The system often fails, such as an innocent person being convicted of a crime they didn't commit.
But I don't recall EVER hearing-of or even imagining a situation where somebody was charged with a violation of a non-existent law. Have you? Seriously?
No, actually, they CAN'T be charged unless they're actually committing a crime.
And there are 2 fail-safes here:
1. Age of Consent -- In most states, the Age of Consent is below the age of majority. Often it's 16 or 17. 2. Peer Provision -- If the major is within X number of years of the minor, there is no penalty or a reduced penalty. Often this is 2 or 3 years.
It doesn't matter how bad a kids PD is. If no law is being violated, the judge is probably going to catch that...
But we do have to be pragmatic.. I mean, Parole is designed not only to give the "rehabilitated" a second (third, fourth..) chance, but also to act as a swap file for the prison system.
Obviously we'd have resource allocation issues if we marked a large class of prisoners as unswappable.
The good news is that there's a simple fix that doesn't involve "just add more space." ---> Purge the prison system of the MILLIONS of Americans who were WRONGLY locked-up on drug offenses. You do that and--bam--we have millions of open beds.
Of course, many with drug convictions SHOULD stay in prison and those that get released should have a lot of reintegration guidance. However, many should be released and doing so would remove this GLUT of nonsensical prosecutions/prisoners from the system, giving prosecutors, judges & parole boards the ability to focus more on cases that matter: such as whether or not to parole Mikey The Molester or Randy The Rapist. And, more importantly, it would give parole officers the ability to keep a much sharper eye on those offenders.
If you've done *serious* web development then you consider yourself a *professional*. And as a professional, you no longer have the luxury afforded to the "my CSS is art" drama-queens.
As a professional, you should be more concerned with the viability of your design to meet your clients goals: most often to sell something, support something already sold, or strengthen the brand they use to sell things. Which means you should be focusing on nothing more than making your design accessible to the widest swath of viewers.
You should be TARGETING IE from the beginning. No, it's not sexy or trendy. And Yes, i'm writing this from Firefox, so I feel your pain. But when you develop for, FF/Opera/Safari and you realize it looks like crap in IE, you have to go to a client and say "The design doesn't work for 70%+ of the web population. I need time to fix it" Of course, they are not going to be happy. The obvious question is "You just NOW thought about that?" Now, if you do your job, you'd develop on IE first, and then go to the client and say "With another day, I can make this design work for the <30% of users on FF/Opera/Safari. Would you like me to do that?"
This really isn't debatable. Is IE the best browser? Not in my opinion. Does that matter one bit when you're being paid $50-100/hr to do web development? Not for a second...
First, they use WMV. And whether or not you hate Microsoft, you can't objectively deny that WMV has matured into a very competent video format. It's efficient and has an impressive feature set. The only real downside is that it's a windows-based technology and that you have to use Media Player:)
Second, even if they did use H.264, which isn't any more efficient than WMV, it's not a cure-all. We're not talking about specifications. We're talking about implementations. I can put my VHS home videos on DVD but it doesn't make them "DVD Quality."
What really matters is the conversion process. It's not easy to format-shift thousands of DVDs. They are so wildly different that it's hard to preserve quality. Something tuned to convert, say, Animation would produce crappy results when trying to convert a non-interlaced live-action video, and something tuned for that would produce crappy results when trying to convert classic black-and-whites.
Third, I think you over-estimate the use of Watch Now. First, the average user with a 3-at-a-time plan is getting 17 hours a month of VOD. I was in the very first batch of users to be given access to the feature (since I was on he 8-at-a-time plan) and I'm an "early adopter" of things and I STILL only use it to watch, maybe, one or two movies a month.
This will clearly go-up as their selection does, but they're ramping that up slowly.
Also, the video quality scales with the users connection speed. At the highest quality, you're talking about a ~2GB file, which works out to about 3Mbps. But most users will probably fall in the "average" quality which scales down to 2Mbps. There's also a significant percentage of users that are seeing the lowest-quality 1Mbps videos. I'd assume that the average would probably work out to just about 2Mbps.
So, if you're talking about TODAYS numbers, I think you've highly over-estimated. You can probably oversubscribe the line at least to 50/1. So 622Mbps / 2Mbps = 311 Simultaneous streams * 50 = $15,500. Your $25k figure then distributes down to $1.6 a user.
