It seems that rampant Xenophobia is alive, well and being modded up on Slashdot.
As a business owner located in the EU, I'd be very interested to see evidence of any 'harsh and irrational restraints' that I'm under, as I'm not currently aware of any.
The EU monopoly abuse laws that Microsoft are so dismissive of are pretty much exactly the same as the US, it's just that we might actually be enforcing them.
As for unemployment rates, our 4.7% unemployment rate here in Britain is lower than the 5.5% in the USA. The high rates (which are lower than 10% according to the US Govt.) in France and Germany have far more to do with local left-wing economic policies and the absorption of communist East Germany respectively than EU-wide laws.
Microsoft have royally pissed off the EU, and many other jusrisdictions with their continual and unrepentant monopoly abuse, but are still in denial. Their current strategy seems to be to drag the court cases out forever, and hope they will go away. Eventually, they will have to face up to the law, pay huge fines and (here's the challenge) change their culture to a more law-abiding style.
For the film's final twist - that Ender has been fighting the actual war not just a simulator - to be feasible, the audience needs to understand the existence of Ansible, and the way the Dr. Device chain reaction works, without these explanations seeming like blatant clues as to the ending when they happen earlier on in the movie. In a 600 page novel you can hide these sorts of key facts in the general 'fleshing out' of the world, but by the time you trim it to a 2 phour script, then it gets difficult.
I'm worred that the book's plot holes will be shown up with great clarity - in my opinion it's never adequately explained why it has to be a kid who controls the fleet, rather than Wrackham. If the reason is video game skills, then I can see a swing to teenagers not young kids in the lead roles, which makes sense from the studio's point of view but will ruin the empathy.
I don't see the computer simulation episodes being a problem, they will simply look like PS3 games (bacause that's what they will be, there's money in tie-in games). Hollywood never bothers to extrapolate the state of the art when computers are concerned, witness the Nostromo in 'Alien' being less graphically capable than your cellphone.
On the upside of all this rewriting, the longer the movie takes to get made, the better the battle room / war scenes can be done with state of the art CGI.
Couldn't Google simply start it's own ISP and grow it to at least 5% the size of AOL? That would give it all the leverage (or more because they can't be outvoted by the other 95%) with none of the nasty associations.
Well, I think there's a high chance I'm being trolled here, but just in case, please try reading that quote from my post again, paying particular attention to my use of the word "scarce".
You think retaillers like turning away 1000s of potential customers, disappointing 1000s more that don't set the machines they put deposits down for before Christmas, devoting big display areas to machines they don't have stock of, or losing sales of previous gen consoles to vapourware?
If retailers could simply have the high-mark up, small, well supplied Games on their shelves instead of low mark-up, big, scarce consoles, I think they would be very happy!
Given that my cable here in Britain costs about the same as yours in America, but shows far less adverts, it's not cheaper at all. Here we have laws limiting the time advert breaks can last, and the advert-free BBC providing an alternative if the commerical channels push the limits. Advertisers here have simply learnt that having their advert shown 5 times out of 100 adverts a day is better for them than having it shown 40 times out of 1000, and they would rather have a 5% share of eyeballs than a 4%. The scarcity of advertising slots here has simply pushed the price up, the revenue to the cable/broadcast companies is exactly the same.
Count yourself lucky you don't live in Europe. The only way you'll get a PSP before christmas round here is to pay an extra £100 ($160) for a bundle.
Re:Another source of seasonal price information
on
Forbes Fictional 15
·
· Score: 1
The Christmas Price Index does indeed take account of that:
As part of its annual tradition, PNC Advisors also tabulates the "true cost of Christmas," which is the total cost of items gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song's verses. This holiday season, very generous True Loves will pay $72,608 for all 364 items, up from $66,334 in 2004
Another source of seasonal price information
on
Forbes Fictional 15
·
· Score: 1
There is the ever informative the Christmas Price Index [warning - linked site plays horrible christmas music if you have Flash insatalled] which tracks the price of obtaining 12 dummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 5 gooooooold rings, a partridge in a pear tree and so on.
