Oh... and you seem to have missed the fact that I'm not a Republican. And while I'm at least as opposed to the erosion of liberties in America as you are, part of that means not acting like a loon. Suggesting that we should kill other Americans to make your point -- even in jest -- is the precise sort of thing that encourages further erosion of liberties.
Revolutions are not won by killing the right people off. If that were true, then our war in Iraq would be justified. Revolutions are won by getting the enthusiastic cooperation of the masses throughout a nation. Before we could revolt against England, supporters of the idea had to convince the population -- most of whom saw themselves as Englishmen -- that it was a noble cause. Once that was done, sending troops was a futile gesture by England.
The crazy you're spewing from your keyboard can only serve to convince others that further erosion of liberty is necessary.
If you look up the definition of "counterproductive" in the dictionary, you know what you'll find? The definition of counterproductive. Which you are being.
You are, of course, also right that murdering all the Republicans will solve the world's ills.
You: Wow, what a far out idea. I, of course, never said anything of the sort.
No? Then what does "Be a patriot. Murder a Republican" mean in your sig?
Given events of the past week, if I were you, I'd change your sig. Someone is liable to think you're serious. And if you are serious, then you're a psycho nutbag.
Of course, you realize that the Chinese idea of "rich" is what we over here call "lower middle class."
You know, the "rich" Chinese can actually afford, like, a DVD player. And note that a DVD player is far, far, far less expensive over there than it is here.
It's not that I'm hearing waveform interaction; it's that I'm -not- hearing the waveform interaction. Or rather, my ear, when decoding the waveform into its component frequencies, is getting frequencies that are modulating due to aliasing rather than the original, pure tones. If there are only a couple of ultra-high frequency things happening, it's no big deal; but in most rock music, you get tons of high frequencies interacting with each other. If a guitarist on the fuzzy channel plays a chord with more than three strings at the same time a snare drum hits while a cymbal's still ringing and the singer is shrieking out the letter "t" -- when this sound is played back, you just get a bunch of noise. I mean, not the GOOD kind of noise.
If you remember MOD music back in the days of the PC demo scene or Amiga, then you remember that kind of unfiltered digital distortion at the low sample rates of the time. It's that same sound, but at a much higher pitch.
That is a very interesting and informative post. I know firsthand of the difficulty in preserving sound quality over digital means versus analog means, and I also agree with you that modern pop music has gone overboard with dynamic compression.
I think with audio, there's an awful lot of baggage and religion that makes reasonable discussions very difficult. It's too easy to hear one claim and think that it's another. You seem to be addressing a claim I haven't made, without addressing the claim I did make, which is this: In an apples-to-apples comparison, a couple of good tapes have apparently superior high-range than the same recordings on a CD.
My hypothesis is that it has to do with the limitations of PCM encoding as much as a low sample rate. If so, then the solution isn't necessarily to switch to vinyl, because PCM certainly isn't the only way to encode a waveform digitally.
In my experience, increasing the sample rate up to 96kHz alone helped a lot. An awful lot. It still wasn't quite as good as the original, but it was good. And that right there is a hint as to what the problem is.
Thanks. Yeah, there seems to be an awful lot of bullshit baggage in discussions about audio, none of which I'm really conversant in. To me, this is a simple mathematical exercise: PCM encoding fails to reproduce the slope of a sound wave (which can approach infinity) and it fails to account for essentially infinite phase differences. You can increase your sample rate and resolution to compensate and give your DAC a few more hints about how to construct the wave between the points you've stored, but to get a significant improvement you have to increase these by a few orders of magnitude, which seems wasteful.
It seems to me that there should be a better way to store waveform data digitally than PCM to compensate that doesn't result in a massive expansion in the amount of data stored.
There's a bigger problem than mastering, especially where rock is concerned.
I started wondering about this a few months ago when I was transferring some of my ancient cassettes to digital with my ancient, but quality, tape deck. I was astonished to discover that two of my cassettes -- Sammy Hagar's Unboxed and AC/DC's Who Made Who -- sounded better than every CD in my collection. And in the latter case, we're talking about a 21-year old cassette that has had tons of play and sat in the car through ski trips and Summers in Texas. And here's the layman's version of what I figured out:
The more high frequencies you have interacting with each other, the more little squiggles you get in your waveform that are way beyond the range of human hearing. The squiggles come from the fact that the high-frequency sounds are out of phase with each other, and constantly shifting in phase relative to each other. Now although those little squiggles in the waveform are beyond what you or I can hear, our ears aren't looking for those squiggles -- they're looking for the harmonics that comprised those squiggles. But PCM encoding doesn't do that; it's trying to capture the actual waveform. Since those squiggles are well beyond the sample rate of a CD, they're fucking messed up. Sharp points get sheared off, the tiny squiggles disappear, and the sound wave that ends up being recorded gets aliased across a range of different frequencies.