Now, if you're talking about FUTURE numbers... eventually NF will switch to all-download delivery. This is probably at least 5 years off, maybe 10. But you can count on it.
I think it's fair to assume that it would cost no more to run data centers than it costs them currently to run 40 shipping centers with all those copies of +50k DVD titles.
I imagine NF gets a postal discount due to their presorting, so lets assume 35 cents. Of course, it goes 2-ways, so that's $0.70 per DVD. With the 3-at-a-time plan, it's reasonable to assume that eager users can get 13-15 DVDs a month. However there are also users that are only getting 9-12. So we can assume a weekly "cycle," making it 12 DVDs a month. I'm sure that NF, once they go all-download, would have to actually cap the number of movies. Right now it's "unlimited" because the nature of the mail throttles the user (and yes, of course, they have their own throttling).
So, 12 *.7 = $8.40.
So, to make downloads work, they'd have to keep the average users bandwidth costs at $8.50 or so.
I think that's reasonable. I think that bandwidth costs over the next decade will fall faster than inflation will increase, so they're probably getting a decent deal from that.
And given their millions of subscribers, once they go all-download, that's a SERIOUS amount of bandwidth. Much like google, I'm sure they'd get concessions from their ISPs.
Much of both of our posts are just speculation, but it can be fun to speculate. And I still think that download-only is a viable business model and obvious progression.
They may not be able to double their margins or anything, but I do think it'll be more profitable for them and more advantageous for the user.
Of course, i said as much in my first post in this thread:
But the point is that this service is here. Today. And it's trivial for me to hook my laptop to my TV and get IP VOD with decent audio and video quality. And that it's being improved every month. Netflix clearly (and smartly) sees this as THE future of its business model. And considering that my cable company charges $3 per VOD release and Netflix gives you 17 free hours a month (on the $17 plan. You'd get 40 free hours on their $40 plan), it's really a pretty decent system.
Even at their highest quality, there's a LOT to be desired.
They've got serious aliasing issues. I have no idea who wrote their deinterlacing algo but it's a disaster. And I think they have no notion of what an inverse telecine filter is even supposed to do: there are so many ghosts in the image that it can be nearly painful to watch.
And they re-scale the video into square pixels despite the fact that it's no longer 2001 and Media Player supports every aspect ratio DVD Players do!!
It's not hideous, but it's simply NOT DVD quality. Maybe someday.
Wouldn't you agree, though, that they could make it tempting...
Imagine being able to chose. Right now you can do the $14/mo 2-at-a-time plan. So imagine if they offered a way for you to cut the price in half for your plan. For $7 a month you get to download and burn, say, 9 DVDs. Their software would work to automatically D/L from your queue in off-hours and it could include integrated burning features.
And, of course, you get to KEEP the DVDs you burn. Despite the fact that the plan would surely carry a "must dispose" caveat.
If they made the software easy to use, for $7 a month I think I might just take them up on that.
Well, lets be real, their selection is nowhere near what it would need to be to consider it a viable service on its own right. It's OK since it's a free addition to your monthly plan, but that's about the extent of it.
But they are adding new all the time.
And also, it's not quite as DRM-light as you make it sound. You have to have the newest version of Media Player and, if you already have that, you still have to download the newest DRM update. It can be a bit of a PITA to get working the first time, requiring a restart and all.
But after that, it does work very reliably and actually quite well.
The quality is still only so-so and nowhere near DVD quality. I think their encoding process going from DVD->Streamable needs some work.
But the point is that this service is here. Today. And it's trivial for me to hook my laptop to my TV and get IP VOD with decent audio and video quality. And that it's being improved every month. Netflix clearly (and smartly) sees this as THE future of its business model. And considering that my cable company charges $3 per VOD release and Netflix gives you 17 free hours a month (on the $17 plan. You'd get 40 free hours on their $40 plan), it's really a pretty decent system.
The problem is that your post is gibberish to most users.
For most users their choice is binary:
0. Call the family IT guy (you know, one of us..) and waste our time (as if we don't sit in front of a PC enough..) 1. Call Geeksquad or a similar ripoff-artist and pay $100+ to have them wipe the disk and re-install windows, after stealing all your porn and music
FWIW, facebook has the best default privacy settings of all the social networking sites.
