The PS3 was sold at a loss with the full intention of making back those losses, through game licence fees (the usual console approach) and, longer term, through Blu-Ray licence fees (movies and drives). The costs of both those fees are undeniably passed on to the consumer. Assuming Sony's business plan works, users will indeed eventually pay, with interest - Sony is not a charity.
You could argue that individuals who buy subsidised hardware but few games & movies do come out on top, or that original Xbox owners (as a group) didn't pay in the end (since MS never made back their losses), but those losses are still passed on to other users and other products (unless the company goes bankrupt of course). Sony's losses now just increase the pressure on them to raise prices elsewhere, or at least delay dropping them when costs decrease. Of course, in Sony's case, they've been charging more than most on their consumer electronics for some time, so perhaps the users have already paid.
I agree that including Blu-Ray in the PS3 weighed hugely in the format war, but suggesting that MS is trying to promote format confusion by supporting one format only is not only illogical, but simply run-of-the-mill conspiracy paranoia. Their primary business is games and consoles, not movies or media hardware, and they've said (twice now) that they're open to doing a Blu-Ray add-on for the 360 if that's what consumers demand. Download services are inevitable and open to all vendors (including Sony), but are far more dependant on global broadband penetration than anything MS can do right now.
Toshiba should have demanded that the 360 carry an HD-DVD drive standard.
That move would have won the format war outright.
Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.
No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.
As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly, at least in the short term.
OK, thanks for your opinion and all. But I'd rather hear from people who actually live in Taiwan, South Korea or Israel, or Japan. I'd be very interested to hear how many share your opinion.
I don't doubt some do, but I can certainly imagine that people who don't have quite the same level of trust in America (given their rhetoric and actions over the last few years) might feel somewhat more comfortable if America could actually be held accountable for their actions, rather than just having to hope their current president (and advisers) have more than just their own best interests at heart this year.
Yes, the originator of a message can forge headers, but trustworthy relays won't. They all record the IP address of where they got it from, which can't be spoofed so it's as reliable as the relay itself.
All you need to do is traverse back through the relay chain, looking at IP addresses, until you get to the last relay considered reliable (by whatever criteria you like). The IP address it received the email from (which might be a legit relay or a zombie or even the real originator) can be investigated further, or just considered the originator for your purpose.
As I understand it, the system works best when multiple messages are sent in reasonably quick succession from a single IP address (which is usually the case, even if tens of thousands of zombies are involved).
It treats those messages as a group, and rates the whole group according to the "reputation" of the named recipients (which of course are in each individual email). Emails addressed to honeypots and bad addresses will assign a high probability that all emails in the group are spam. Legit addresses with little or no history of receiving spam will decrease that probability for the group. Legit addresses that do receive spam will increase it according to their typical spam content, and so on. If enough emails from that group go to typical spam recipients, that whole group of emails from that IP is considered spam, receiver reputations are updated, and the group is dropped.
The claim is that this method is usually quite effective even for small groups of a handful of emails, and it does sound plausible. I don't see that it could make any effective judgement if it received only a single email from a given IP address, however, and would have to let that through unchallenged. It's possible that, even at the ISP level, a large enough botnet could send no more than a single email from each bot to a given ISP, which would render the system largely useless. However, it could be very effective against spam sent from a small number of machines, especially for larger ISPs, and results could optionally be pooled from multiple ISPs which would increase effectiveness for larger botnets.
Your argument might make more sense if the thousands of P2P sites, protocols, apps, formats, codecs, containers & hidden alt.binary.newsgroups weren't far more diverse and fragmented than even the MS conglomeration.
I think the reasons are simply
price
freedom (no DRM or ads)
availability (for the more technically-minded at least)
Did they also have a convincing explanation for the many clearly non-terrestrial rock samples the astronauts brought back with them? I'm curious how they explained those away.
Kindle has an SD slot, so you can add a GB or four of storage dirt cheap (not that ebooks take much space at all). Also makes for an easy way to get stuff onto it.
