Is the game disc going away?

This has been a hot topic of debate for past year or two. Investors in Gamestop (GME)certainly think so and have been punishing the stock.

EA COO, John Schappert, thinks that discs would be around. This should be a good shot in the arm for Gamestop. To quote him(http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27322/DICE_2010_EAs_Schappert_on_Surviving_the_Next_Three_Years_in_the_Industry.php),

“Don’t abandon the consumer base, specifically the shiny discs,” he urges. “I think we often forget about how important the disc is, and we often underestimate the technical hurdles we have to go through to get rid of the disk. I don’t think in the near term, or the medium term, arguably the long term we’re going to be without the disk.”

In my personal opinion, the only threat to Gamestop's used game sales model is EA's $10 project (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/eas-project-ten-dollar-explained ). I think its a smart idea and would most likely make a dent in Gamestop's earnings. So Gamestop's used game sales may go down but may be they would be offset by the new motion controllers from Microsoft/Sony coming out to the market this year.

Another threat, OnLive Inc.(Cloud based Gaming), simply does not make sense to me.  It seems like it requires a speed of at least 1.5 Mbps for standard-def and 5 Mbps for high-def gaming(http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/021910-onlive-demoed-on-stage-.html). I don't think it's practical. I have not recently met any gamer who does not like gaming in high def. Going forward, would you like to see the standard def graphics or high def? And how many of you trust your internet connection to run at 5 Mbps consistently, say even for an hour? Heh, I don't think it can handle 1.5 Mbps for an hour either.

Talking about internet connection speed, does it seem likely that they would increase dramatically in future? One of my colleague mentioned a pretty good point. Majority of the ISP providers in USA also have their multimedia/cable business as well and they stand to incur a loss by increasing the connection speed. US currently ranks 28th in the world in terms of internet speed and the situation does not seem to improve much(http://www.physorg.com/news170447728.html) .    

And for any reason, even if you have an "ultra ninja internet connection", the lag is just going to be too annoying. Period.

OnLive (and their technology) would probably be absorbed by Google :). Good for them!

You may want to visit http://pistakulfi.blogspot.com/2010/02/gamestop-gme-is-here-to-stay.html for additional information.

cheers.

Online Tax Filing Software Comparison

Taxes. One of my favorite things to do :). I am one of those guys who would go and check as many online tax filing softwares every year as possible. This is to figure out which online tax filing software can get me most refund :). Hopefully, this would be a useful post.

Here is a review of online tax filing softwares that I have used/looked at in the past. In this review, as usual, I'll try to keep the noise to minimum and get to the point. One thing to note that the price comparison is for the federal tax filing only. Also, price quoted in the table below is for the version of the software that I am interested in and provide similar level of "functionality".

In summary,

Online Tax Filing Software Comparison

	Price	Interface	Additional Comment
H&R Block	$49.95	Slick	Will use this year, same refund as TaxAct
TaxAct	$19.95	Slick but not as good	Will pass this year, same refund as H&R
TurboTax	$74.95	Yikes!	Not recommended

If you  are interested in details, please read further.

H&R Block online tax preparation software -

This emerged as the winner in my case. I liked the interface overall. Questionnaire is pretty straight forward. The only issue I have is that the refund/due amount(calculated at each step) in the top right corner of the screen is shown in yellowish rather than more natural green or red. It handled reporting of 1099-Misc self-employment income for contractor job much better compared to TaxAct(which was very confusing and I did not get it). This is the sole reason of my preference of H&R Block over TaxAct even though it is slightly expensive.

One variation of the online tax filing software, "H&R Block Best of Both", is a nice to have for people who would want a human tax consultant to review their tax forms before filing and go over any questions for $99.95(including $49.95 quoted above so $50 extra). I think pretty useful for some but I don't need it.

I have filed my 2006 and 2007 returns using H&R Block.

TaxAct -

TaxAct's interface is convenient in general. H&R Block is slightly better in parts though. One nice touch is the use of green/red color for the refund/due amount calculated at each step. However, it was really very confusing to report 1099-MISC income using TaxAct. For some unknown reason, it presents the questions to me as if I owned the business. Note that you can get the 1099-Misc for the contract work and that is classified as self-employment.

Another really confusing aspect of TaxAct is how it presents the state tax refund/due amount to the user if you have lived in more than 1 states in a given tax year. Let's say you stayed in two states. As soon as you enter your first W-2, it calculates your state tax due in both the states as if you have lived in both the states for "entire" year resulting in a sudden increase in your state tax dues. After all, you were paying taxes in only 1 state through payroll deductions. I don't recall where but ultimately you can fix this issue in the flow(I think state filing) somewhere. But, pretty inconvenient.

However, at $19.95, TaxAct is the cheapest online tax filing software. So if you don't have 1099-Misc to report, you may want to go with TaxAct. I have filed my 2008 return using TaxAct.