By default, only those in your network can see ANYTHING about you. This would be people in your own school or whatever. And within that, you have a number of privacy setting controlling whether only your direct friends can see things.
In a number of ways... I've always thought that Facebook is to Apple what MySpace is to Microsoft...
All I have is anecdotal evidence since Google was no help for me in this quest, but I'd LOVE to see numbers on what percentage of DVD players were represented by the PS2. Anecdotally, I remember a LOT of friends having their ps2 as their only DVD player.
That made sense for a while, and was one of the selling-points of the PS2.
But soon enough that was eclipsed by standalone units. Overwhelmingly.
Right now Standalones are at a disadvantage to the PS3. Since they're being made in such small quantities, manufacturers are unable to realize economies of scale. Also, they're adding on an "early adopter tax" just because they can.
It's just as expensive to produce the BR drive in a PS3 but Sony is able to subsidize the cost of the PS3 due to the backend revenue of games and licenses.
This is why, as you put it, standalone players are a "joke" right now compared to the PS3.
But soon enough, just as it happened with the DVD player, this won't be the case. This is WHY the HD-DVD players are producing more affordable units.
At the end of the day, most people in the Movie-Watching market don't care about the video-game market. Just take a look at penetration numbers of DVD players compare to game consoles. Consoles are popular, but they look absolutely RARE compared to the number of DVD players out there. When a consumer can chose between a $300 HD-DVD player or a $400 PS3, most will probably go w/ the $300 player, perhaps for no other reason than they don't KNOW they could buy the PS3.
Eventually it's going to come down to who can deliver HD to consumers in the most cost-effective way. And if the HD-DVD partners do what they need to do to push the prices down, they're probably going to win. It won't MATTER than PS3 has primed the BR market.
In 18-24 months, PS3's will be to Hi-Def Optical as PS2's are to Standard-Def Optical. A drop in the bucket.
So because China could move a single sub covertly into INTERNATIONAL WATERS that just so happen to be the location of a US Battle Group, that's evidence that they can move a million men in boats across the pacific ocean ?!
Please, explain this to me like I'm a child, because I can't wrap my head around how you made THAT connection..
"Seeing Hitachi and Toshiba launch super cheap players just reeks of desperation "
I disagree.
I think it "reeks" of strategy.
You're right that BR has more penetration, mostly due to PS3. But there aren't enough PS3's out there to create a mass market akin to the current standard-def DVD market. What's really going to turn the tide are stand-alone players. Even if Sony SLASHES the price, the PS3 will end-up being as marginal to Hi-Def DVD playing as the PS2 is to Standard-Def DVD playing.
Sure, consumers are going to factor-in content when choosing which player to buy. But with a BR player costing perhaps as much as twice what the HD-DVD player costs, I think you're going to see consumers hard-pressed to justify the BR player on the flimsy basis that at the current moment there are more BR titles than HD titles.
Frankly, consumers at this point aren't hard-pressed to upgrade optical formats. Most everyone I know is still content with DVD technology. They're certainly not going to CONSIDER spending $500+ for a BR player.
The pro-BR crowd, yourself included, is good at generating a lot of heat and smoke but I've yet to see any real fire. It all seems to me more akin to another Sony Boondoggle, the Mini-Disc. There was once a very respectable MD section at my local Worst-Buy, but that doesn't mean they "won" the "format war" now does it?
It was obvious that the OP meant a "more powerful" army, no?
Chinas ground-force numbers hardly make it more powerful. What good are troops if you can't get them to the fight?
And as for Russian nukes... the same principle applies. How many, really, are battle ready? Their Nuke forces are much more expensive to maintain. In large part due to their decentralized C&C systems, as well as the fact that they didn't deploy MIRVs until the R-36M4. That means that they have a higher missle:warhead ratio, meaning much higher maintenance.
And do you really think these things have been nurtured the way they need to be?
I said hew as a "speculative candidate for president"
And he was.
He formed an exploratory committee last year but eventually declined to enter the race after Obama, Bayh and Edwards appeared to be vying for the anti-hillary role.
