Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Charts and graphs time!

- A chart, with accurate scaling, of the Mariana sea trench.  Make sure you click on the chart to zoom-in:
http://i.imgur.com/m3ZxZ.jpg




- Another big chart showing the demographics of World of Warcraft:
http://www.pixlmonster.com/gaga/wow/




- Microsoft takes off the gloves against Google.  Apple did the same thing (in an indirect way) just today:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10460829-265.html#




- A list of 100 very successful people who never earned a college degree.  It's not a truly homogeneous list:
http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/100-top-entrepreneurs-who-succeeded-without-a-college-degree/

6 comments:

Randal said...

Hey, apropos of nothing, I have decided after years of meticulous research that John Cazale was, and is, the greatest American actor.

Greymarch said...

Cazale died too young, but damn he did get into some good movies before he passed away.

Randal said...

Ooh ooh ooh! You must watch TCM tonight - they have Airplane followed by Zero Hour. I DEFY you to watch Zero Hour and not constantly finishing or transposing the dialogue.

Randal said...

OK, took a look at the Warcraft stuff there. The mind boggles. The upkeep costs (on the computer end), seems to be about 50 million a year...I wonder what the human resource costs, capital costs, supply and distribution costs are, but I can't imagine that's more than 300 million a year (especially if they're only working with 150 programmers). But they're pulling 800 million a year from less than 50% of their user base, so I can't even comprehend what they're making in Asia or off ancilliaries like merchandising and software sales.

Good thing Obama doesn't know about this, or he'd start trying to figure out who to tax the in-game economy.

Oh wait, I bet he's already trying to figure that out.

Won't ever play WoW, but bravo Blizzard. Bravo.

Greymarch said...

I dont think you will ever see the government tax players in WoW, unless Blizzard starts selling gold for real cash, then I could see the government getting involved.

On a slightly related note, Conan O'brien started a twitter account. He immediately got over 700k followers. For his second tweet, he picked at random a person from twitter and linked to their twitter account. He picked a woman who hardly ever uses twitter. Naturally, she immediately got thousands of followers, something that other people have spent months, even years trying to accomplish. I guarantee some people have offered this woman cash for her twitter account. I also suspect people have offered her cash simply for mentioning their twitter accounts on her account. All of this due to Conan Obrien's celebrity.

There are some really funky ways to make money on the net.

Randal said...

Let the record show, I'm NOT with Coco.