"The Christmas Price Index reflects the economic trends that we have witnessed during the past year," said Jeff Kleintop, chief investment strategist for PNC Advisors. "Not only are avian flu fears and fuel costs driving prices higher, but gold prices are also on the rise. Meanwhile, wages for skilled laborers are struggling to keep up with rising expenses."
WADND (as they abreviate themselves) are not trying to take over, all they are trying to do is prevent ICANN/Verisign from doing this shady looking deal.
The article suggests to me that game companies will only need average programmers to make real good games, but they will need some absolute geniuses if they want to optimise them.
Even if you forget the SPEs entirely, and just write for one of the two threads the PPC offers, then you'll have a lot more horsepower than the PS2 to throw around. I exepct we'll see some pretty impressive early games that have the SPEs doing either nothing, or fairly minimal things like generating music, or doing little bits of algorythmic texture generation, and it will be years before we have games routinely pushing the Cell's bandwidth and processing power limits on all avaialble cores.
If I was programming, then I'd be looking at learning to deal with SPEs at the lowest possible level, as that's going to be a very important skill as other CBEA chips (ie. different varieties of Cell) start popping up everywhere.
Time for somebody independent to write a song with yellow in the title and sue the RIAAu or whatever their big label cartel is called for restricting their exposure. It's high time these illegal cartels were brought to justice.
The title should actually read "Business Week pulls some numbers out of it's ass".
Merrill Lynch did the same calculation in This Slashdot story and came up with a $61 profit per console, and they guessed $170 as the cost of the CPU compared to Business Week's $106.
Neither set of numbers include marketing, design and development costs, or the higher profist from less competitive pricing abroad - but hey, what's a few billion between friends?
Spawning processes just to do some simple animation is exactly the sort of wastefulness I'm complaining about, and leads to unresponsiveness. Arcade games managed this sort of thing with a 1Mhz 8-bit chip precicely because they didn't carry around a mess of abstraction. If phones kept things simple (and I can see no resaon for a file system any more complex than that of (say) an Apple II) then the power requirements would drastically reduce, and the battert life would rise drastically.
I have to wonder why a telephone needs an OS. In an environment where CPU power is an incredibly valuable resource, responsiveness is essentiual and there are none of the complications of device drivers and hard disks, surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
Apple only sells around 10 different Macs, but Dell sells countless different machines with constant spec changes for each type. Consequentally, Apple probably sell more base spec Minis than Dell does of any given spec, so economies of scale are actually a lot more in Apple's favour than those calling their hardware 'exotic' might think.
Secondly, Apple won't be paying the Windows tax on it's x86 machines, and everybody else (except Linux vendors) will. This gives Apple a price advantage, they could actually undecut Dell if they chose to.
Why does everyone assume we'll be paying a sizable premium for an Apple machine? Because G5s looked more expensive than X86s? That's (if you'll pardon the pun) Apples v. Oranges. Now we are moving to a situation where Apple can be compared a lot more easily to other manufacturers, I think they will either be forced to be competitive, or be revealed to have been competitive all along. Certainly going with IBM/Motorola for CPUs was a big expense for them, or they wouldn't be changing to Intel, so they should have more room for price cuts when they are with Intel.
I think that a big and often overlooked factor in Apple's decision to stay a hardware company is that becoming an OS vendor would quickly shift them above Google as the number 1 target for Mircosoft's wrath, and Microsoft could seriously damage them (without even breaking too many laws this time) just by saying "No more Office for OS X". The general public don't know a CPU from C3PO and are probably going to percieve a x86 box without Office as less compatible with their Windows machine than a G5 with Office was.
...and laughably inaccurate. Did you know The Xbox 360 has a Cell processor?
CoolTechZone couldn't even link the pages together properly (pages 2 and 3 are identical). The speculation on the Revolution is the sort of thing I'd expect from a 5-year-old... It might have virtual reality goggles and force feedback on the wireless controller (Newton's third law anyone?). Yes, and you might get a pullitzer prize!
I particularly liked the comment on graphics "nobody can really comment on the actual performance between the two", which was of course followed by several comments on the actual performance between the two.
The Xbox's remote control is "so you don't have to get up every time you want to change something." - such journalistic insight!