Furthermore, he's alluded in the past to Presidential ambitions and I think you'll find that a Senate seat is a temporary lay over for Warner. If a Republican wins in 08 (god forbid), I'd wager you'd see a Warner candidacy in 2012......But yeah, thanks for the "correction".......
I remember a neighbor had, IIRC, a 2400 baud that was the type that you set the receiver upon. Not sure on cost, but considering the IBM XT w/o Hard Disk, a couple hundred K of ram, and dual 5.25" floppy drives would run you $2500 in '85 ($4500 in 2006 dollars), I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
"Is there a single high end business guy who will hang up the phone if president of USA calls? What would happen if he does?"
The answers are "Probably Not" and "Probably Nothing."
But, more on point...
I detest President Bush, but I would still take a call from the President of the United States if he were to call me. I mean, you wouldn't? And why not? Like it or not (and, in my case, it's NOT), Bush is the President. And I'm a patriot. And I'm not going to turn down any reasonable request made by our President.
Furthermore, there are LOADS of successful Democratic businessmen. LOADS. Millions of them. You're being ignorant if you think that's not the case. An obvious example that I just read about this morning is Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia and a speculative Presidential Candidate....Before entering politics he made his billion$ running a little-known outfit called "Nextel"....
Besides, as heavy-handed as the Bush Administration has been, this is nothing, NOTHING like what Putin has done in Russia. To say that it is, undermines the seriousness of what Putin has done to Russia.
First, you made an informed decision in regard to Vista and what was valuable in your own life. You took personal responsibility for your actions.
Second, You recognize the nuance in, just an example, my FAA license. You recognize that things shouldn't just be taken at face value to mean whatever you assume them to mean. You can, thru a bit of research, determine exactly what I'm qualified for.
And while you're right, there is no ability to look at the "Vista Compatible" badge itself and determine the salient details, the rest of the machines specs are, no doubt, within reach of the badge itself.
There's a very easy remedy to all this, and the remedy also works in THOUSANDS of other cases: Personal responsibility and Caveat Emptor.
I can't believe that people here are all "Wha? Marketing isn't completely obvious and i shouldn't believe ever spurious claim?! wha?!"
Exactly what I thought. Just a rabid anti-microsoft'er who can't see things objectively.
Your only issue with me is not that I LIKE microsoft (I'm 100% indifferent. They're just another brand name). Your issue is that I don't HATE Microsoft. And that taints every other part of your argument, even parts that may be correct.
Your opinion about Microsoft is no more valid than MICROSOFTS OPINION ABOUT THEMSELVES. In both cases, it's just propaganda.
That's the cost of being a fanboy or, it's grumpy opposite, the flameboy.
I don't think you understand the POINT of Caveat Emptor.
The whole POINT is that the consumer will not have "perfect information." That's the "Beware" part in "Buyer Beware" !!
Your Doctor analogy is flawed-- You're paying for expert advice. If you pay somebody for expert advice on buying a computer compatible w/ Vista Ultimate, and the advice is bad, that's a problem, and you have a cause of action against the expert that was paid to advise you. But MARKETING on a product is NOT expert advice. Nor is the name HD-DVD. My mother wasn't swindled, and either were people who bought these laptops in question that were not able to run Vista Ultimate.
They, sadly, made ASSUMPTIONS. In the case of the computer, they made assumptions about a major purchase. They are responsible.
And let's be real here... there are many cases when you're right, the buyer doesn't have the "perfect info" needed to make a perfect decision. But this is not one of those cases. They could have easily printed out specs for the version of Vista they're seeking, and compare them to the computer they're checking out. Or, in the opposite direction, they could easily take the specs of their newly-bought computer and compare them to the Vista version they're checking out. And if they can't do the comparison themselves, there's about a million places online that will offer free help, as well as probably a dozen people in everybody's life who could advise them on this, from children and grandchildren to the IT Dept at work to the guy at the computer store to whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. That was a stunningly bad joke.
The system often fails, such as an innocent person being convicted of a crime they didn't commit.
But I don't recall EVER hearing-of or even imagining a situation where somebody was charged with a violation of a non-existent law. Have you? Seriously?
And your tinfoil hattery over something like this is enough to send ME into hysterics.
