I skimmed through the article to find the numbers and this is what I got:
Of the four million people we have on Xbox Live, in one year they've unlocked over 200 million achievements; that's 50 per person.
Now, when you consider that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat has 46 achievements, Dead or Alive 4 has 45 achievements, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has 50 achievements, Gears of War has 49 achievements, Ghost Recon has 43 achievements, Kameo: Elements of power has 50 achievements, and Perfect Dark: Zero has 50 achievements it demonstrates that "50 achievements per person" is really not that impressive; a person could probably get that many achievements by casually playing a couple of the most popular games on the XBox 360.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that there is a dedicated group (probably 200,000 or so) of hard-core gamers who will do nearly anything to boost their gamer score but the numbers Microsoft is avertizing do not imply that Achievements are all that popular.
Actually, it is just a bad habit I have of capatalizing nouns when they represent companies, people or products. I picked up this habit several years ago when I was working for a company and was writing requirements documents and it was the company's policy that 'Client', 'Company', 'User', 'System' (including portions of the system like 'Database') and 'Deliverable' (along with several other terms, typically any noun that acts as an entity/actor within the system we were going to deliver) were supposed to be capatalized and bolded.
Much like colloquialisms, it is very difficult to stop using writing habits that you have developed over years.
The basic structure of the modern music industry was that Music Labels would promote and distribute and Artist's work in exchange for the lion's share of the physical Album's revinue while the artist would still collect the revinue from merchandise, touring and radio play; this (at the time) was a remarkably fair dead because it was expensive to promote and distribute an Artist's work in the pre-internet era.
The internet has changed everything...
The cost to distribute music is no longer significant and a (hard-working) individual can promote themself to a reasonably successful level with very little work; you probably won't sell out stadiums, but you can make a decent living for the rest of your life as an Artist which (from all the Artists I have met) is the dream. Now, Labels exploit artists they do not help them.
The "Cost" of an Artist's work is a lifetime of developing a skillset that very few people have; it is priceless. The price of an Artist's work per song with how little it costs to distribute the song should be (roughly) the ammount of money the artist is getting.
If they calculated the damages at $0.70 per download AllOfMP3.com would (likely) be facing damages of $100,000,000 or more which would probably put the company out of buisness. A smart (and well connected) company might consider buying the bankrupt company and attempt to get the legal right to sell the music; a valid argument to make to the RIAA is in places like Russia and China no one is willing to spend more than AllOfMP3.com was already charging for music and AllOfMP3.com would attempt to prevent Americans from buying music from them.
Another thing to consider is how much could the RIAA claim as damages from individuals who were downloading music? Would people just download music under the assumption that it would kill the RIAA to try to sue them for damages? (The ammount of work $7,000 buys you from lawyers would easily be surpassed in any of these lawsuits unless the RIAA decided to start collecting Mexican-Educated Lawyers.
If they only make $0.70 wouldn't that imply that for the damages of 1.5 trillion from AllOfMP3.com would only be justified if AllOfMP3.com had uploaded over 2 trillion copies of songs to their users?
Personally, I suspect that is the reason they wouldn't want their prices known; it destroys the RIAA's ability to sue for massive damages.
I think the point was that you can legally/ethically purchase games for the Wii as compared to the illegal/unethical methods of stealing games for the PS3...
If homebrew and emulation is your thing though, you can run homebrew applications on the Wii using the SD card exploit that worked on the Gamecube; I could be wrong, but I believe that all gamecube homebrew works on the Wii meaning that you have access to all of the emulators that would work on the PS3. What this means is that you can spend $500/$600 to do the same thing you can do with a $250 Wii...
Note: From my understanding all of the current Wii exploits only give access to the Wii in Gamecube mode, the extra processing power the Wii has is unavailabe and the hackers are looking for new exploits.
I agree with you and have seen this type of behavior myself (people with no interest in games wanting a Wii) but I think this is the reason why I find it so difficult to predict when the Wii will become available.
With the PS2, PS3 and XBox 360 I have a pretty well established understanding on how the people who are buying these systems will react to certain events; surrounding the release of big games the sales will spike, as the price drops the spikes will become larger and the "average" number of systems sold will increase, at "Christmas" nearly 50% of hardware sales will occur within a 6 week period and will crash (to the yearly low point) for 6 to 8 weeks following. "New" gamers will likely react quite differently than "Traditional" gamers and will likely have their own set of "big games" which does not match a "Traditional" gamers "big games" (say Wario Ware: Smooth Moves or Wii Play may be huge for the non-gamer crowd). Even how non-gamers buy games does not match how traditional gamers buy games because game sales are not front loaded.
