The press release says nothing about reduced ps/2 support. Sony never said that. Period. And slashdot has launched another massive anti-sony tirade for no reason at all! Way to go!
Just think, if you guys can kill Sony, then Microsoft will be free to take over the living room just like they did with the office! Won't that be great!?
You're in school for christ sake, how about have a class or two about the libre software tools in the 100 level?
Yeah, beacuse everyone in school is taking comp sci or engineering.
Or maybe 90% of the are NOT taking comp sci, engineering and 50%+ don't even take a MATH CLASS (for christs sake) at the 100 level. Universities are a good cross section of the general population not a bunch of geeks running around waving penguins at each other.
You did not answer *any* of the OP questions, you just assumed that every single student should learn/master the archaic world of free linux software. Right, that will work great- just like it works outside of the school environment!
Someone needs to get their head out of their arse: you.
Not in Toronto. Sigh. I keep hearing about 'piles' of unsold PS3's. But there are none available around here, none available online and none show up on ps3seeker.com anywhere within driving range. So where the heck are they? Send them up here!
Uh, no there are in fact two sets of books:one for public consumption (available at www.sec.gov for US filers) and one for tax purposes. That's called 'accounting'. It is routine for corps to make huge profits in their public statements while climbing losses on their tax statements. The differences in depreciation rates for high tech gear alone can cause huge differences in expenses between the two sets (and thus difference in Net Income). R&D expenditures are also a big source of difference. You really think corps base their tax return on their SEC10-k form numbers? Come on!
I haven't bothered to look up Warners numbers, but there are many may ways to manipulate these figures. Just like the dot com boys spun them UP, Warner could spin them down when politically convienent. My guess is there expenses suddeny shot up last year, maybe those lawyer bills are starting to add up. We also know that they are releasing fewer albums year over year, so their overhead stays constant while product releases drop (an idle recording studio still 'costs' to acquire and use). Finally, we know that one huge hit album can skew sales. So comparing quarter to quarter isn't really useful if last yeara there was a huge hit for Warner in that quarter and this year there was none.
How to tell? If the stock price has not dropped in relation to their 'profits' then there are some adjustments going on . Stock analysts will look at the 10-k, read the footnotes and the fine print and build their OWN set of 'reality adjusted' accounting statements. They base the stock value on their own set, not what Warner provided. If the stock price really is trending down along with their statments margins than they probably are in decline. Looking at warners sotck it does seem to be settling down, so maybe they really are losing money:)
Warner's problem is their market, and sales, are shrinking and there costs aren't. Rather than adjusting to new reailty they are fighting to keep those CD sales coming in. Not going to happen.
Once PS2 titles begin to dry up, Wii titles are faced with shouldering the ENTIRE cost of development from conception, implementation, artwork, QA and marketing by themselves.
By contrast, perhaps PS3 & 360 development is more expensive. But if you're developing for PS3 and 360 and PC (and possibly Mac) then much of the expense is common to all platforms - graphics, artwork, models, engines (Unreal, Havok, PhysX etc.) a large percentage of the code, QA, marketing etc.
The Wii is going to be the odd man out here.
Shhhh...there is NO future. Only 5% of America has a HDTV and it will stay that way, forever. 'no one' wants a HD movie player in their living room; NO ONE. And it will stay that way forever. Here on slashdot we are frozen in game/TV time. The Wii is the perfect system for today. The Xbox360 is the perfect next gen system for today. The PS3 is stupid because they force you to buy a BD player AND a hard drive. No one wants that. Nothing will ever change. Please do not attempt to extrapolate into the future. Thank you.
On a side note, a few of the Wii's I know are already packed away with boondoggle and pictionary, waiting for the next party to come out and play for a bit. Four years from now, when the XBOX540 (with HD player! Hard drive! wireless net! HDMI1080p!) comes out THEN we can say the Wii is screwed...unless you buy a 'Wii too'.
Yeah because a 600M investment for a less than 3M tax break (per year, which 30 years from now will be worthless...) is *SUCH* a bad deal for NC!
200 jobs at 50k per job and 15% tax rate (Sate only...) gives 1,500,000 back to NC per year anyway bringing the net 'loss' to the state of 1.5M a year, decreasing over time as salaries go up.
It's not unusual for large corps to get 1:1 tax breakes. ie if you build a 500M car plant, you get 500M or more in tax breaks.
If this is google being evil, they sure suck at it!