No, actually, they CAN'T be charged unless they're actually committing a crime.
And there are 2 fail-safes here:
1. Age of Consent -- In most states, the Age of Consent is below the age of majority. Often it's 16 or 17.
2. Peer Provision -- If the major is within X number of years of the minor, there is no penalty or a reduced penalty. Often this is 2 or 3 years.
It doesn't matter how bad a kids PD is. If no law is being violated, the judge is probably going to catch that...
I couldn't agree more.
But we do have to be pragmatic.. I mean, Parole is designed not only to give the "rehabilitated" a second (third, fourth..) chance, but also to act as a swap file for the prison system.
Obviously we'd have resource allocation issues if we marked a large class of prisoners as unswappable.
The good news is that there's a simple fix that doesn't involve "just add more space." ---> Purge the prison system of the MILLIONS of Americans who were WRONGLY locked-up on drug offenses. You do that and--bam--we have millions of open beds.
Of course, many with drug convictions SHOULD stay in prison and those that get released should have a lot of reintegration guidance. However, many should be released and doing so would remove this GLUT of nonsensical prosecutions/prisoners from the system, giving prosecutors, judges & parole boards the ability to focus more on cases that matter: such as whether or not to parole Mikey The Molester or Randy The Rapist. And, more importantly, it would give parole officers the ability to keep a much sharper eye on those offenders.
True, they can't yet run Vista, but TFA says it does have an impressive compliment of games pre-installed..
Chess
Hearts
Global Thermonuclear Jihad...
No, it's the rants of petulant children.
If you've done *serious* web development then you consider yourself a *professional*. And as a professional, you no longer have the luxury afforded to the "my CSS is art" drama-queens.
As a professional, you should be more concerned with the viability of your design to meet your clients goals: most often to sell something, support something already sold, or strengthen the brand they use to sell things. Which means you should be focusing on nothing more than making your design accessible to the widest swath of viewers.
You should be TARGETING IE from the beginning. No, it's not sexy or trendy. And Yes, i'm writing this from Firefox, so I feel your pain. But when you develop for, FF/Opera/Safari and you realize it looks like crap in IE, you have to go to a client and say "The design doesn't work for 70%+ of the web population. I need time to fix it" Of course, they are not going to be happy. The obvious question is "You just NOW thought about that?" Now, if you do your job, you'd develop on IE first, and then go to the client and say "With another day, I can make this design work for the <30% of users on FF/Opera/Safari. Would you like me to do that?"
This really isn't debatable. Is IE the best browser? Not in my opinion. Does that matter one bit when you're being paid $50-100/hr to do web development? Not for a second...
First, they use WMV. And whether or not you hate Microsoft, you can't objectively deny that WMV has matured into a very competent video format. It's efficient and has an impressive feature set. The only real downside is that it's a windows-based technology and that you have to use Media Player :)
.7 = $8.40.
Second, even if they did use H.264, which isn't any more efficient than WMV, it's not a cure-all. We're not talking about specifications. We're talking about implementations. I can put my VHS home videos on DVD but it doesn't make them "DVD Quality."
What really matters is the conversion process. It's not easy to format-shift thousands of DVDs. They are so wildly different that it's hard to preserve quality. Something tuned to convert, say, Animation would produce crappy results when trying to convert a non-interlaced live-action video, and something tuned for that would produce crappy results when trying to convert classic black-and-whites.
Third, I think you over-estimate the use of Watch Now. First, the average user with a 3-at-a-time plan is getting 17 hours a month of VOD. I was in the very first batch of users to be given access to the feature (since I was on he 8-at-a-time plan) and I'm an "early adopter" of things and I STILL only use it to watch, maybe, one or two movies a month.
This will clearly go-up as their selection does, but they're ramping that up slowly.
Also, the video quality scales with the users connection speed. At the highest quality, you're talking about a ~2GB file, which works out to about 3Mbps. But most users will probably fall in the "average" quality which scales down to 2Mbps. There's also a significant percentage of users that are seeing the lowest-quality 1Mbps videos. I'd assume that the average would probably work out to just about 2Mbps.