"it seems obvious that Xbox 360 will have HD-DVD support". Obvious unless you actually read any reliable source, or think for more than a moment about the fact that it's shipping in 2 weeks and HD-DVD isn't, presumably?
"Sony's strategy is to wait". Ahh - and there was I thinking they might actually be finishing development, gearing up for mass production, fabricating chips and writing games, etc!
"...if the Xbox 360 takes off, Sony will be positively behind" - well at least they are not negatively behind, eh?
"As far as pure specifications are concerned, the situation is exactly reversed" - umm, sorry, you've lost me there!
"Nintendo's idea of targeting to the younger demographics aren't particularly exciting" - where's a grammar Nazi when you need one?
"Remember Mario? It's a trademark character for Nintendo, if you will,..." or just a competent subeditor?
"Nintendo plans to get rid of the traditional wired (or not) game pads and wants to make them more interactive. This will put you in the middle of the game with your movements controlling those of the game characters." Making things more interactive by getting rid of them? Crafty!
"The absolute novelty of the experience will probably carry all of the new titles that Nintendo will come out with." Is English this guy's first language?
"Doom III is an FPS game" no, it's a FPS game. Write it out 100 times in detention, boy!
"What about other realism inducing effects?" What indeed!
"That's unclear at the moment, and it's something that we'll have to wait and see." what both unclear AND we'll have to wait and see. Wow, that's like, twice as unknown then, right, dude?
Maybe that's an american usage? To me in England, revenue = profit, and what you are describing is called turnover.
In order to get the highest number possible for PR purposes, Microsoft will probably be getting their figures from the prices shops will be selling at, not the prices they are selling the machines to shops at, and they may well be including units that shops have ordered on a non-cancellable basis by shops (but have not yet been delivered) in their count of how many have been 'sold' too.
Here, 17.5% is tax. The article can't be talking about revenue, since even the most optimistic estimates assume Microsoft is making next to no profit on the first few million consoles, it's far more likely to be turnover that is being discussed.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that rampant Xenophobia is alive, well and being modded up on Slashdot.
As a business owner located in the EU, I'd be very interested to see evidence of any 'harsh and irrational restraints' that I'm under, as I'm not currently aware of any.
The EU monopoly abuse laws that Microsoft are so dismissive of are pretty much exactly the same as the US, it's just that we might actually be enforcing them.
As for unemployment rates, our 4.7% unemployment rate here in Britain is lower than the 5.5% in the USA. The high rates (which are lower than 10% according to the US Govt.) in France and Germany have far more to do with local left-wing economic policies and the absorption of communist East Germany respectively than EU-wide laws.
Microsoft have royally pissed off the EU, and many other jusrisdictions with their continual and unrepentant monopoly abuse, but are still in denial. Their current strategy seems to be to drag the court cases out forever, and hope they will go away. Eventually, they will have to face up to the law, pay huge fines and (here's the challenge) change their culture to a more law-abiding style.
For the film's final twist - that Ender has been fighting the actual war not just a simulator - to be feasible, the audience needs to understand the existence of Ansible, and the way the Dr. Device chain reaction works, without these explanations seeming like blatant clues as to the ending when they happen earlier on in the movie. In a 600 page novel you can hide these sorts of key facts in the general 'fleshing out' of the world, but by the time you trim it to a 2 phour script, then it gets difficult.
I'm worred that the book's plot holes will be shown up with great clarity - in my opinion it's never adequately explained why it has to be a kid who controls the fleet, rather than Wrackham. If the reason is video game skills, then I can see a swing to teenagers not young kids in the lead roles, which makes sense from the studio's point of view but will ruin the empathy.
I don't see the computer simulation episodes being a problem, they will simply look like PS3 games (bacause that's what they will be, there's money in tie-in games). Hollywood never bothers to extrapolate the state of the art when computers are concerned, witness the Nostromo in 'Alien' being less graphically capable than your cellphone.
On the upside of all this rewriting, the longer the movie takes to get made, the better the battle room / war scenes can be done with state of the art CGI.
Couldn't Google simply start it's own ISP and grow it to at least 5% the size of AOL? That would give it all the leverage (or more because they can't be outvoted by the other 95%) with none of the nasty associations.