I'm just hoping this will bring down the price of e-ink displays. I'd love one on my phone (which is where I do my ebook reading - don't want to carry around something extra the size of a Kindle).
I don't want to turn this into a flamewar (I own a WM6 phone, but I like the iPhone too), but I do need to point out a few errors in the above (which strikes me as rather biased).
It can't run anything beyond Windows Mobile, which is a joke.
It ain't sexy, but it's very functional. It has an open SDK and countless third-party apps, supports copy/paste, records video, sends MMSs, and has a LOT of little usability touches added over the years (e.g. counting SMS characters) that I'm sure the iPhone will eventually get. The sheer usefulness of my WM phone (and apps) is what I'd miss most if I swapped it for an iPhone, no joke.
It can't store more than 128 MB Flash without juggling around SD cards.
I have a 4GB MicroSD card always installed (no juggling), and 8GB is becoming available. If I want to "juggle", I can have far more storage than the iPhone.
It can't navigate photos or music or menus like the iPhone's multitouch display, and its media apps are no match for the iPhone's.
No question that the iPhone's media handling is sexier and more intuitive, but OTOH I can and do wirelessly stream mp3s from an 80GB DNLA server store (or from iTunes) and Divx shows from a 300GB SMB share - can the iPhone's media apps manage that?
It can't display HTML emails in a real email client that works well.
WM6 can (and third party clients could). And it can delete multiple emails at once too.
It can't do Visual Voicemail.
That'd be nice, but it's really just a carrier thing. There's no reason at all my carrier couldn't MMS me my voicemails for the same result. They just don't want to. Credit to Apple for persuading AT&T.
It can't be navigated with a single button and screen taps.
Incorrect. Everything can be done via screen taps, except powering up/down. The buttons are there for convenience (they're easier to use one-handed, or in the dark).
It can't be used with an onscreen keyboard.
It can be used with an onscreen keyboard, with handwriting recognition, with Jot/Graffiti-style characters AND a slide-out keyboard (which, bulk aside, is significantly faster and more accurate than the iPhone's onscreen keyboard, good as it is).
It can't use slick Google integration to pull up nearby searches and map them at all similar to the iPhone's Maps.
I have and use the WM-native Google Maps app which is almost identical to the iPhone version.
You can buy several hundred dollars of third party WM apps
Yeah, it's nice to have a choice about that.
You can have your phone remotely terminated by your boss when he fires you.
I have been reading books for years on my smartphones, and I find it very comfortable - especially in bed at night, where the small size & weight and backlit screen are huge advantages. Turning pages is trivial with a scrollwheel, and more than makes up for the smaller page size. It's searchable, and never loses my place. It's also great to have a small library with you at all times. 10 minutes waiting for the bus? Read a few pages. My wife tried it, and now she reads most of her books on her E65 too.
That said, I recognise that reading LCDs is not for everyone - and this is the Kindle's advantage (only advantage IMHO). The display is gorgeous, and much more familiar to traditional book readers. It'll bring new blood into the ebook market, but I don't think ebooks will truly take off until phones have e-ink screens (or equivalent), and we get the best of both worlds.
I'm kinda wondering what the big deal about visual voicemail is.
I mean, I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself. But it seems to me that it'd be pretty easy for any network to offer it to almost ANY phone, or at least a pretty close facsimile to a large majority.
Phones that can receive audio-video MMS messages have been around for many years. So why not just MMS the recorded voice file directly to the phone, when it's convenient? They already SMS you the notification, why not just send the voice too? Then you can see all your voicemail messages listed individually on your phone, and listen to them at will.
Technically it's better for the network, as the bandwidth cost is lower than playing the message over a voice call, and they can do it at less-than-realtime data rates too. They can still charge for the service however they like, and many customers would pay for the convenience. They could send extra info in the MMS, maybe even a basic speech-to-text summary (for a fee). They could also email it anywhere, as many VoIP providers do now.
I'm kinda wondering what the big deal about visual voicemail is.