So, if you're talking about TODAYS numbers, I think you've highly over-estimated. You can probably oversubscribe the line at least to 50/1. So 622Mbps / 2Mbps = 311 Simultaneous streams * 50 = $15,500. Your $25k figure then distributes down to $1.6 a user.
Now, if you're talking about FUTURE numbers... eventually NF will switch to all-download delivery. This is probably at least 5 years off, maybe 10. But you can count on it.
I think it's fair to assume that it would cost no more to run data centers than it costs them currently to run 40 shipping centers with all those copies of +50k DVD titles.
I imagine NF gets a postal discount due to their presorting, so lets assume 35 cents. Of course, it goes 2-ways, so that's $0.70 per DVD. With the 3-at-a-time plan, it's reasonable to assume that eager users can get 13-15 DVDs a month. However there are also users that are only getting 9-12. So we can assume a weekly "cycle," making it 12 DVDs a month. I'm sure that NF, once they go all-download, would have to actually cap the number of movies. Right now it's "unlimited" because the nature of the mail throttles the user (and yes, of course, they have their own throttling).
So, 12 *
So, to make downloads work, they'd have to keep the average users bandwidth costs at $8.50 or so.
I think that's reasonable. I think that bandwidth costs over the next decade will fall faster than inflation will increase, so they're probably getting a decent deal from that.
And given their millions of subscribers, once they go all-download, that's a SERIOUS amount of bandwidth. Much like google, I'm sure they'd get concessions from their ISPs.
Much of both of our posts are just speculation, but it can be fun to speculate. And I still think that download-only is a viable business model and obvious progression.
They may not be able to double their margins or anything, but I do think it'll be more profitable for them and more advantageous for the user.
Of course, i said as much in my first post in this thread:
But the point is that this service is here. Today. And it's trivial for me to hook my laptop to my TV and get IP VOD with decent audio and video quality. And that it's being improved every month. Netflix clearly (and smartly) sees this as THE future of its business model. And considering that my cable company charges $3 per VOD release and Netflix gives you 17 free hours a month (on the $17 plan. You'd get 40 free hours on their $40 plan), it's really a pretty decent system.
Then you just aren't looking.
Even at their highest quality, there's a LOT to be desired.
They've got serious aliasing issues. I have no idea who wrote their deinterlacing algo but it's a disaster. And I think they have no notion of what an inverse telecine filter is even supposed to do: there are so many ghosts in the image that it can be nearly painful to watch.
And they re-scale the video into square pixels despite the fact that it's no longer 2001 and Media Player supports every aspect ratio DVD Players do!!
It's not hideous, but it's simply NOT DVD quality. Maybe someday.
Wouldn't you agree, though, that they could make it tempting...
Imagine being able to chose. Right now you can do the $14/mo 2-at-a-time plan. So imagine if they offered a way for you to cut the price in half for your plan. For $7 a month you get to download and burn, say, 9 DVDs. Their software would work to automatically D/L from your queue in off-hours and it could include integrated burning features.
And, of course, you get to KEEP the DVDs you burn. Despite the fact that the plan would surely carry a "must dispose" caveat.
If they made the software easy to use, for $7 a month I think I might just take them up on that.
Well, lets be real, their selection is nowhere near what it would need to be to consider it a viable service on its own right. It's OK since it's a free addition to your monthly plan, but that's about the extent of it.
But they are adding new all the time.
And also, it's not quite as DRM-light as you make it sound. You have to have the newest version of Media Player and, if you already have that, you still have to download the newest DRM update. It can be a bit of a PITA to get working the first time, requiring a restart and all.
But after that, it does work very reliably and actually quite well.
The quality is still only so-so and nowhere near DVD quality. I think their encoding process going from DVD->Streamable needs some work.
But the point is that this service is here. Today. And it's trivial for me to hook my laptop to my TV and get IP VOD with decent audio and video quality. And that it's being improved every month. Netflix clearly (and smartly) sees this as THE future of its business model. And considering that my cable company charges $3 per VOD release and Netflix gives you 17 free hours a month (on the $17 plan. You'd get 40 free hours on their $40 plan), it's really a pretty decent system.
The problem is that your post is gibberish to most users.
