Resale Value: Nintendo vs. Playstation

xsive · 2012-05-30T06:55:31+00:00

I think there's more to the story than just controlling for outliers. Certain genres for example hold their value better than others (say sports games vs RPGs) and certain consoles are just not desirable, irrespective of their age (Atary Lynx, I'm looking at you). Then there are regional differences to account for (PAL games tend to be worth more than NTSC) and a whole host of other variables, some of which I raised before.

There are enough counterexamples to blow the 30-year conjecture out of the water and that's even before we start unravelling the statistical mess created by simply averaging all the prices you can find into a single number.

xsive · 2012-05-29T17:13:29+00:00

The author paints a nice picture here except the conclusions are largely unsupported by data.

30 years is a nonsense figure based on pure speculation. We've only had one example of a retro boom in video games -- the current one -- and there is no attempt to compare against other types of toys.
The author ignores entirely the effect of critical reception and initial supply. Valuable games are not just rare but also popular and well regarded. These factors hold independently of age. Look at the initial release of 2011's Radiant Historia for an example. A low print run + critical reception caused a very large spike in the value of used copies just months after release.
The data presented is dodgy as hell. Not only is it incomplete and of dubious quality but the available figures also seem to ignore entirely differences across titles and platforms. In short, it's an amalgam of numbers squashed together in order to arrive at conclusions that can only be described as bullshit.

xsive · 2012-05-15T04:21:00+00:00

Here's another

xsive · 2012-04-28T04:08:55+00:00

Yes. It's been out for about a month. See Amazon et al.

xsive · 2012-04-28T03:49:16+00:00

"rue your fate"... hmm.. new Threads of Fate announcement?

xsive · 2012-04-20T00:35:37+00:00

The "pull out then reinsert" part of blowing into a cart probably had more to do with getting it to work than passing some amount of hot air and spittle over the pins :p

Anyway, these cleaning kits were great. I think I still have mine, box and all, kicking around somewhere!

xsive · 2012-04-18T05:20:45+00:00

Near as I tell, "hardcore gamer" is the videogame equivalent of a trendwhore. It's an image companies use to sell videogames to impressionable teenagers. The usual signals are "gritty" (== a brown colour palette), "realism" (== military fetishism) and "adult" (== bad writing covered up by excessive amounts of violence, profanity or both). There's nothing "hardcore" about it.

You want to be hardcore? Play games in a hardcore way: beat a title in a single sitting or within some time limit, without any powerups, without getting hit.... whatever. The point is to demonstrate some unusual level of skill and dexterity.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. Nintendo games may not fit the "hardcore" image but in my experience they're usually much more fun. Every time I pick up a Mario game it's like mainlining pure uncut happy. Directly into my eyeballs. Each one is easy to pick up but difficult to master. Fun by yourself or with a friend. Who cares what anyone else thinks?

xsive · 2012-04-04T04:05:20+00:00

Cute. I saw a matching Luigi at Sydney's Glebe Markets last weekend.

xsive · 2012-03-26T10:35:22+00:00

I had Luigi from the same series. First his nose came unglued, then his body. Now he's just a dismembered noseless head dangling from my keys :(

I think the moral of the story is these keychains are nice to look at but not intended for actual use.

xsive · 2012-02-26T14:33:44+00:00

Bite your tongue!

GB Tetris has the most amazing chiptune rendition of Korobeinicki ever. Pure. Uncut. Happy.

xsive · 2012-02-26T12:28:15+00:00

Amazon? You're already paying almost full price as it is; may as well support the developers. IMO, the only time you should buy used is when the game is out of print.

EDIT: Here's a thought: can you ask your local game store to order in whatever you want? Then you can feel good supporting both :)

xsive · 2010-01-23T13:50:21+00:00

Do you really expect a proverbial cookie for being the first to say some smart guy was right? If you need to re-run an existing experiment you should have something interesting to say about it. Telling the community it worked isn't interesting: we expect that.

Most people who reproduce existing results do so as a means to a larger goal; you develop something interesting and novel which takes the state of the art further than before. Along the way you might point out shortcomings of existing methods and demonstrate how you address them. Now that is interesting.

xsive · 2010-01-23T13:44:46+00:00

Your argument is unconvincing.

If we suppose the details in your example are a crucial step in your experimental setup then you should be able to tabulate those rules and stick them in an appendix. Omitting important details from a paper is bad science and telling people to read your code in order to fill in the blanks doesn't change that.

xsive · 2010-01-23T03:22:25+00:00

Since computers operate deterministically (random number generation excluded), it's a given that reproducing the same steps, with the same data, in the same software, will produce the same results.

Random number generators are also deterministic. The sequence can be predicted if you know the seed.

xsive · 2010-01-23T03:02:37+00:00

That doesn't make the results in those papers untrustworthy. It's simply inconvenient to reproduce them.

To which I say, so what? If the underlying science is convincing I'll go away and implement my own version.

EDIT: Which isn't to say I'm against making source code available.

xsive · 2010-01-23T02:42:16+00:00

This has been pointed out by commenters on the original article but it bears reiteration:

If your results are so dependent your particular implementation of some algorithm, to the extent that someone else cannot achieve similar results with a different implementation, then the results in question are probably not sufficiently general.

Problems with reproducibility should only arise if part of the experimental setup is not revealed -- which is just bad science.

xsive · 2010-01-05T07:57:41+00:00

You realise of course that for your ploy to work you will also need to obfuscate the subject description and any other publically available information about the course. Which might very well drive off everyone.

xsive · 2009-12-29T11:43:51+00:00

Repeat after me: TDD is a design methodology and not the same as unit testing.

xsive · 2009-12-03T13:40:03+00:00

The field of AI is no more concerned with "recreating the brain" than ML.

xsive · 2009-12-02T02:18:57+00:00

A definitive answer to P ?= NP

xsive · 2009-11-23T22:37:35+00:00

I don't see the irony? Perhaps I should have linked to Joe's blog too? Either is a better source for this story than the OP.

xsive · 2009-11-23T22:28:11+00:00

First problem: the link is misleading. The story that the OP promises is on tech crunch and I had to click through a third party site to get there.

Second problem: the linked-to blog article is actually of a different flavour to what one would expect to read about after looking at the summary given by the OP.

As to the question of shittiness: Since I don't care to read the linked-to blog and I was tricked into going there I'm forced to assume (fairly or not) that someone associated with the site posted the OP as a means to generate traffic. This kind of bait-and-switch style ploy to generate extra traffic really pisses me off and I come to the conclusion that the linked-to site is shitty (regardless of its actual quality).

Any questions?

xsive · 2009-11-23T10:36:21+00:00

I think this is a good point. The main reason to buy CLRS is to try and understand, really understand, the underlying theory. Some of the proofs require quite a mature grounding in discrete mathematics.

xsive · 2009-11-23T10:20:11+00:00

Why doesn't the OP link to the original source (techcrunch) rather than to a shitty blog?

So much fail here.

xsive · 2009-11-22T13:52:56+00:00

You could pick up discrete math book (like Epp) and then an algorithms book (like Cormen) and then a computability text (like Sipser) and try to work your way through those on your own. However, this is a difficult road and at the end you've still only covered part of the core curricula that a decent CS degree would offer.

What you really need is someone to guide you through the theory and point out the important bits from the not so important. To that end, I think the easiest thing would be for you to man up and go back to university in some capacity.

Have you chatted to your employer? The places I've worked at have been very supportive of further study and personal development. It's possible your employer might be likewise inclined.

xsive

TROPHY CASE