Well, I think there's a high chance I'm being trolled here, but just in case, please try reading that quote from my post again, paying particular attention to my use of the word "scarce".
You think retaillers like turning away 1000s of potential customers, disappointing 1000s more that don't set the machines they put deposits down for before Christmas, devoting big display areas to machines they don't have stock of, or losing sales of previous gen consoles to vapourware?
If retailers could simply have the high-mark up, small, well supplied Games on their shelves instead of low mark-up, big, scarce consoles, I think they would be very happy!
Put the initial shipments on ebay with a minimum bid of $300, and donate the additional profits to charity?
Given that my cable here in Britain costs about the same as yours in America, but shows far less adverts, it's not cheaper at all. Here we have laws limiting the time advert breaks can last, and the advert-free BBC providing an alternative if the commerical channels push the limits. Advertisers here have simply learnt that having their advert shown 5 times out of 100 adverts a day is better for them than having it shown 40 times out of 1000, and they would rather have a 5% share of eyeballs than a 4%. The scarcity of advertising slots here has simply pushed the price up, the revenue to the cable/broadcast companies is exactly the same.
Some of us are fighting a war against adverts all over the internet. So called clickfraud looks like a nice weapon to me.
Count yourself lucky you don't live in Europe. The only way you'll get a PSP before christmas round here is to pay an extra £100 ($160) for a bundle.
The Christmas Price Index does indeed take account of that:
As part of its annual tradition, PNC Advisors also tabulates the "true cost of Christmas," which is the total cost of items gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song's verses. This holiday season, very generous True Loves will pay $72,608 for all 364 items, up from $66,334 in 2004
There is the ever informative the Christmas Price Index [warning - linked site plays horrible christmas music if you have Flash insatalled] which tracks the price of obtaining 12 dummers drumming, 11 pipers piping, 5 gooooooold rings, a partridge in a pear tree and so on.
"The Christmas Price Index reflects the economic trends that we have witnessed during the past year," said Jeff Kleintop, chief investment strategist for PNC Advisors. "Not only are avian flu fears and fuel costs driving prices higher, but gold prices are also on the rise. Meanwhile, wages for skilled laborers are struggling to keep up with rising expenses."
WADND (as they abreviate themselves) are not trying to take over, all they are trying to do is prevent ICANN/Verisign from doing this shady looking deal.
The article suggests to me that game companies will only need average programmers to make real good games, but they will need some absolute geniuses if they want to optimise them.
Even if you forget the SPEs entirely, and just write for one of the two threads the PPC offers, then you'll have a lot more horsepower than the PS2 to throw around. I exepct we'll see some pretty impressive early games that have the SPEs doing either nothing, or fairly minimal things like generating music, or doing little bits of algorythmic texture generation, and it will be years before we have games routinely pushing the Cell's bandwidth and processing power limits on all avaialble cores.
If I was programming, then I'd be looking at learning to deal with SPEs at the lowest possible level, as that's going to be a very important skill as other CBEA chips (ie. different varieties of Cell) start popping up everywhere.
Time for somebody independent to write a song with yellow in the title and sue the RIAAu or whatever their big label cartel is called for restricting their exposure. It's high time these illegal cartels were brought to justice.
The title should actually read "Business Week pulls some numbers out of it's ass".
Merrill Lynch did the same calculation in This Slashdot story and came up with a $61 profit per console, and they guessed $170 as the cost of the CPU compared to Business Week's $106.
Neither set of numbers include marketing, design and development costs, or the higher profist from less competitive pricing abroad - but hey, what's a few billion between friends?
Spawning processes just to do some simple animation is exactly the sort of wastefulness I'm complaining about, and leads to unresponsiveness. Arcade games managed this sort of thing with a 1Mhz 8-bit chip precicely because they didn't carry around a mess of abstraction. If phones kept things simple (and I can see no resaon for a file system any more complex than that of (say) an Apple II) then the power requirements would drastically reduce, and the battert life would rise drastically.