For most users their choice is binary:
0. Call the family IT guy (you know, one of us..) and waste our time (as if we don't sit in front of a PC enough..)
1. Call Geeksquad or a similar ripoff-artist and pay $100+ to have them wipe the disk and re-install windows, after stealing all your porn and music
FWIW, facebook has the best default privacy settings of all the social networking sites.
By default, only those in your network can see ANYTHING about you. This would be people in your own school or whatever. And within that, you have a number of privacy setting controlling whether only your direct friends can see things.
In a number of ways... I've always thought that Facebook is to Apple what MySpace is to Microsoft...
All I have is anecdotal evidence since Google was no help for me in this quest, but I'd LOVE to see numbers on what percentage of DVD players were represented by the PS2. Anecdotally, I remember a LOT of friends having their ps2 as their only DVD player.
That made sense for a while, and was one of the selling-points of the PS2.
But soon enough that was eclipsed by standalone units. Overwhelmingly.
Right now Standalones are at a disadvantage to the PS3. Since they're being made in such small quantities, manufacturers are unable to realize economies of scale. Also, they're adding on an "early adopter tax" just because they can.
It's just as expensive to produce the BR drive in a PS3 but Sony is able to subsidize the cost of the PS3 due to the backend revenue of games and licenses.
This is why, as you put it, standalone players are a "joke" right now compared to the PS3.
But soon enough, just as it happened with the DVD player, this won't be the case. This is WHY the HD-DVD players are producing more affordable units.
At the end of the day, most people in the Movie-Watching market don't care about the video-game market. Just take a look at penetration numbers of DVD players compare to game consoles. Consoles are popular, but they look absolutely RARE compared to the number of DVD players out there. When a consumer can chose between a $300 HD-DVD player or a $400 PS3, most will probably go w/ the $300 player, perhaps for no other reason than they don't KNOW they could buy the PS3.
Eventually it's going to come down to who can deliver HD to consumers in the most cost-effective way. And if the HD-DVD partners do what they need to do to push the prices down, they're probably going to win. It won't MATTER than PS3 has primed the BR market.
In 18-24 months, PS3's will be to Hi-Def Optical as PS2's are to Standard-Def Optical. A drop in the bucket.
Are you serious?
So because China could move a single sub covertly into INTERNATIONAL WATERS that just so happen to be the location of a US Battle Group, that's evidence that they can move a million men in boats across the pacific ocean ?!
Please, explain this to me like I'm a child, because I can't wrap my head around how you made THAT connection..
"Seeing Hitachi and Toshiba launch super cheap players just reeks of desperation "
I disagree.
I think it "reeks" of strategy.
You're right that BR has more penetration, mostly due to PS3. But there aren't enough PS3's out there to create a mass market akin to the current standard-def DVD market. What's really going to turn the tide are stand-alone players. Even if Sony SLASHES the price, the PS3 will end-up being as marginal to Hi-Def DVD playing as the PS2 is to Standard-Def DVD playing.
Sure, consumers are going to factor-in content when choosing which player to buy. But with a BR player costing perhaps as much as twice what the HD-DVD player costs, I think you're going to see consumers hard-pressed to justify the BR player on the flimsy basis that at the current moment there are more BR titles than HD titles.
Frankly, consumers at this point aren't hard-pressed to upgrade optical formats. Most everyone I know is still content with DVD technology. They're certainly not going to CONSIDER spending $500+ for a BR player.
The pro-BR crowd, yourself included, is good at generating a lot of heat and smoke but I've yet to see any real fire. It all seems to me more akin to another Sony Boondoggle, the Mini-Disc. There was once a very respectable MD section at my local Worst-Buy, but that doesn't mean they "won" the "format war" now does it?
It was obvious that the OP meant a "more powerful" army, no?
Chinas ground-force numbers hardly make it more powerful. What good are troops if you can't get them to the fight?
And as for Russian nukes... the same principle applies. How many, really, are battle ready? Their Nuke forces are much more expensive to maintain. In large part due to their decentralized C&C systems, as well as the fact that they didn't deploy MIRVs until the R-36M4. That means that they have a higher missle:warhead ratio, meaning much higher maintenance.
And do you really think these things have been nurtured the way they need to be?
I said hew as a "speculative candidate for president"
.....But yeah, thanks for the "correction" .......