When played back, instead of responding to a set of pure harmonic frequencies, our ears pick up a random assortment of frequencies near the originals. The crash cymbal goes "TSHHHH" instead of "TSSSS."
Now the standard objection to this argument so far goes something like this: Yeah, well man, vinyl and cassettes don't respond well much above, like, 18kHz!
There's two flaws with that objection.
First, an analog deck's frequency response may not go beyond 18kHz, but what happens is that those higher frequencies just fade beyond the noise threshold. They do not get mucked about with. And if you mix together multiple frequencies at 18kHz and below, record them, and play them back, you can deconstruct the result into the original waveforms pretty cleanly, because an analog recording device doesn't have quants that can go out of phase.
The other problem is that the pitches in question don't even have to be close to the Nyquist frequency (half the sample rate -- 22kHz on a CD, which is slightly above most people's range of hearing) if there's more than a few of them. And with rock 'n' roll is that you have tons of high-frequency shit going on. You've got the lead singer's shriek, the crash cymbals, the gate on the snare (and sometimes bass) drum, and the guitar on the fuzzy channel. All of those frequencies mix together, out of phase with each other.
The ultimate result of all of this is that high-frequency joy, those sharp high-frequency peaks in the guitar, the splash of the cymbals, the things that all combine together that made rock become the dominate pop music form for 30 years, disappeared once CDs became the main standard for audio. And rock, outside of the live show, hasn't sounded right ever since.
Truly, you have defeated me with your dizzying command of logic. I surrender!
You are, of course, also right that murdering all the Republicans will solve the world's ills. The 100 million or so who die will help ease the pain of the thousands who died in Iraq. And truly, as a one-party nation, then truly will our votes count! I doubt the Democrats, noble as they are, would ever misuse that power, so why not blindly follow them wherever they go? We know that all Republicans are truly evil, destitue souls devoid of any quality worth, as you suggest, allowing them to live.
You are truly a person not to lose sight of the larger picture, the grand scheme of things. You are not one of those who is too quick to judge! You are slow to anger, and measured in your response.
Wise one, I commit ritual seppuku, for my ignorance in the face of your wisdom has shamed me! After I click Submit, I will stab myself through the heart with a kitchen knife, that my stupidity might never harm the world again!
Yeah, and I'll admit this is a big reason why I voted Republican in 2000: I saw the writing on the wall with the way the Democrats were cozying up to the RIAA.
I can't say that the results are quite what I hoped.
I'm pretty much voting for Mack Brown from now on.
I present to you the Beagle Bros Big Tip Book for the Apple ][, by Bert Kersey, ISBN-10: 0553342800, ISBN-13: 9780553342802, Publisher: Bantam Books - 1986. (I forgot the page number, but it's in there, complete with how it works and an example program.)
As everyone knows, the Apple ][ graphics system was 128 pixels wide -- in color. But in monochrome, one could get 256 pixels wide. What the above book details is a way to get 512 pixels wide on any standard Apple ][ -- no 80-column adapter or 128KB necessary.
It's the exact same algorithm ClearType uses.
2. The parties must give a damn.
Novell just signed their soul away to Microsoft, demonstrating that they don't give a damn. This is just the first step in the suckyzation of Novell's free Linux offal^H^Herings. This sort of thing has been around for decades, so why hasn't anyone challenged the patent? Because nobody gives a crap, that's why. Everybody's using Fedora or Ubuntu if they're going free, anyway.
Start with two things that have been pointed out here.
As many other posts have pointed out, MP3 is not an open standard. Encoding and decoding requires payment of licensing fees to Fraunhofer IIS. AAC is an open, royalty-free standard.
Also, as has already been pointed out, AAC at X bps sounds better than MP3 at X bps, in general.
What happens as a result of this?
People who buy un-DRM'ed AAC files begin sharing them in addition to their own home-brewed AAC and MP3 files.
Free audio codecs are all going to switch to AAC, since they don't have to pay any license fees.
The above two trends will increase. Over a ten-year period, the relevance of MP3 will decrease more and more, in the same way that PCI architecture replaced ISA architecture in PC's; the number of people who require MP3 support will diminish to the point where manufacturers will revisit whether the cost of MP3 codec licensing is worth the loss in sales.