I have to wonder why a telephone needs an OS. In an environment where CPU power is an incredibly valuable resource, responsiveness is essentiual and there are none of the complications of device drivers and hard disks, surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
Dupe of a dupe, actually
Apple only sells around 10 different Macs, but Dell sells countless different machines with constant spec changes for each type. Consequentally, Apple probably sell more base spec Minis than Dell does of any given spec, so economies of scale are actually a lot more in Apple's favour than those calling their hardware 'exotic' might think.
Secondly, Apple won't be paying the Windows tax on it's x86 machines, and everybody else (except Linux vendors) will. This gives Apple a price advantage, they could actually undecut Dell if they chose to.
Why does everyone assume we'll be paying a sizable premium for an Apple machine? Because G5s looked more expensive than X86s? That's (if you'll pardon the pun) Apples v. Oranges. Now we are moving to a situation where Apple can be compared a lot more easily to other manufacturers, I think they will either be forced to be competitive, or be revealed to have been competitive all along. Certainly going with IBM/Motorola for CPUs was a big expense for them, or they wouldn't be changing to Intel, so they should have more room for price cuts when they are with Intel.
I think that a big and often overlooked factor in Apple's decision to stay a hardware company is that becoming an OS vendor would quickly shift them above Google as the number 1 target for Mircosoft's wrath, and Microsoft could seriously damage them (without even breaking too many laws this time) just by saying "No more Office for OS X". The general public don't know a CPU from C3PO and are probably going to percieve a x86 box without Office as less compatible with their Windows machine than a G5 with Office was.
Where do you think we get beef jerky from?
"A First Person Shooter, A First Person Shooter, A First Person Shooter."
...and laughably inaccurate. Did you know The Xbox 360 has a Cell processor?
CoolTechZone couldn't even link the pages together properly (pages 2 and 3 are identical). The speculation on the Revolution is the sort of thing I'd expect from a 5-year-old... It might have virtual reality goggles and force feedback on the wireless controller (Newton's third law anyone?). Yes, and you might get a pullitzer prize!
I particularly liked the comment on graphics "nobody can really comment on the actual performance between the two", which was of course followed by several comments on the actual performance between the two.
The Xbox's remote control is "so you don't have to get up every time you want to change something." - such journalistic insight!
"it seems obvious that Xbox 360 will have HD-DVD support". Obvious unless you actually read any reliable source, or think for more than a moment about the fact that it's shipping in 2 weeks and HD-DVD isn't, presumably?
"Sony's strategy is to wait". Ahh - and there was I thinking they might actually be finishing development, gearing up for mass production, fabricating chips and writing games, etc!
"...if the Xbox 360 takes off, Sony will be positively behind" - well at least they are not negatively behind, eh?
"As far as pure specifications are concerned, the situation is exactly reversed" - umm, sorry, you've lost me there!
"Nintendo's idea of targeting to the younger demographics aren't particularly exciting" - where's a grammar Nazi when you need one?
"Remember Mario? It's a trademark character for Nintendo, if you will,..." or just a competent subeditor?
"Nintendo plans to get rid of the traditional wired (or not) game pads and wants to make them more interactive. This will put you in the middle of the game with your movements controlling those of the game characters." Making things more interactive by getting rid of them? Crafty!
"The absolute novelty of the experience will probably carry all of the new titles that Nintendo will come out with." Is English this guy's first language?
"Doom III is an FPS game" no, it's a FPS game. Write it out 100 times in detention, boy!
"What about other realism inducing effects?" What indeed!
"That's unclear at the moment, and it's something that we'll have to wait and see." what both unclear AND we'll have to wait and see. Wow, that's like, twice as unknown then, right, dude?
Maybe that's an american usage? To me in England, revenue = profit, and what you are describing is called turnover.
In order to get the highest number possible for PR purposes, Microsoft will probably be getting their figures from the prices shops will be selling at, not the prices they are selling the machines to shops at, and they may well be including units that shops have ordered on a non-cancellable basis by shops (but have not yet been delivered) in their count of how many have been 'sold' too.
Here, 17.5% is tax. The article can't be talking about revenue, since even the most optimistic estimates assume Microsoft is making next to no profit on the first few million consoles, it's far more likely to be turnover that is being discussed.