And he was.
He formed an exploratory committee last year but eventually declined to enter the race after Obama, Bayh and Edwards appeared to be vying for the anti-hillary role.
Furthermore, he's alluded in the past to Presidential ambitions and I think you'll find that a Senate seat is a temporary lay over for Warner. If a Republican wins in 08 (god forbid), I'd wager you'd see a Warner candidacy in 2012.
I remember a neighbor had, IIRC, a 2400 baud that was the type that you set the receiver upon. Not sure on cost, but considering the IBM XT w/o Hard Disk, a couple hundred K of ram, and dual 5.25" floppy drives would run you $2500 in '85 ($4500 in 2006 dollars), I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
"Is there a single high end business guy who will hang up the phone if president of USA calls? What would happen if he does?"
...Before entering politics he made his billion$ running a little-known outfit called "Nextel"....
The answers are "Probably Not" and "Probably Nothing."
But, more on point...
I detest President Bush, but I would still take a call from the President of the United States if he were to call me. I mean, you wouldn't? And why not? Like it or not (and, in my case, it's NOT), Bush is the President. And I'm a patriot. And I'm not going to turn down any reasonable request made by our President.
Furthermore, there are LOADS of successful Democratic businessmen. LOADS. Millions of them. You're being ignorant if you think that's not the case. An obvious example that I just read about this morning is Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia and a speculative Presidential Candidate.
Besides, as heavy-handed as the Bush Administration has been, this is nothing, NOTHING like what Putin has done in Russia. To say that it is, undermines the seriousness of what Putin has done to Russia.
"back in those days it wasn't really a place that flower shops could have gotten anything from."
That was until FTP was discovered.
The Flower Transfer Protocol changed the internet forever.
I agree with everything you say.
First, you made an informed decision in regard to Vista and what was valuable in your own life. You took personal responsibility for your actions.
Second, You recognize the nuance in, just an example, my FAA license. You recognize that things shouldn't just be taken at face value to mean whatever you assume them to mean. You can, thru a bit of research, determine exactly what I'm qualified for.
And while you're right, there is no ability to look at the "Vista Compatible" badge itself and determine the salient details, the rest of the machines specs are, no doubt, within reach of the badge itself.
There's a very easy remedy to all this, and the remedy also works in THOUSANDS of other cases: Personal responsibility and Caveat Emptor.
I can't believe that people here are all "Wha? Marketing isn't completely obvious and i shouldn't believe ever spurious claim?! wha?!"
Exactly what I thought. Just a rabid anti-microsoft'er who can't see things objectively.
Your only issue with me is not that I LIKE microsoft (I'm 100% indifferent. They're just another brand name). Your issue is that I don't HATE Microsoft. And that taints every other part of your argument, even parts that may be correct.
Your opinion about Microsoft is no more valid than MICROSOFTS OPINION ABOUT THEMSELVES. In both cases, it's just propaganda.
That's the cost of being a fanboy or, it's grumpy opposite, the flameboy.
I don't think you understand the POINT of Caveat Emptor.
The whole POINT is that the consumer will not have "perfect information." That's the "Beware" part in "Buyer Beware" !!
Your Doctor analogy is flawed-- You're paying for expert advice. If you pay somebody for expert advice on buying a computer compatible w/ Vista Ultimate, and the advice is bad, that's a problem, and you have a cause of action against the expert that was paid to advise you. But MARKETING on a product is NOT expert advice. Nor is the name HD-DVD. My mother wasn't swindled, and either were people who bought these laptops in question that were not able to run Vista Ultimate.
They, sadly, made ASSUMPTIONS. In the case of the computer, they made assumptions about a major purchase. They are responsible.
And let's be real here... there are many cases when you're right, the buyer doesn't have the "perfect info" needed to make a perfect decision. But this is not one of those cases. They could have easily printed out specs for the version of Vista they're seeking, and compare them to the computer they're checking out. Or, in the opposite direction, they could easily take the specs of their newly-bought computer and compare them to the Vista version they're checking out. And if they can't do the comparison themselves, there's about a million places online that will offer free help, as well as probably a dozen people in everybody's life who could advise them on this, from children and grandchildren to the IT Dept at work to the guy at the computer store to whatever.