I would like to point out that Nintendo had advantages in the N64/Gamecube days that neither Sony or Microsoft have. Nintendo has always had the most popular handheld gaming platform in the world, and Nintendo has (always?) been the largest game publisher in the world, so the "Nintendo" brand was always positively seen by gamers even though the N64 and Gamecube struggled. Sony will likely be given the opportunity to release a PSP-2 or PS4 if (big if) these platforms continue to perform poorly but (depending on how poorly they perform) the "Playstation" brand will have a deeper taint than the "Nintendo" brand ever did.
I'm rooting for the 360 because I'm sick of anime and senseless/cutesy Japanese story lines. Come on, hasn't this Japanese fad in the West lasted long enough?
The NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation, and PS2 all had a lot of western developed games (and Japaneese games) which didn't have senseless/cutesy story lines.
Before the Xbox, where could us Western console gamers go for realistic eyes and hair? Where could we go for a game originally written in English (without some strange translation)? Where could we go for an RPG that wasn't on rails? Where could we go for a game whose main character was a clear heterosexual?
For realistic hair and eyes, I'll tell you when we actually get them; considering realistic Skin, Hair and Eyes are still difficult on pre-rendered movies (because humans are very good at telling the difference between computer generated and real people) I expect that it will be a couple of generations. If you're talking about where you could get them from an Artistic perspective I think you should look into a couple of games Link, and Link,Link. Many Japaneese companies have been on the forefront of 'realistic' graphics.
RPGs that "aren't on rails" are mostly an American (typically PC) genre and have never been (particularly) popular...
I, for one, am glad that an American company is finally back in the game.
There is nothing wrong with an American (or Japaneese) company being very successful in the industry... Blindly following that company simply because they are American (or Japaneese) is foolish because they will (likely) take your support for granted and you will (probably) become angry with the company.
Anybody know when the Wii becomes truly "generally available"?
I think the only answer anyone can give you is "sometime in 2007" because no one really knows...
In the small circle of people I know I'm the only person who actually owns a Wii and I know several people who are actively searching for one. When Nintendo ships another 500,000 to 1,000,000 units I would expect that most people who were looking for a Wii to own one but I'm not postivie about that; with (essentially) 2 Million systems sold in 6 weeks, and there still being a pretty massive shortage I think it is selling at a rate that no one expected. Traditionally, January and February are very slow months for game system sales (with around 1 Million sales of all hardware combined per month) so I would anticipate that within the next 6 to 8 weeks the Wii should be seen on store shelves... that is assuming it is not going to break all kinds of sales records...
NPD only tracks North America... Japan is tracked by several companies and the most popular chart is released in Famitsu (which will release the numbers for December 25th to December 31st sometime today or tomorow)... Europe doesn't really have any (well known) sales tracking companies...
As of December 24th Nintendo has sold 859,000 Wii units in Japan, NPD claims 1.8 Million in North America and it was (earlier) confirmed that there were 375,000 Wii units sold in Europe on launch. So far we know that Nintendo has sold more than 3 Million units world wide...
vgcharts.org attempts to track sales in Japan, North America and Europe (and is probably the most accurate) but there aren't good numbers from Europe because of the difficulty in collecting data in dozens of countries.
As of December 24th Nintendo had sold 859,000 Wii in Japan, with 286,500 selling in the week of December 18th-December 24th so the total Japaneese sales numbers for December will be between 1,000,000-1,100,000 (as a guestimate; later today or tomorow we should have the sales for the week of December 25th to December 31st).
In North America NPD was reporting 1.8 Million units sold up until December 25th, with total December sales available on January 11th; as an estimate, 2 Million units seems reasonable if Nintendo shipped a reasonable number in the final week of December.
In Europe it was reported that Nintendo sold 375,000 in the launch week...
If Nintendo successfully sold 500,000-700,000 additional units in Europe since the launch of the system it is very likely that they would meet/surpass their 4 Million units sold in 2006 target. Whether they are successful or not, they will come far closer to their estimates than either Sony or Microsoft did.
rs. HDTV owners aren't buying the new formats because they don't want to pick the losing side. Why don't they want to pick the losing side? Because they don't want to buy a new player for the winning format years down the road. Mind you, in 2009 or 2010 HD players are going to be $199. So these people are holding off because they don't want to spend $199 in another year. And a new $1000 player is supposed to calm these fears
They are not worried about the hardware, they are worried that in 2 years they could have spent $5000 on content (early adopters are often collectors) in a format which they can no longer buy a player for.
