fix what we have for cheaper?" In doing the trade-off analysis, nearly any sane management will take the significantly reduced cost for a minor improvement in a trouble feature as opposed to a rewrite.

And to go to the car analogy, say you are management. Your car currently makes you a lot of money because people use it, but they complain about how old/clunky it is. To completely re-invigorate your car, the mechanic wants $25K to completely re-tune/paint/upholster/everything your vehicle. The end result will be basically the exact same car, just in mint condition. OR you think to yourself, you can do the bare minimum maintenance, and take that 25K and buy a new car, and have two cars that can make money. Even if your customers simply use the new car over the old one, at least now you can buy a different car from the old one and attract more customers! Management generally prefers the latter option here, while consumers might prefer the former. Then again, its management's money, hence the tough sell.

So the key here is, if you were someone who could talk to the Apple Management, how could you make a convincing enough case to do a rewrite of iTunes such that the ROI (return on investment) is worth it for management? A true answer to that takes more than just a /. post.

This is true. A friend of mine did cancel his cable TV and watches his television from his AppleTV, either buying individual episodes or entire seasons so he can watch what he likes.

What I am a little surprised about is the AppleTV move to no purchasing (only rentals). If true, that seems like a step backwards in how my friend is currently using his AppleTV. I would have to question why he would keep using the device if the service no longer offered individual episodes or seasons for purchase.