THESuperShawn - Slashdot User

Comment Re:He'll have to learn the hard way... (Score 1) 403

by THESuperShawn on Tuesday October 19, 2010 @12:31PM (#33948134) Attached to: Gene Simmons Threatens Anonymous Again and Gets DDoS'd

You simply don't win an argument with a group of trolls by feeding them.

But, in all who fairness, which side is 'not' a troll in this story??? There is no way Gene is not milking this for all the publicity he can get. The guy licenses KISS coffee houses and coffins for crying out loud!!

After all, what is his loss? Would his website really have generated more revenue during the DDoS'ing than what this much publicity would have cost?

I'm just waiting for him to post a Google image-searched picture of a bloodied kid with a caption saying "We got one" like that white supremacist web radio host did a few years back.

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 06, 2010 @05:52AM from the arrrrbitrary-numbers dept.

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

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