Price should be a consideration in 'superior format' as well...
HD-DVD is currently much less expensive for consumers, and manufacturers of both discs and hardware. This may not be the case forever, but (hypothetically) if it is cheaper to produce 2 or 3 HD-DVD discs then to produce 1 Blu-Ray disc the storage capacity advantage is not really important.
Imagine someone who doesn't know too much about the technology who walks into best buy to buy a movie player. They can buy a HD-DVD player for $500, a Blu-Ray player for $1000 or a Dual-Format player for $1250; the Best-Buy salesman is trying to make more money so he starts talking about how neither format is ensured success so they should probably buy the dual format player. After looking at the move players they walk over to the movie section and see some titles in HD-DVD that are not available in Blu-Ray, some titles in Blu-Ray that aren't available in HD-DVD and there are less Total-HD titles than either of the other formats; on top of this the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD titles are $30 where the Total-HD titles are $35. After all of that they notice that Best Buy is having a sale on DVDs where 2 of their favourite movies are on the 2 for $15 rack and they have a working DVD player at home.
Every sale of a Total-HD disc or Dual-Format drive prevents the industry as a whole from choosing one format as their standard.
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems Microsoft faces is that web-page structure and syntax is not handled the same way a C++ program's structure and sytax are (as an example); you can make hundreds of syntax and structural mistakes in HTML, CSS and Javascript and IE will still attempt to display your page. I could be wrong, but I heard a couple of years ago that the majority of code in web browsers was not dealing with displaying correct HTML but was dealing with correcting mistakes to display a page. If IE could simply not display incorrect HTML and CSS the code base should be far smaller, which in turn should make it easier to maintain and probably more secure.
Compiling from source could have (potentially) have taken too long for most setups, but that doesn't mean that the general idea was impossible. If you started from an intermediate step in the compile process you could (hypothetically) greatly reduce the compile time, or (after 95 or so when CD players were available on most PCs) you could have included dozens of binaries for the most common setups and the source code in case someone wanted to run the program on hardware that wasn't currently supported.
I think you're a little delusional if you believe that...
I know of a few people who recently bought Macs because Apple switched to Intel based processors, and because Apple was smart enough to realize why most people were buying Windows PCs rather than Macs; people buy Windows based PCs because they believe that it would be expensive to replace their software library by switching operating systems (I say believe because 90% of software you own will likely be upgraded before you use it again, meaning you'd replace the software anyways). Being able to buy a Mac, run OSX, Windows, and Linux gives people the flexability they have never had before.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were right to a certain extent though. I expect that with IBM working on the Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 processors the resources that were devoted towards Apple were probably being reduced leaving Apple unhappy; IBM may have ignored complaints from Apple being that even the worst performing of the 'next generation' systems would likely sell more processors than Apple would have.
The reason "We" use x86 is because "we" use PCs, where x86 technology is dominant and obvious. However, "we" also use PDAs, cell phones, TiVos and even game console systems. As the functions of those devices melt into a new class of unified devices, other architectures will advance.
Honestly, I think it is much simpler than that...
The problem has very little to do with the processors that are used and is entirely related to the software that we run. Even in the 80s/90s it would have been completely possible for Microsoft to support a wide range of processors ( if their OS was designed correctly ) and produce OS related libraries which abstracted software development from needing to directly access the underlying hardware; on install, necessary files would be re-compiled and all over the shelf software could run on any architecture that Windows/dos supported. In general, the concept is combining standard C/C++ with libraries (like OpenGL) and recompiling to ensure that no one was tied to a particular hardware architecture.
Just think of how many different architectures Linux has been ported to, if DOS/Windows was built in a similar way you'd be able to choose between any architecture you wanted and still be able to run any program you wanted.
Given the bosses are just employees (duh, I hope), the rate of bad employees ought the be the same as the rate of bad bosses.
Well, if promotions were given simply by seniority this would be true. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that companies are likely to give promotions based on merit; it is largely dependant on what a company determines to be merit that is worth rewarding with a promotion.
Companies which reward high performance as a way of promoting people will (often) find that they're promoting sociopaths because they are better at gaining success at all costs. Companies which reward education (either level or institution) or seniority usually find that they're promoting a lot of people who are not capable of performing the job.
Personally, I believe if a company rewards people who have strong social skills, a decent moral backing, and adequate technical skills they're probably going to have the best chance at having good management.