TurboTax -

Personally, I have never filed taxes using TurboTax. I have registered and played around though. The version I am interested in would cost me $74.95. The same functionality in H&R Block and TaxAct is available for $49.95 and $19.95 respectively. And damn, it does not support my favorite browser, Google Chrome. Probably not big deal for most but I consider it lame!

It does not have as nice interface as H&R Block and TaxAct. You have to continuously use the browser scroll bar to move up and down. Yikes! I did not go beyond that.

cheers.

OnLive - An epic fail!

So this company OnLive plans to come up with cloud computing model for games. Last year, it was seen as a big threat to Gamestop(and other video game retailers). Gamestop stock did tank on the news.

In my personal opinion, OnLive is going to be an epic fail. Just look at the comments of all the "gamers" at the end of the article - http://www.gamespot.com/news/6251495.html. I agree with most of the comments.

For more details on analysis of Gamestop (GME), please see the post http://pistakulfi.blogspot.com/2010/02/gamestop-gme-is-here-to-stay.html

cheers.

First Indian to celebrate Valentine's day

Teacher : Do you know who was the first Indian to celebrate Valentine's day?

Little Johnny: Yes. Mr. Motilal Nehru.

Teacher: Really? How?

Little Johnny: Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru's b'day is 14th Nov.

Gamestop (GME) is here to stay

I'll keep this post as short as possible and cut on the noise. As a disclaimer, Gamestop is the worst performing stock in my portfolio so far and this is not an effort to pump it up :). It's just an "let it out" effort.

Investors have been punishing GameStop for two main reasons for more than an year now.

1. Digital distribution of the games.
2. Threat to used games business due to new competitors in the market.

Here is my analysis for both of them.

1. This is interesting. I'd rather not forecast the time frame for the games to go digital. I'll just put some thoughts for you to ponder over. Couple of days ago, I looked at the download size of the GTA:Chinatown Wars for iPhone. It is 188 MB! Mass Effect 2 just launched for PC and Xbox 360. It spans over 2 discs on both the platforms! So like 12 GB. If games go digital only, it would suck to download 12 GB. With major publishers now trying to have "bigger, better and fewer" releases, this size is only going to increase. Imagine the plight of your ISP(and the steps they would take - charging based on the internet usage, for example).
   
   Another reason for the physical distribution of the game is that shiny disk itself. The video games are a different form of entertainment than music/movies. Unless the game publishers pass the savings from the digital distribution back to the consumer, they would always prefer to have a disc that they can sell back. Unlike music/movies where the consumer may have little interest in selling it back, gamers frequently like to resale their games.
2. Gamestop has the edge because it's a recognized brand in the market. Since they are the specialty retailer, they can afford to devote proper resources to it. Few months ago, Wal-Mart and BestBuy had announced the plan to sell used games using a self-service kiosk trough e-Play. However, they recently has shelved the service. So while Gamestop continues to mint money via used games, some of the very well known competitors could not.

So with a strong balance sheet, low P/E, stock buyback and favorable comparison to 2009, I hope GME only goes up from here in 2010.

cheers.

FPU Precision, DirectX, _controlfp_s

So debugging a mysterious issue today, I found that DirectX would unilaterally lower the FPU precision of the calling thread to single precision(in order to boost the application performance). So Microsoft has decided that none of the DirectX application should rely on double precision! There is a D3DCREATE_FPU_PRESERVE flag to avoid this but it is the poor programmer's responsibility to know that. The problem I have with such an assumption is that this behavior may break code(as in my case) in some totally unrelated module without any obvious clue.

Here is something funnier. Now, that I knew why my code did not behave correctly(needed higher FPU precision), the next thing was to enable higher precision for the code that needed it. So nice of Microsoft to provide _controlfp_s to do this. But seriously, who has the time to read through the entire documentation at work? After all, I did not need to deal with this at the first place. Anyways, here is the function signature.

errno_t _controlfp_s(
unsigned int *currentControl,
unsigned int newControl,
unsigned int mask
);

So I expected to call the function with desired FPU precision(newControl) and it would return the current FPU precision(currentControl) that I can save in order to restore it after the calculation. So something like following.

unsigned int savedPrecision;
_controlfp_s(&savedPrecision, _PC_64, MCW_PC);//_PC_64 for extended precision
//Do calculation
_controlfp_s(NULL, savedPrecision, MCW_PC);

But that does not work correctly!! Saved precision is never restored, it remains higher precision(_PC_64). Stumped!!

Read the documentation again and you would find that if you want to "actually get the current control word", you have to pass in 0 for the mask. Otherwise, the "currentControl" is the value of the control word "after" setting the desired precision. A little weird to me. So instead of two steps, it is 3 step process.
unsigned int savedPrecision;
_controlfp_s(&savedPrecision, 0, 0);
_controlfp_s(NULL, _PC_64, MCW_PC);
//Do calculation
_controlfp_s(NULL, savedPrecision, MCW_PC);