Just as motherboards that have ISA slots are extremely rare today, audio players that support MP3 will be rare a dozen years hence.
Re:I disagree with Smart Appliances being listed
on
The Top 21 Tech Flops
·
· Score: 1
"As soon as RFID replaces bar codes,..."
You mean, never?
RFID will never replace bar codes. Know why?
Bar codes work better.
It's just that simple. The physics of passive RFID tags alone present a ridiculous obstacle: It requires a transmitter powerful enough to warm your skin to give a tag enough power to transmit a code back, and even that is unreliable, even in pointblank range, with more than a few tags. On top of that, the cost of the damned things is immensely greater than that of a bar code. And from a practical consideration, what is the RFID tag giving you for that extra cost that you weren't getting before with bar codes? Since the tag readers have to be lined up just so and many packaging materials reflect or absorb microwaves, you still need line-of-sight. And this is just to track packages in an industrial setting; all of these things get worse once you try them within the store.
Privacy aficionados everywhere sigh in disappointment, that they will never have a chance to test their brilliant method for sabotaging RFID, because it sabotages itself in this application.
Notice that you've not heard about Wal-Mart's big investment in RFID in a long time? It's because Wal-Mart ran their trials. Guess what happened in those trials? It didn't do what it was supposed to do. Suppliers said, "We aren't about to use RFID because it will cost us more and gain us less, so you can find another supplier if you want us to switch." Game over, RFID.
I continued receiving an RFID hype e-mail for about a year afterwards. It was pathetic and hilarious.
And now that I think of it, I'm wondering why RFID isn't in TFA. It has all the hallmarks of one of the most collossal tech flops.
1. They sold Vista by showing off Aero. 2. They give the "Works with Vista" logo to computers. 3. Most of #2 do not meet the requirements for #1. 4. You know how car ads have "Shown with optional equipment" on them? Well, Microsoft failed to mention #3 when doing #1. 5. Mentioning #3 while showing #1 is not legally optional.
The obvious solution to the different desires and needs of different users is configurability. Of course, if you throw too much configuration at a user, you end up with something that is impossible to use for simple configurations.
That problem has been solved already. Once upon a time, there was a graphical desktop system called...
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Suppose there was a way to, you know, show and hide configuration based on a user's needs? Call it a "difficulty setting" for the GUI. People who just want to go through the basics get some common templates for settings, and don't even see most of the configuration options. People who are slightly more sophisticated get another level of complexity; they can actually change the UI templates.
Power users get all kinds of details. They don't need templates any more; they create their own configurations per application. And finally, you have every potential configuration option in the universe visible and modifiable.
Once upon a time, there was a GUI that did this. it wasn't perfect; sometimes a level 1 user had to switch to level 2 to find just that one feature she needed. Sometimes a user had most of what she needed at level 3, but also a handful of things she wished she could do without. But even just giving her the option made her feel more empowered.
Sony only needs to sell 4 million more PS3's to catch up to where the Xbox 360 is today.
Of course, this assumes that Microsoft decides to stop selling the Xbox 360 for a period of time until Sony catches up.
Assuming European sales double the rest of the world's PS3 sales for each month, that means Microsoft would have to stop selling the 360 for about a year for Sony to catch up. (2*125k consoles/month * 12 months = 3 million. Not too shabby, really.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft has not stopped selling X360s. And they are in fact widening the already monstrous gap made possible by a year-long delay.
But I guess if you're a PS3 fan, you've got to take your victories when you get 'em, eh?
The small, minor, tiny little problem Sony has is that no matter how well they're doing compared to the Xbox 360 last year, they started a year later. The PS3 has to sell as many units as the Xbox 360 did last year at this time plus as many units as the Xbox 360 is selling now. And if they do that for the rest of the year, then they will be merely tied with the Xbox 360 in November. Both will be far behind the Wii, if current sell-through rates continue.
Unfortunately for Sony, they are only barely meeting last year's extremely supply-constrained Xbox 360 sales. And by failing to meet Xbox 360 sell-through figures, they are losing ground at a ridiculous pace.
Sony doesn't get to hop into a time machine and pretend the last year's Xbox 360 sales didn't happen.
Sony is 4 million units behind Microsoft, and that gap is growing every month.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... and you seem to have missed the fact that I'm not a Republican. And while I'm at least as opposed to the erosion of liberties in America as you are, part of that means not acting like a loon. Suggesting that we should kill other Americans to make your point -- even in jest -- is the precise sort of thing that encourages further erosion of liberties.