There were also lots of people who bought PSPs as UMD players but that didn't really help that format.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the average number of HD-DVD movie sales per system sold (including the XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on) will likely be far greater than the average number of Blu-Ray movie sales per system sold. The reason for this is someone who buys a stand-alone player (or add-on) at these price is likely going to be a reasonably large movie fan as compared to someone who buys an videogame system with an integrated movie player.
There were a lot of studios that supported UMD but that didn't help the format.
Sony got a lot of studios to support Blu-Ray by promising that the PS3 would be released in Q2 of 2006, and they kept a lot of support after the delay by promising 2 Million PS3 systems sold at launch, with 2 Million additional PS3s sold by the end of 2006 and a total of 6 Million sold worldwide by March 2007; even with my earlier argument of a better ratio of movies sold per system, the PS3 would have ensured higher Blu-Ray movie sales. The fact is that Sony will not even come close to meeting these numbers, which will mean that more studios will look into supporting HD-DVD. Now, the PS3 could still recover over the second half of 2007 but ( being that most mainstream and gaming related news sites have proclaimed the PS3 a dud) I wouldn't bet on it.
From what I have found, the best bosses are usually those which act as advocates for the employees benieth them. This means that your boss will act in your best interests at all times; there are lots of benefits to the company from this in that Employees are usually happier, more productive, take less sick days and stay around longer. Someone who is deceptive is usually attempting to protect themselves and is typically not acting in the best interests of anyone else; whether they lie to others (taking credit for your work) or lie to you (about upcomming work) they are not looking out for you.
As an example of how a boss can act as an avocate for you, I have worked in a company where we ended up doing (paid) overtime through November and into mid December in order to complete a project on time. My boss at the time worked it out with HR for everyone to recieve extra vacation time in order for everyone to have the week off between Christmas and New Years; it was a small gesture, but the additional 2 (or 3, I can't remember) days off made everyone happier and more refreshed when we came back and most people felt far better towards the company for giving them the time off. I'm not positive, but I suspect the extra days off probably prevented sick days from being taken in January through March because most people didn't become over tired.
Linux's problem isn't that they lack developers nearly as much as all development for linux is by developers for developers which produces really awful user interfaces.
Linux has tons of powerful applications that do amazing things, but you have to read a manual of highly technical gibberish in order to use the most basic of features; when I'm using linux as a multimedia PC I don't want to have to press ctrl-p to play and shift-alt-r to record, I want something that is simple and straight forward to use. Windows dominates because it is simple and familiar.
I could be completely wrong, but I suspect that neither format will be adopted by the masses (at least for quite awhile) but HD-DVD has a much better chance than Blu-Ray.
Currently, both formats are way too expensive and offer too small of a benefit for most people to consider upgrading at the moment; the image difference between an upscaled DVD and a High-Definition source is far too small for most people (who are not accustomed to HD content because they have not been exposed to much atm) to notice, and neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray have stand alone players that are available in the sub $300 price range yet.
The advantage HD-DVD has is that it will probably hit the $300 price range sometime in 2007 whereas Blu-Ray will be in that price range in 2008; HD-DVD will probably hit $200 in 2008 wheras Blu-Ray will hit $200 in 2009. Now, there is no quality difference in the Sound produced by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and the storage capacity benefits of Blu-Ray can easily be matched (surpassed) by producing an extra disc (the last thing I heard was that it was cheaper to produce 2 HD-DVDs than it was to produce one Blu-Ray disc but I could be wrong) so most people are going to buy their HD player based on the price.
The PS3 will (likely) put a lot of Blu-Ray players into people's homes, but it is unlikely that they will lead to that many Blu-Ray (movie) disc sales in comparison to HD-DVD disc sales; someone who spends $500 on a movie player will probably buy far more movies than someone who spends $500 on a game system/movie player, and even the people who buy the $200 XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on will be more likely to buy HD-DVD movies than someone who bought a $500 PS3 because they went out of their way to get movie playback. If studios do not see a (major) benefit of supporting one format over the other they will (likely) release movies on both formats; this means that (with the exception of Sony Pictures) every movie that is produced for Blu-Ray will likely be produced for HD-DVD.
Just yesterday I spoke with someone from ILM, and they were saying how the film wasn't going to happen because Lucas kept rejecting scripts. Good to hear he found one he liked...
With how well the Star Wars prequels were written, maybe it would be better if he was forced to use a script that he didn't like. Honestly, there are several directors that I really wish would find another director (who would treat the material better) to handle sequels/prequels of movies that were made 10-20+ years ago.
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I skimmed through the article to find the numbers and this is what I got:
Of the four million people we have on Xbox Live, in one year they've unlocked over 200 million achievements; that's 50 per person.