I mean, I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself. But it seems to me that it'd be pretty easy for any network to offer it to almost ANY phone, or at least a pretty close facsimile to a large majority.
Phones that can receive audio-video MMS messages have been around for many years. So why not just MMS the recorded voice file directly to the phone, when it's convenient? They already SMS you the notification, why not just send the voice too? Then you can see all your voicemail messages listed individually on your phone, and listen to them at will.
Technically it's better for the network, as the bandwidth cost is lower than playing the message over a voice call, and they can do it at less-than-realtime data rates too. They can still charge for the service however they like, and many customers would pay for the convenience. They could send extra info in the MMS, maybe even a basic speech-to-text summary (for a fee). They could also email it anywhere, as many VoIP providers do now.
That's the excuse Jobs is giving you, yes. Of course, when the iPhone inevitably gets HSDPA, the extra power usage will be glossed over ("We knew consumers wouldn't be satisfied with a mere 7 hrs talk time instead of 8, so we intentionally limited its capabilities.").
Funny how battery life on 3G just isn't that big an issue on other phones. Personally, I'd rather have the choice, and just switch back to GSM if I need the extra life. But that's not really the Apple way, is it?
Microsoft gets about a penny per disc from codec and HDI. When they rent a movie on Live they probably get more like 10% of the $6 cost.
Not talking about Live, talking HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray. I don't dispute that MS would prefer downloaded content.
pretty much everything else are the same between the two formats.
Except that the managed-copy support isn't mandatory with Blu-Ray.
it seems pretty obvious not everyone would have to have one.
Obvious yes, but the advantage of this seems to have escaped Sony, which was my point.
I don't own a PS3.
Never said you did.
don't buy the "Elite", which currently is just a pile of parts that break every six months
Do you have some inside information about Elite failure rates that nobody else is privy to? No? And what does the Elite have to do with not automatically wanting an HD disc drive anyway?
Seems like you managed to misread, misinterpret or ignore every point I made.
I don't see any evidence at all that MS is involved. I don't even see a motive. MS has no more to gain from HD-DVD succeeding than they do from Blu-Ray, ultimately - they licence their codec to both sides, and indeed were completely neutral about it for quite a while. They started pushing HD-DVD because its features (e.g. mandatory managed-copy) are more consumer-friendly (and maybe Toshiba offered them cheap drives). They've already stated that they could happily produce a Blu-Ray add-on in the future - though they still think HD-DVD is preferable.
They didn't add an HD-DVD player into the Elite because that would have raised the cost up to PS3 levels. They also know that not everyone wants one! I know this might be hard for a PS3 fan to grasp, but a lot of people prefer to have a choice about what they're buying, and often want the games now (for less) and the HD drive later (when it is also cheaper).
Or you can buy neither Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive and simply pay Microsoft $10 directly to download HD movies. Which plan do you think helps Microsoft more?
Sounds like another good rental option to me, for those that don't want to buy. And it's $4.50 to $6, not $10.
But more importantly, what's stopping Sony from also offering downloadable HD movies, from their PSN store? Even if your supposed Microsoft conspiracy were true, the movie download market is still well & truly up for grabs. Sony is also well-positioned to go after it, should they care.
Did you actually read that rumour you linked to? Where does it say Microsoft paid off Paramount? I see only that "sources" claim "the HD-DVD side" gave them $150M for "promotional consideration".
Here's another take that tries to verify this. They don't mention Microsoft at all.
Are you quite sure your historical bias against MS hasn't led you into hasty conclusions here?
There's no point comparing MP3s to CDs without stating the bitrate. We all know low-bitrate MP3s sound like crap, but I've done my own tests on 320kbit/s MP3s (with some fairly expensive stereo equipment), and even switching between them and the original source, I couldn't pick it.
Oh, and it'd need to be a blind comparison too. Misleading judgments due to the placebo effect are very common (see: Monster cable).
Bloody right. I've always wondered what the Dow goes up to, as well. While you're at it, clue me in on the maximum limits of Moh's scale, Scovilles, pH and Degrees Celsius too.