Revolutions are not won by killing the right people off. If that were true, then our war in Iraq would be justified. Revolutions are won by getting the enthusiastic cooperation of the masses throughout a nation. Before we could revolt against England, supporters of the idea had to convince the population -- most of whom saw themselves as Englishmen -- that it was a noble cause. Once that was done, sending troops was a futile gesture by England.
The crazy you're spewing from your keyboard can only serve to convince others that further erosion of liberty is necessary.
If you look up the definition of "counterproductive" in the dictionary, you know what you'll find? The definition of counterproductive. Which you are being.
Now go away before I taunt you another time.
No? Then what does "Be a patriot. Murder a Republican" mean in your sig?
Given events of the past week, if I were you, I'd change your sig. Someone is liable to think you're serious. And if you are serious, then you're a psycho nutbag.
Dumb question:
Does Compiz/Beryl work with Kubuntu as easily as it does with Ubuntu?
Of course, you realize that the Chinese idea of "rich" is what we over here call "lower middle class."
You know, the "rich" Chinese can actually afford, like, a DVD player. And note that a DVD player is far, far, far less expensive over there than it is here.
It's not that I'm hearing waveform interaction; it's that I'm -not- hearing the waveform interaction. Or rather, my ear, when decoding the waveform into its component frequencies, is getting frequencies that are modulating due to aliasing rather than the original, pure tones. If there are only a couple of ultra-high frequency things happening, it's no big deal; but in most rock music, you get tons of high frequencies interacting with each other. If a guitarist on the fuzzy channel plays a chord with more than three strings at the same time a snare drum hits while a cymbal's still ringing and the singer is shrieking out the letter "t" -- when this sound is played back, you just get a bunch of noise. I mean, not the GOOD kind of noise.
If you remember MOD music back in the days of the PC demo scene or Amiga, then you remember that kind of unfiltered digital distortion at the low sample rates of the time. It's that same sound, but at a much higher pitch.
Ick.
Agreed; live is the only way to go. We just bought tickets for the LA Opera's next season, and I can't wait!
That is a very interesting and informative post. I know firsthand of the difficulty in preserving sound quality over digital means versus analog means, and I also agree with you that modern pop music has gone overboard with dynamic compression.
I think with audio, there's an awful lot of baggage and religion that makes reasonable discussions very difficult. It's too easy to hear one claim and think that it's another. You seem to be addressing a claim I haven't made, without addressing the claim I did make, which is this: In an apples-to-apples comparison, a couple of good tapes have apparently superior high-range than the same recordings on a CD.
My hypothesis is that it has to do with the limitations of PCM encoding as much as a low sample rate. If so, then the solution isn't necessarily to switch to vinyl, because PCM certainly isn't the only way to encode a waveform digitally.
In my experience, increasing the sample rate up to 96kHz alone helped a lot. An awful lot. It still wasn't quite as good as the original, but it was good. And that right there is a hint as to what the problem is.
Thanks. Yeah, there seems to be an awful lot of bullshit baggage in discussions about audio, none of which I'm really conversant in. To me, this is a simple mathematical exercise: PCM encoding fails to reproduce the slope of a sound wave (which can approach infinity) and it fails to account for essentially infinite phase differences. You can increase your sample rate and resolution to compensate and give your DAC a few more hints about how to construct the wave between the points you've stored, but to get a significant improvement you have to increase these by a few orders of magnitude, which seems wasteful.
It seems to me that there should be a better way to store waveform data digitally than PCM to compensate that doesn't result in a massive expansion in the amount of data stored.
There's a bigger problem than mastering, especially where rock is concerned.
I started wondering about this a few months ago when I was transferring some of my ancient cassettes to digital with my ancient, but quality, tape deck. I was astonished to discover that two of my cassettes -- Sammy Hagar's Unboxed and AC/DC's Who Made Who -- sounded better than every CD in my collection. And in the latter case, we're talking about a 21-year old cassette that has had tons of play and sat in the car through ski trips and Summers in Texas. And here's the layman's version of what I figured out:
The more high frequencies you have interacting with each other, the more little squiggles you get in your waveform that are way beyond the range of human hearing. The squiggles come from the fact that the high-frequency sounds are out of phase with each other, and constantly shifting in phase relative to each other. Now although those little squiggles in the waveform are beyond what you or I can hear, our ears aren't looking for those squiggles -- they're looking for the harmonics that comprised those squiggles. But PCM encoding doesn't do that; it's trying to capture the actual waveform. Since those squiggles are well beyond the sample rate of a CD, they're fucking messed up. Sharp points get sheared off, the tiny squiggles disappear, and the sound wave that ends up being recorded gets aliased across a range of different frequencies.