Now, when you consider that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat has 46 achievements, Dead or Alive 4 has 45 achievements, Elder Scrolls: Oblivion has 50 achievements, Gears of War has 49 achievements, Ghost Recon has 43 achievements, Kameo: Elements of power has 50 achievements, and Perfect Dark: Zero has 50 achievements it demonstrates that "50 achievements per person" is really not that impressive; a person could probably get that many achievements by casually playing a couple of the most popular games on the XBox 360.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that there is a dedicated group (probably 200,000 or so) of hard-core gamers who will do nearly anything to boost their gamer score but the numbers Microsoft is avertizing do not imply that Achievements are all that popular.
Actually, it is just a bad habit I have of capatalizing nouns when they represent companies, people or products. I picked up this habit several years ago when I was working for a company and was writing requirements documents and it was the company's policy that 'Client', 'Company', 'User', 'System' (including portions of the system like 'Database') and 'Deliverable' (along with several other terms, typically any noun that acts as an entity/actor within the system we were going to deliver) were supposed to be capatalized and bolded.
Much like colloquialisms, it is very difficult to stop using writing habits that you have developed over years.
The basic structure of the modern music industry was that Music Labels would promote and distribute and Artist's work in exchange for the lion's share of the physical Album's revinue while the artist would still collect the revinue from merchandise, touring and radio play; this (at the time) was a remarkably fair dead because it was expensive to promote and distribute an Artist's work in the pre-internet era.
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The internet has changed everything
The cost to distribute music is no longer significant and a (hard-working) individual can promote themself to a reasonably successful level with very little work; you probably won't sell out stadiums, but you can make a decent living for the rest of your life as an Artist which (from all the Artists I have met) is the dream. Now, Labels exploit artists they do not help them.
The "Cost" of an Artist's work is a lifetime of developing a skillset that very few people have; it is priceless. The price of an Artist's work per song with how little it costs to distribute the song should be (roughly) the ammount of money the artist is getting.
No doubt ...
If they calculated the damages at $0.70 per download AllOfMP3.com would (likely) be facing damages of $100,000,000 or more which would probably put the company out of buisness. A smart (and well connected) company might consider buying the bankrupt company and attempt to get the legal right to sell the music; a valid argument to make to the RIAA is in places like Russia and China no one is willing to spend more than AllOfMP3.com was already charging for music and AllOfMP3.com would attempt to prevent Americans from buying music from them.
Another thing to consider is how much could the RIAA claim as damages from individuals who were downloading music? Would people just download music under the assumption that it would kill the RIAA to try to sue them for damages? (The ammount of work $7,000 buys you from lawyers would easily be surpassed in any of these lawsuits unless the RIAA decided to start collecting Mexican-Educated Lawyers.
If they only make $0.70 wouldn't that imply that for the damages of 1.5 trillion from AllOfMP3.com would only be justified if AllOfMP3.com had uploaded over 2 trillion copies of songs to their users?
Personally, I suspect that is the reason they wouldn't want their prices known; it destroys the RIAA's ability to sue for massive damages.
I think the point was that you can legally/ethically purchase games for the Wii as compared to the illegal/unethical methods of stealing games for the PS3 ...
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If homebrew and emulation is your thing though, you can run homebrew applications on the Wii using the SD card exploit that worked on the Gamecube; I could be wrong, but I believe that all gamecube homebrew works on the Wii meaning that you have access to all of the emulators that would work on the PS3. What this means is that you can spend $500/$600 to do the same thing you can do with a $250 Wii
Note: From my understanding all of the current Wii exploits only give access to the Wii in Gamecube mode, the extra processing power the Wii has is unavailabe and the hackers are looking for new exploits.
I agree with you and have seen this type of behavior myself (people with no interest in games wanting a Wii) but I think this is the reason why I find it so difficult to predict when the Wii will become available.
With the PS2, PS3 and XBox 360 I have a pretty well established understanding on how the people who are buying these systems will react to certain events; surrounding the release of big games the sales will spike, as the price drops the spikes will become larger and the "average" number of systems sold will increase, at "Christmas" nearly 50% of hardware sales will occur within a 6 week period and will crash (to the yearly low point) for 6 to 8 weeks following. "New" gamers will likely react quite differently than "Traditional" gamers and will likely have their own set of "big games" which does not match a "Traditional" gamers "big games" (say Wario Ware: Smooth Moves or Wii Play may be huge for the non-gamer crowd). Even how non-gamers buy games does not match how traditional gamers buy games because game sales are not front loaded.