Slashdot Mirror
The PS3 was sold at a loss with the full intention of making back those losses, through game licence fees (the usual console approach) and, longer term, through Blu-Ray licence fees (movies and drives). The costs of both those fees are undeniably passed on to the consumer. Assuming Sony's business plan works, users will indeed eventually pay, with interest - Sony is not a charity.
You could argue that individuals who buy subsidised hardware but few games & movies do come out on top, or that original Xbox owners (as a group) didn't pay in the end (since MS never made back their losses), but those losses are still passed on to other users and other products (unless the company goes bankrupt of course). Sony's losses now just increase the pressure on them to raise prices elsewhere, or at least delay dropping them when costs decrease. Of course, in Sony's case, they've been charging more than most on their consumer electronics for some time, so perhaps the users have already paid.
I agree that including Blu-Ray in the PS3 weighed hugely in the format war, but suggesting that MS is trying to promote format confusion by supporting one format only is not only illogical, but simply run-of-the-mill conspiracy paranoia. Their primary business is games and consoles, not movies or media hardware, and they've said (twice now) that they're open to doing a Blu-Ray add-on for the 360 if that's what consumers demand. Download services are inevitable and open to all vendors (including Sony), but are far more dependant on global broadband penetration than anything MS can do right now.
Doubtful. But it would certainly have subjected the 360 to the same cost and time overruns that the PS3 suffered from.
No-one would argue that much of the 360's current success is due to it launching a year earlier with a cheaper price. Making the HD disc player optional might (in the long run) make it harder for devs to squeeze large games in, but definitely kept the console cheaper and simpler for the so-crucial first couple of years of its life.
As for putting it in the Elite, its sales weren't large enough to make much difference to Toshiba, and increasing the cost would not have helped that. Armchair analysts can call it "penny pinching", but in the world of business, the user always pays in the end. Sony's decision to sacrifice their Playstation brand on the altar of Blu-Ray success has cost them dearly, at least in the short term.
By my rough count, the original dialogue weighs in at 156 syllables, which PJ compressed down to a mere 22 (if you count "AAaaagggh!" as a syllable).
Yes, something is lost in the process. But that's OK, you can still read the original book.
OK, thanks for your opinion and all. But I'd rather hear from people who actually live in Taiwan, South Korea or Israel, or Japan. I'd be very interested to hear how many share your opinion.
I don't doubt some do, but I can certainly imagine that people who don't have quite the same level of trust in America (given their rhetoric and actions over the last few years) might feel somewhat more comfortable if America could actually be held accountable for their actions, rather than just having to hope their current president (and advisers) have more than just their own best interests at heart this year.
Yes, the originator of a message can forge headers, but trustworthy relays won't. They all record the IP address of where they got it from, which can't be spoofed so it's as reliable as the relay itself.
All you need to do is traverse back through the relay chain, looking at IP addresses, until you get to the last relay considered reliable (by whatever criteria you like). The IP address it received the email from (which might be a legit relay or a zombie or even the real originator) can be investigated further, or just considered the originator for your purpose.
As I understand it, the system works best when multiple messages are sent in reasonably quick succession from a single IP address (which is usually the case, even if tens of thousands of zombies are involved).
It treats those messages as a group, and rates the whole group according to the "reputation" of the named recipients (which of course are in each individual email). Emails addressed to honeypots and bad addresses will assign a high probability that all emails in the group are spam. Legit addresses with little or no history of receiving spam will decrease that probability for the group. Legit addresses that do receive spam will increase it according to their typical spam content, and so on. If enough emails from that group go to typical spam recipients, that whole group of emails from that IP is considered spam, receiver reputations are updated, and the group is dropped.
The claim is that this method is usually quite effective even for small groups of a handful of emails, and it does sound plausible. I don't see that it could make any effective judgement if it received only a single email from a given IP address, however, and would have to let that through unchallenged. It's possible that, even at the ISP level, a large enough botnet could send no more than a single email from each bot to a given ISP, which would render the system largely useless. However, it could be very effective against spam sent from a small number of machines, especially for larger ISPs, and results could optionally be pooled from multiple ISPs which would increase effectiveness for larger botnets.