When played back, instead of responding to a set of pure harmonic frequencies, our ears pick up a random assortment of frequencies near the originals. The crash cymbal goes "TSHHHH" instead of "TSSSS."
Now the standard objection to this argument so far goes something like this: Yeah, well man, vinyl and cassettes don't respond well much above, like, 18kHz!
There's two flaws with that objection.
First, an analog deck's frequency response may not go beyond 18kHz, but what happens is that those higher frequencies just fade beyond the noise threshold. They do not get mucked about with. And if you mix together multiple frequencies at 18kHz and below, record them, and play them back, you can deconstruct the result into the original waveforms pretty cleanly, because an analog recording device doesn't have quants that can go out of phase.
The other problem is that the pitches in question don't even have to be close to the Nyquist frequency (half the sample rate -- 22kHz on a CD, which is slightly above most people's range of hearing) if there's more than a few of them. And with rock 'n' roll is that you have tons of high-frequency shit going on. You've got the lead singer's shriek, the crash cymbals, the gate on the snare (and sometimes bass) drum, and the guitar on the fuzzy channel. All of those frequencies mix together, out of phase with each other.
The ultimate result of all of this is that high-frequency joy, those sharp high-frequency peaks in the guitar, the splash of the cymbals, the things that all combine together that made rock become the dominate pop music form for 30 years, disappeared once CDs became the main standard for audio. And rock, outside of the live show, hasn't sounded right ever since.
Truly, you have defeated me with your dizzying command of logic. I surrender!
You are, of course, also right that murdering all the Republicans will solve the world's ills. The 100 million or so who die will help ease the pain of the thousands who died in Iraq. And truly, as a one-party nation, then truly will our votes count! I doubt the Democrats, noble as they are, would ever misuse that power, so why not blindly follow them wherever they go? We know that all Republicans are truly evil, destitue souls devoid of any quality worth, as you suggest, allowing them to live.
You are truly a person not to lose sight of the larger picture, the grand scheme of things. You are not one of those who is too quick to judge! You are slow to anger, and measured in your response.
Wise one, I commit ritual seppuku, for my ignorance in the face of your wisdom has shamed me! After I click Submit, I will stab myself through the heart with a kitchen knife, that my stupidity might never harm the world again!
Yeah, and I'll admit this is a big reason why I voted Republican in 2000: I saw the writing on the wall with the way the Democrats were cozying up to the RIAA.
I can't say that the results are quite what I hoped.
I'm pretty much voting for Mack Brown from now on.
280, 256, whatever. Ya talk at me like I never programmed an Apple ][ in HGR mode before. :)
There are two things that must exist.
1. It must be documented.
I present to you the Beagle Bros Big Tip Book for the Apple ][, by Bert Kersey, ISBN-10: 0553342800, ISBN-13: 9780553342802, Publisher: Bantam Books - 1986. (I forgot the page number, but it's in there, complete with how it works and an example program.)
As everyone knows, the Apple ][ graphics system was 128 pixels wide -- in color. But in monochrome, one could get 256 pixels wide. What the above book details is a way to get 512 pixels wide on any standard Apple ][ -- no 80-column adapter or 128KB necessary.
It's the exact same algorithm ClearType uses.
2. The parties must give a damn.
Novell just signed their soul away to Microsoft, demonstrating that they don't give a damn. This is just the first step in the suckyzation of Novell's free Linux offal^H^Herings. This sort of thing has been around for decades, so why hasn't anyone challenged the patent? Because nobody gives a crap, that's why. Everybody's using Fedora or Ubuntu if they're going free, anyway.
"This will change too, but if your business docs are in nothing but Word and Excel, you are not going anywhere soon."
In more ways than one.
Start with two things that have been pointed out here.
What happens as a result of this?
The above two trends will increase. Over a ten-year period, the relevance of MP3 will decrease more and more, in the same way that PCI architecture replaced ISA architecture in PC's; the number of people who require MP3 support will diminish to the point where manufacturers will revisit whether the cost of MP3 codec licensing is worth the loss in sales.
Just as motherboards that have ISA slots are extremely rare today, audio players that support MP3 will be rare a dozen years hence.
"As soon as RFID replaces bar codes, ..."
You mean, never?
RFID will never replace bar codes. Know why?
Bar codes work better.