I would like to point out that Nintendo had advantages in the N64/Gamecube days that neither Sony or Microsoft have. Nintendo has always had the most popular handheld gaming platform in the world, and Nintendo has (always?) been the largest game publisher in the world, so the "Nintendo" brand was always positively seen by gamers even though the N64 and Gamecube struggled. Sony will likely be given the opportunity to release a PSP-2 or PS4 if (big if) these platforms continue to perform poorly but (depending on how poorly they perform) the "Playstation" brand will have a deeper taint than the "Nintendo" brand ever did.
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I admit I could be wrong though
I'm rooting for the 360 because I'm sick of anime and senseless/cutesy Japanese story lines. Come on, hasn't this Japanese fad in the West lasted long enough?
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The NES, SNES, N64, Gamecube, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation, and PS2 all had a lot of western developed games (and Japaneese games) which didn't have senseless/cutesy story lines.
Before the Xbox, where could us Western console gamers go for realistic eyes and hair? Where could we go for a game originally written in English (without some strange translation)? Where could we go for an RPG that wasn't on rails? Where could we go for a game whose main character was a clear heterosexual?
For realistic hair and eyes, I'll tell you when we actually get them; considering realistic Skin, Hair and Eyes are still difficult on pre-rendered movies (because humans are very good at telling the difference between computer generated and real people) I expect that it will be a couple of generations. If you're talking about where you could get them from an Artistic perspective I think you should look into a couple of games Link, and Link,Link. Many Japaneese companies have been on the forefront of 'realistic' graphics.
RPGs that "aren't on rails" are mostly an American (typically PC) genre and have never been (particularly) popular
I, for one, am glad that an American company is finally back in the game.
There is nothing wrong with an American (or Japaneese) company being very successful in the industry
Blindly following that company simply because they are American (or Japaneese) is foolish because they will (likely) take your support for granted and you will (probably) become angry with the company.
Anybody know when the Wii becomes truly "generally available"?
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... that is assuming it is not going to break all kinds of sales records ...
I think the only answer anyone can give you is "sometime in 2007" because no one really knows
In the small circle of people I know I'm the only person who actually owns a Wii and I know several people who are actively searching for one. When Nintendo ships another 500,000 to 1,000,000 units I would expect that most people who were looking for a Wii to own one but I'm not postivie about that; with (essentially) 2 Million systems sold in 6 weeks, and there still being a pretty massive shortage I think it is selling at a rate that no one expected. Traditionally, January and February are very slow months for game system sales (with around 1 Million sales of all hardware combined per month) so I would anticipate that within the next 6 to 8 weeks the Wii should be seen on store shelves
NPD only tracks North America ... ... ...
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Japan is tracked by several companies and the most popular chart is released in Famitsu (which will release the numbers for December 25th to December 31st sometime today or tomorow)
Europe doesn't really have any (well known) sales tracking companies
As of December 24th Nintendo has sold 859,000 Wii units in Japan, NPD claims 1.8 Million in North America and it was (earlier) confirmed that there were 375,000 Wii units sold in Europe on launch. So far we know that Nintendo has sold more than 3 Million units world wide
vgcharts.org attempts to track sales in Japan, North America and Europe (and is probably the most accurate) but there aren't good numbers from Europe because of the difficulty in collecting data in dozens of countries.
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As of December 24th Nintendo had sold 859,000 Wii in Japan, with 286,500 selling in the week of December 18th-December 24th so the total Japaneese sales numbers for December will be between 1,000,000-1,100,000 (as a guestimate; later today or tomorow we should have the sales for the week of December 25th to December 31st).
In North America NPD was reporting 1.8 Million units sold up until December 25th, with total December sales available on January 11th; as an estimate, 2 Million units seems reasonable if Nintendo shipped a reasonable number in the final week of December.
In Europe it was reported that Nintendo sold 375,000 in the launch week
If Nintendo successfully sold 500,000-700,000 additional units in Europe since the launch of the system it is very likely that they would meet/surpass their 4 Million units sold in 2006 target. Whether they are successful or not, they will come far closer to their estimates than either Sony or Microsoft did.
rs. HDTV owners aren't buying the new formats because they don't want to pick the losing side. Why don't they want to pick the losing side? Because they don't want to buy a new player for the winning format years down the road. Mind you, in 2009 or 2010 HD players are going to be $199. So these people are holding off because they don't want to spend $199 in another year. And a new $1000 player is supposed to calm these fears
They are not worried about the hardware, they are worried that in 2 years they could have spent $5000 on content (early adopters are often collectors) in a format which they can no longer buy a player for.