Your argument might make more sense if the thousands of P2P sites, protocols, apps, formats, codecs, containers & hidden alt.binary.newsgroups weren't far more diverse and fragmented than even the MS conglomeration.
I think the reasons are simply
Did they also have a convincing explanation for the many clearly non-terrestrial rock samples the astronauts brought back with them? I'm curious how they explained those away.
Windows NT has always supported multiple desktops under the hood, and MS has had a powertoy that exposes this for ages.
There's many other third-party virtual desktop managers around, if you look, even for Vista.
Kindle has an SD slot, so you can add a GB or four of storage dirt cheap (not that ebooks take much space at all). Also makes for an easy way to get stuff onto it.
I'm just hoping this will bring down the price of e-ink displays. I'd love one on my phone (which is where I do my ebook reading - don't want to carry around something extra the size of a Kindle).
I don't want to turn this into a flamewar (I own a WM6 phone, but I like the iPhone too), but I do need to point out a few errors in the above (which strikes me as rather biased).
It ain't sexy, but it's very functional. It has an open SDK and countless third-party apps, supports copy/paste, records video, sends MMSs, and has a LOT of little usability touches added over the years (e.g. counting SMS characters) that I'm sure the iPhone will eventually get. The sheer usefulness of my WM phone (and apps) is what I'd miss most if I swapped it for an iPhone, no joke. I have a 4GB MicroSD card always installed (no juggling), and 8GB is becoming available. If I want to "juggle", I can have far more storage than the iPhone. No question that the iPhone's media handling is sexier and more intuitive, but OTOH I can and do wirelessly stream mp3s from an 80GB DNLA server store (or from iTunes) and Divx shows from a 300GB SMB share - can the iPhone's media apps manage that? WM6 can (and third party clients could). And it can delete multiple emails at once too. That'd be nice, but it's really just a carrier thing. There's no reason at all my carrier couldn't MMS me my voicemails for the same result. They just don't want to. Credit to Apple for persuading AT&T. Incorrect. Everything can be done via screen taps, except powering up/down. The buttons are there for convenience (they're easier to use one-handed, or in the dark). It can be used with an onscreen keyboard, with handwriting recognition, with Jot/Graffiti-style characters AND a slide-out keyboard (which, bulk aside, is significantly faster and more accurate than the iPhone's onscreen keyboard, good as it is). I have and use the WM-native Google Maps app which is almost identical to the iPhone version. Yeah, it's nice to have a choice about that. Riiight. I don't need to comment on that.I have been reading books for years on my smartphones, and I find it very comfortable - especially in bed at night, where the small size & weight and backlit screen are huge advantages. Turning pages is trivial with a scrollwheel, and more than makes up for the smaller page size. It's searchable, and never loses my place. It's also great to have a small library with you at all times. 10 minutes waiting for the bus? Read a few pages. My wife tried it, and now she reads most of her books on her E65 too.
That said, I recognise that reading LCDs is not for everyone - and this is the Kindle's advantage (only advantage IMHO). The display is gorgeous, and much more familiar to traditional book readers. It'll bring new blood into the ebook market, but I don't think ebooks will truly take off until phones have e-ink screens (or equivalent), and we get the best of both worlds.
I'm kinda wondering what the big deal about visual voicemail is.
I mean, I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself. But it seems to me that it'd be pretty easy for any network to offer it to almost ANY phone, or at least a pretty close facsimile to a large majority.
Phones that can receive audio-video MMS messages have been around for many years. So why not just MMS the recorded voice file directly to the phone, when it's convenient? They already SMS you the notification, why not just send the voice too? Then you can see all your voicemail messages listed individually on your phone, and listen to them at will.
