I used to have all three sources in the top15 and then some non-programmers said I should remove it...it would be trivial to add that back in. It's really about who I am trying to reach. Ideally I would have different types/sections for mainstream (reddit.com front page, digg.com,etc) and then computer people (proggit, HN, etc). I just wasn't sure which direction to take it. Thanks for your feedback.
I'll make a dump of the data...what format do you think would be best?
The WIFI is on-board. Ethernet,usb,etc are supposed to be provided through a docking station (which I haven't seen anywhere). If you view the video included in the article, they mention this as well as point out the WIFI led on the device.
>It's a huge win for the site, which suffered a major setback in the case before a Düsseldorf court back in 2008.
A huge win for Rapidshare, a loss for website owners, since this implies that the responsibility lies on those who host or publish links to Rapidshare.
I'm not so sure here, if hosting is legal then it seriously undermines the 'linking' theory, after all hosting used to 'trump' linking in the past in terms of 'how bad' it was according to a variety of court decisions.
The whole reason the linking was made illegal in the first place was because the 'hosts' were usually in places where prosecution was tough, rapidshare is a 'sitting duck' and they've just won this case.
edit: it might even be that this makes music lockers in Germany legal!
I think Rapidshare not being responsible for infringement must be contingent on what Rapidshare does to fight it.
Well they have damn good lawyers, since now they don't have to check filenames, check checksums, IP addresses, manually check lists of links (according to your post below) and whatever else.
So what does that leave Rapidshare with? Do they just have to manually check files when a copyright owner submits a complaint with a list of links?
(On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners)
> On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners
Anybody here probably could, and I'm sure the plaintiffs are aware of that possibility.
Already DMCA takedown requests are generated in an automatic way, but that doesn't change much because another upload is minutes away.
It's a real problem for the copyright fat cats, which is why I don't doubt they'll appeal this to the German national high court.
If they call it quits now I predict a serious increase in German hosting capacity in the near future.
What is so wrong about body odour? I'm sure there must have been a time, not too long ago, when people smelled like people.
Sometimes, I don't shower for 3-4 days. You don't sweat that much if you are hacking away at a keyboard for 12 hours a day.
I don't see how showering ever day is hygienic. You are stripping your skin and hair of natural oils,bacteria and whatnot. Then you have to use more substances to fight the negative effects of the above. On top of that, you spray yourself with long-lasting synthetic smells or things that stop your armpits from sweating.
I shower every other day, more or less. I don't use deodorants. I don't use colognes, except on rare occasions. Haven't had any complaints from other people.
I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get some new fans and customers.
As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.
I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.
...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay.
The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.
This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model. It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with the cash to skimp.
> ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway.
Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.
In general, you will find that a very small fraction of your user base constitutes a huge portion of support requests. A fraction of this fraction has entitlement issues and simultaneously believes you are trying to cheat them (dimestore psychology: because they know they'd cheat you if they could get away with it). Those are pathological users.
I have repeatedly found personally, and talked to other software developers, that increasing your price drives pathological users away and decreasing your price (particularly dramatically decreasing your price) draws them in like flies.
I do not think it is obviously true that selling 8 games for, e.g., $1 is better than not having that sale. If folks offered me the option of participating in a similar deal, I would decline. In addition to customers paying essentially nothing but requiring disproportionate support, I would be worried about auto-commoditizing my software offering. Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?
On a related topic: dangrover's comments about participating in Macheist are a great read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
Can you explain to me how the developers of World of Goo, who field the support requests for WoG, are going to refund the bundle price despite a) having not actually received the bundle price and b) having no direct commercial relationship with the customer which would let them click the Refund button in Paypal?
You have a point regarding pathological users, but this promotion also draws in people who might have already played or heard of one or two of these games, and are willing to drop $30 or $40 to check out the remaining ones.
Also, even a cost of $1 incurs the friction of the transaction. That ought to turn away a significant percentage of the freeloaders, who probably paid 0 on pirate bay a long time ago anyway.
They're making less per game than they would charging a lousy buck on the appstore. Given all the ways they can make whole dollars, as in plural, per purchase I'd say it's not better than 0% at all.
This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money.
It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.
It seems like pretty expensive advertising actually - a normal sale makes them $x minus the ad or whatever that brought them the customer. Now $x is somewhere between $0 and $1.58 where it used to be up to $20 minus whatever advertising.
They're not making more they're just selling more.
World of Goo did the same thing a while back. They made an incredible amount of money and reached a large amount of people. Yes, many people paid 1 cent, but they still made more than they would have otherwise.
Not disputing they're going to make a lot of money from this, obviously when they wake up tomorrow morning they're each going to have tens of thousands more than they had when they woke up this morning. In that sense it "works".
But relative to other models the "pay what you want" is a terrible failure - any of those games could have singlehandedly grossed $30,000 to $60,000 from the number of sales they've had today, and that's going to lose a big chunk to advertising but still make them a lot more than $1.66 a sale.
It comes with Android 1.6 but there's a comment on the above website saying it can be upgraded. You can also find it for less than $100 on sites like alibaba.com and dhgate.com but you will have to buy more than one unit.
At my current location in Europe, low cost items usually pass through customs without a lot of extra tax, although sometimes it comes down to luck. Should be 20%-25% total if they decide to tax it.
On a sidenote, the seller I linked to is flexible about what price they stick on your package. You don't want to overdo it though, otherwise you might end up paying even more tax than normal.
I don't know about Netherlands, but in Spain you can contest any customs tax. They send you a printed form to fill if you want to contest it in the same envelope where they send you the invoice for the tax. Things can't be very different there.
Anyway, since you have a database of submissions to HN, Reddit and Digg, there's alot of interesting things to do.
Off the top of my head, how about a side-by-side view of parallel discussions?
EDIT, some more suggestions:
Make a downloadable dump of your data at the end of each day. Would be useful for all the people scraping HN for their own purposes/websites.
Twitter would be more useful than Digg, although all the short-urls do pose a problem.
Your top15 page (http://dexjra.com/row_view) is strange. Why isn't HN there except the "First at Hacker News view" part?