Price should be a consideration in 'superior format' as well ...
HD-DVD is currently much less expensive for consumers, and manufacturers of both discs and hardware. This may not be the case forever, but (hypothetically) if it is cheaper to produce 2 or 3 HD-DVD discs then to produce 1 Blu-Ray disc the storage capacity advantage is not really important.
Or it could make things worse ...
Imagine someone who doesn't know too much about the technology who walks into best buy to buy a movie player. They can buy a HD-DVD player for $500, a Blu-Ray player for $1000 or a Dual-Format player for $1250; the Best-Buy salesman is trying to make more money so he starts talking about how neither format is ensured success so they should probably buy the dual format player. After looking at the move players they walk over to the movie section and see some titles in HD-DVD that are not available in Blu-Ray, some titles in Blu-Ray that aren't available in HD-DVD and there are less Total-HD titles than either of the other formats; on top of this the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD titles are $30 where the Total-HD titles are $35. After all of that they notice that Best Buy is having a sale on DVDs where 2 of their favourite movies are on the 2 for $15 rack and they have a working DVD player at home.
Every sale of a Total-HD disc or Dual-Format drive prevents the industry as a whole from choosing one format as their standard.
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems Microsoft faces is that web-page structure and syntax is not handled the same way a C++ program's structure and sytax are (as an example); you can make hundreds of syntax and structural mistakes in HTML, CSS and Javascript and IE will still attempt to display your page. I could be wrong, but I heard a couple of years ago that the majority of code in web browsers was not dealing with displaying correct HTML but was dealing with correcting mistakes to display a page. If IE could simply not display incorrect HTML and CSS the code base should be far smaller, which in turn should make it easier to maintain and probably more secure.
Well ...
Compiling from source could have (potentially) have taken too long for most setups, but that doesn't mean that the general idea was impossible. If you started from an intermediate step in the compile process you could (hypothetically) greatly reduce the compile time, or (after 95 or so when CD players were available on most PCs) you could have included dozens of binaries for the most common setups and the source code in case someone wanted to run the program on hardware that wasn't currently supported.
I think you're a little delusional if you believe that ...
I know of a few people who recently bought Macs because Apple switched to Intel based processors, and because Apple was smart enough to realize why most people were buying Windows PCs rather than Macs; people buy Windows based PCs because they believe that it would be expensive to replace their software library by switching operating systems (I say believe because 90% of software you own will likely be upgraded before you use it again, meaning you'd replace the software anyways). Being able to buy a Mac, run OSX, Windows, and Linux gives people the flexability they have never had before.
I wouldn't be surprised if you were right to a certain extent though. I expect that with IBM working on the Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 processors the resources that were devoted towards Apple were probably being reduced leaving Apple unhappy; IBM may have ignored complaints from Apple being that even the worst performing of the 'next generation' systems would likely sell more processors than Apple would have.
The reason "We" use x86 is because "we" use PCs, where x86 technology is dominant and obvious. However, "we" also use PDAs, cell phones, TiVos and even game console systems. As the functions of those devices melt into a new class of unified devices, other architectures will advance.
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Honestly, I think it is much simpler than that
The problem has very little to do with the processors that are used and is entirely related to the software that we run. Even in the 80s/90s it would have been completely possible for Microsoft to support a wide range of processors ( if their OS was designed correctly ) and produce OS related libraries which abstracted software development from needing to directly access the underlying hardware; on install, necessary files would be re-compiled and all over the shelf software could run on any architecture that Windows/dos supported. In general, the concept is combining standard C/C++ with libraries (like OpenGL) and recompiling to ensure that no one was tied to a particular hardware architecture.
Just think of how many different architectures Linux has been ported to, if DOS/Windows was built in a similar way you'd be able to choose between any architecture you wanted and still be able to run any program you wanted.
Given the bosses are just employees (duh, I hope), the rate of bad employees ought the be the same as the rate of bad bosses.
Well, if promotions were given simply by seniority this would be true. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that companies are likely to give promotions based on merit ; it is largely dependant on what a company determines to be merit that is worth rewarding with a promotion.
Companies which reward high performance as a way of promoting people will (often) find that they're promoting sociopaths because they are better at gaining success at all costs. Companies which reward education (either level or institution) or seniority usually find that they're promoting a lot of people who are not capable of performing the job.
Personally, I believe if a company rewards people who have strong social skills, a decent moral backing, and adequate technical skills they're probably going to have the best chance at having good management.