Technically it's better for the network, as the bandwidth cost is lower than playing the message over a voice call, and they can do it at less-than-realtime data rates too. They can still charge for the service however they like, and many customers would pay for the convenience. They could send extra info in the MMS, maybe even a basic speech-to-text summary (for a fee). They could also email it anywhere, as many VoIP providers do now.
I'm kinda wondering what the big deal about visual voicemail is.
I mean, I get that the feature is great, and I'd love to have it myself. But it seems to me that it'd be pretty easy for any network to offer it to almost ANY phone, or at least a pretty close facsimile to a large majority.
Phones that can receive audio-video MMS messages have been around for many years. So why not just MMS the recorded voice file directly to the phone, when it's convenient? They already SMS you the notification, why not just send the voice too? Then you can see all your voicemail messages listed individually on your phone, and listen to them at will.
Technically it's better for the network, as the bandwidth cost is lower than playing the message over a voice call, and they can do it at less-than-realtime data rates too. They can still charge for the service however they like, and many customers would pay for the convenience. They could send extra info in the MMS, maybe even a basic speech-to-text summary (for a fee). They could also email it anywhere, as many VoIP providers do now.
If you want battery life more than speed, why don't you just switch the phone back to GSM, instead of complaining? You do have a choice.
That's the excuse Jobs is giving you, yes. Of course, when the iPhone inevitably gets HSDPA, the extra power usage will be glossed over ("We knew consumers wouldn't be satisfied with a mere 7 hrs talk time instead of 8, so we intentionally limited its capabilities.").
Funny how battery life on 3G just isn't that big an issue on other phones. Personally, I'd rather have the choice, and just switch back to GSM if I need the extra life. But that's not really the Apple way, is it?
Do you have some inside information about Elite failure rates that nobody else is privy to? No? And what does the Elite have to do with not automatically wanting an HD disc drive anyway?
Seems like you managed to misread, misinterpret or ignore every point I made.
...and you have only played the demo. There is more you haven't seen. Perhaps they know something you don't?
Still, far be it from me to tell you what to like.
I don't see any evidence at all that MS is involved. I don't even see a motive. MS has no more to gain from HD-DVD succeeding than they do from Blu-Ray, ultimately - they licence their codec to both sides, and indeed were completely neutral about it for quite a while. They started pushing HD-DVD because its features (e.g. mandatory managed-copy) are more consumer-friendly (and maybe Toshiba offered them cheap drives). They've already stated that they could happily produce a Blu-Ray add-on in the future - though they still think HD-DVD is preferable.
They didn't add an HD-DVD player into the Elite because that would have raised the cost up to PS3 levels. They also know that not everyone wants one! I know this might be hard for a PS3 fan to grasp, but a lot of people prefer to have a choice about what they're buying, and often want the games now (for less) and the HD drive later (when it is also cheaper).
Sounds like another good rental option to me, for those that don't want to buy. And it's $4.50 to $6, not $10.
But more importantly, what's stopping Sony from also offering downloadable HD movies, from their PSN store? Even if your supposed Microsoft conspiracy were true, the movie download market is still well & truly up for grabs. Sony is also well-positioned to go after it, should they care.
Did you actually read that rumour you linked to? Where does it say Microsoft paid off Paramount? I see only that "sources" claim "the HD-DVD side" gave them $150M for "promotional consideration".
Here's another take that tries to verify this. They don't mention Microsoft at all.
Are you quite sure your historical bias against MS hasn't led you into hasty conclusions here?
There's no point comparing MP3s to CDs without stating the bitrate. We all know low-bitrate MP3s sound like crap, but I've done my own tests on 320kbit/s MP3s (with some fairly expensive stereo equipment), and even switching between them and the original source, I couldn't pick it.
Oh, and it'd need to be a blind comparison too. Misleading judgments due to the placebo effect are very common (see: Monster cable).
Bloody right. I've always wondered what the Dow goes up to, as well. While you're at it, clue me in on the maximum limits of Moh's scale, Scovilles, pH and Degrees Celsius too.
What, like the "I can touch the keyboard" line? You need to try harder.