It's just that simple. The physics of passive RFID tags alone present a ridiculous obstacle: It requires a transmitter powerful enough to warm your skin to give a tag enough power to transmit a code back, and even that is unreliable, even in pointblank range, with more than a few tags. On top of that, the cost of the damned things is immensely greater than that of a bar code. And from a practical consideration, what is the RFID tag giving you for that extra cost that you weren't getting before with bar codes? Since the tag readers have to be lined up just so and many packaging materials reflect or absorb microwaves, you still need line-of-sight. And this is just to track packages in an industrial setting; all of these things get worse once you try them within the store.
Privacy aficionados everywhere sigh in disappointment, that they will never have a chance to test their brilliant method for sabotaging RFID, because it sabotages itself in this application.
Notice that you've not heard about Wal-Mart's big investment in RFID in a long time? It's because Wal-Mart ran their trials. Guess what happened in those trials? It didn't do what it was supposed to do. Suppliers said, "We aren't about to use RFID because it will cost us more and gain us less, so you can find another supplier if you want us to switch." Game over, RFID.
I continued receiving an RFID hype e-mail for about a year afterwards. It was pathetic and hilarious.
And now that I think of it, I'm wondering why RFID isn't in TFA. It has all the hallmarks of one of the most collossal tech flops.
1. They sold Vista by showing off Aero.
2. They give the "Works with Vista" logo to computers.
3. Most of #2 do not meet the requirements for #1.
4. You know how car ads have "Shown with optional equipment" on them? Well, Microsoft failed to mention #3 when doing #1.
5. Mentioning #3 while showing #1 is not legally optional.
In other words, there's a pretty good case here.
Or Apple's OS X, for that matter.
Rocket-jumping in Quake, for that matter. Totally unintentional, but became a key part of the game.
Gah! AS/400s? EVEN WORSE! Akers' incompetence and focus on this hunk o' junk is how Microsoft was able to become the Evil Empire...
The obvious solution to the different desires and needs of different users is configurability. Of course, if you throw too much configuration at a user, you end up with something that is impossible to use for simple configurations.
That problem has been solved already. Once upon a time, there was a graphical desktop system called...
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Suppose there was a way to, you know, show and hide configuration based on a user's needs? Call it a "difficulty setting" for the GUI. People who just want to go through the basics get some common templates for settings, and don't even see most of the configuration options. People who are slightly more sophisticated get another level of complexity; they can actually change the UI templates.
Power users get all kinds of details. They don't need templates any more; they create their own configurations per application. And finally, you have every potential configuration option in the universe visible and modifiable.
Once upon a time, there was a GUI that did this. it wasn't perfect; sometimes a level 1 user had to switch to level 2 to find just that one feature she needed. Sometimes a user had most of what she needed at level 3, but also a handful of things she wished she could do without. But even just giving her the option made her feel more empowered.
And it ran on 8-bit computers.
This is what happens when you buy Microsoft's line about how Windows is adequate for anything other than video games.
And Vista's so slow and has so many driver problems, it can't even do that very well.
You truly are the king of the moral victory.
Sony only needs to sell 4 million more PS3's to catch up to where the Xbox 360 is today.
Of course, this assumes that Microsoft decides to stop selling the Xbox 360 for a period of time until Sony catches up.
Assuming European sales double the rest of the world's PS3 sales for each month, that means Microsoft would have to stop selling the 360 for about a year for Sony to catch up. (2*125k consoles/month * 12 months = 3 million. Not too shabby, really.)
Unfortunately, Microsoft has not stopped selling X360s. And they are in fact widening the already monstrous gap made possible by a year-long delay.
But I guess if you're a PS3 fan, you've got to take your victories when you get 'em, eh?
The small, minor, tiny little problem Sony has is that no matter how well they're doing compared to the Xbox 360 last year, they started a year later. The PS3 has to sell as many units as the Xbox 360 did last year at this time plus as many units as the Xbox 360 is selling now. And if they do that for the rest of the year, then they will be merely tied with the Xbox 360 in November. Both will be far behind the Wii, if current sell-through rates continue.
Unfortunately for Sony, they are only barely meeting last year's extremely supply-constrained Xbox 360 sales. And by failing to meet Xbox 360 sell-through figures, they are losing ground at a ridiculous pace.
Sony doesn't get to hop into a time machine and pretend the last year's Xbox 360 sales didn't happen.
Sony is 4 million units behind Microsoft, and that gap is growing every month.
Well, clearly sex isn't the only way to achieve diversification.
It's just more fun that way.