There were also lots of people who bought PSPs as UMD players but that didn't really help that format.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the average number of HD-DVD movie sales per system sold (including the XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on) will likely be far greater than the average number of Blu-Ray movie sales per system sold. The reason for this is someone who buys a stand-alone player (or add-on) at these price is likely going to be a reasonably large movie fan as compared to someone who buys an videogame system with an integrated movie player.
There were a lot of studios that supported UMD but that didn't help the format.
Sony got a lot of studios to support Blu-Ray by promising that the PS3 would be released in Q2 of 2006, and they kept a lot of support after the delay by promising 2 Million PS3 systems sold at launch, with 2 Million additional PS3s sold by the end of 2006 and a total of 6 Million sold worldwide by March 2007; even with my earlier argument of a better ratio of movies sold per system, the PS3 would have ensured higher Blu-Ray movie sales. The fact is that Sony will not even come close to meeting these numbers, which will mean that more studios will look into supporting HD-DVD. Now, the PS3 could still recover over the second half of 2007 but ( being that most mainstream and gaming related news sites have proclaimed the PS3 a dud) I wouldn't bet on it.
From what I have found, the best bosses are usually those which act as advocates for the employees benieth them. This means that your boss will act in your best interests at all times; there are lots of benefits to the company from this in that Employees are usually happier, more productive, take less sick days and stay around longer. Someone who is deceptive is usually attempting to protect themselves and is typically not acting in the best interests of anyone else; whether they lie to others (taking credit for your work) or lie to you (about upcomming work) they are not looking out for you.
As an example of how a boss can act as an avocate for you, I have worked in a company where we ended up doing (paid) overtime through November and into mid December in order to complete a project on time. My boss at the time worked it out with HR for everyone to recieve extra vacation time in order for everyone to have the week off between Christmas and New Years; it was a small gesture, but the additional 2 (or 3, I can't remember) days off made everyone happier and more refreshed when we came back and most people felt far better towards the company for giving them the time off. I'm not positive, but I suspect the extra days off probably prevented sick days from being taken in January through March because most people didn't become over tired.
Linux's problem isn't that they lack developers nearly as much as all development for linux is by developers for developers which produces really awful user interfaces.
Linux has tons of powerful applications that do amazing things, but you have to read a manual of highly technical gibberish in order to use the most basic of features; when I'm using linux as a multimedia PC I don't want to have to press ctrl-p to play and shift-alt-r to record, I want something that is simple and straight forward to use. Windows dominates because it is simple and familiar.
I could be completely wrong, but I suspect that neither format will be adopted by the masses (at least for quite awhile) but HD-DVD has a much better chance than Blu-Ray.
Currently, both formats are way too expensive and offer too small of a benefit for most people to consider upgrading at the moment; the image difference between an upscaled DVD and a High-Definition source is far too small for most people (who are not accustomed to HD content because they have not been exposed to much atm) to notice, and neither HD-DVD nor Blu-Ray have stand alone players that are available in the sub $300 price range yet.
The advantage HD-DVD has is that it will probably hit the $300 price range sometime in 2007 whereas Blu-Ray will be in that price range in 2008; HD-DVD will probably hit $200 in 2008 wheras Blu-Ray will hit $200 in 2009. Now, there is no quality difference in the Sound produced by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray and the storage capacity benefits of Blu-Ray can easily be matched (surpassed) by producing an extra disc (the last thing I heard was that it was cheaper to produce 2 HD-DVDs than it was to produce one Blu-Ray disc but I could be wrong) so most people are going to buy their HD player based on the price.
The PS3 will (likely) put a lot of Blu-Ray players into people's homes, but it is unlikely that they will lead to that many Blu-Ray (movie) disc sales in comparison to HD-DVD disc sales; someone who spends $500 on a movie player will probably buy far more movies than someone who spends $500 on a game system/movie player, and even the people who buy the $200 XBox 360 HD-DVD add-on will be more likely to buy HD-DVD movies than someone who bought a $500 PS3 because they went out of their way to get movie playback. If studios do not see a (major) benefit of supporting one format over the other they will (likely) release movies on both formats; this means that (with the exception of Sony Pictures) every movie that is produced for Blu-Ray will likely be produced for HD-DVD.
Just yesterday I spoke with someone from ILM, and they were saying how the film wasn't going to happen because Lucas kept rejecting scripts. Good to hear he found one he liked...
With how well the Star Wars prequels were written, maybe it would be better if he was forced to use a script that he didn't like. Honestly, there are several directors that I really wish would find another director (who would treat the material better) to handle sequels/prequels of movies that were made 10-20+ years ago.