No. AA had a stunning record of being involved in every major accounting scandal for something like 10 years. Sunbeam? Check. Xerox? Check. Tyco? Check. Worldcom? Check. Enron? Check. And *then* they shredded the Enron documents...
You know things are bad when former spin offs (what would become Accenture) pay 1.2B to AA to NOT use the Anderson name:)
Sequels to what? Oh yeah, successful, original, innovative games. Version 1 gets the market interested, version 2, etc proves the concept. I am sure Quake II outsold Doom, but if it wasn't for Doom...
Let's imagine that every piece of software you've bought followed Microsoft's lead: you reinstall your motherboard, or buy a computer, and you have to call the 27 different companies and ask for permission to please use the software license you've purchased on your new equipment; please, please, I'm not bad, I swear. Perhaps there will be "Software License Lawyers" in the future that will, for a fee, make your case to all of your vendors, why you should be able to use the product you bought on the hardware you want.
You mean like IBM's UNIX and Mainframes have done for the last 30 years? It would be great to upgrade a z/OS machine and make as *few* as 27 calls....
If you bought, at any time in the past, one single item from Micrsoft on their vloume purchasing plan, you have a contract with them. You are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.
Unless you have been 100% Micrsoft free for 10+ years they can, and will, audit you anytime at your expense.
Remember that 10pack of Office95 you bought in '96? Well the file formats that version supporters are now obsolete and you have not bought the upgrades to 98/2000/XP/2003 - time to audit your office licenses!
The Us dollar is at record lows w.r.t to the Euro. You can't use Todays spot exchange rate to get a real idea of cost/valu. The reailty is the US dollar does not buy as much in the last few years. Lately, everything looks very expensive when converted to USD!
In canada, The PS3 60G is listed at $699 at best buy (sold out, of course). Here in Ontario we add the 14% vat/sales tax to that to get a total of $796CDN. In Europe, the VAT is usually included in the price, so a 600 Euro works out to around $900CDN with tax. So there is about a $100 higher price in Europe, not the 200-300 difference the article header would imply. For the additional complexity of serving all those country standards (what, 9 different power cords?) that is not unreasonable.
Uh, yeah becasue no one in America or Europe bought a PS/2. Ever. Son'y can only use the Japanes market for the PS/3. You used the Japan only sales. Actual sales were triple that worldwide, over 1 million/month.
It will not take long for the PS/3 to outsell the xbox360 at that rate!
Note: I don't think 1M ps/3 per month is realistic in the next few years, but they can certainly catch up.
FTA It is not uncommon for spacecraft to have individual hinges and latches on single solar arrays or antennas hang up. Such a mechanism failure is, for example, suspected in the apparent loss of the NASA Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft (AW&ST Nov. 27, p. 53). But to have all major solar array and antenna deployments halted by a broader failure is almost unheard of in modern satellite operations.
Emphasis mine. It's all in the scale. The thing is space junk. No functions. Dead. Three years to replace.
AFAIK, only the Player and Server are free-as-in-beer. The Player can't actually create the VM, or install a guest OS, etc...and I'm assuming that the free Server is crippled as well.
I'll assume you know nothing at all about virtualization, and ignore everything else you said in your post. Oh wait, I don't have to assume because you proved it! nice work!
Question 1) How can a 'player' that 'plays' be crippled? is Microsoft's Word Viewer 'crippled' because it can't make new documents?
Answer 1) And no, the server is not 'crippled' in any way...no matter how bizarrely you define 'crippled'
for those who don't get it (not sure on parent sarcasm, but I have heard this statement before that they 'lose more on the high end machines')
It costs sony ~ $34 more to make a premium machine. They charge $100 more for it.
So, yes, they lose more on the base machine as they 'make' an additional ~$66 on the high end ones.
somewhat on topic: I played the WII, X360, PS3 side by side for several hours yesterday. The Wii graphic looks like the PS/2, and I found the controller tiring/annoying - Zelda was tricky to get the hang of and I am not sure the game play was any better with the double controller setup. I was not able to throw a knife at the bunny (not sure on the game- a seris of carnival games) and we passed the controller around and most of us just gave up on it. General impressions were similar to mine : this looks old and is hard to use. (No wonder it is so cheap - it doesn't look or play any better than the PS/2) All consoles were on LCD panels and the Wii looked truly awful - like using an analog VGA card and a LCD panel on your computer. The X360 and PS3 looked similar, very sharp, but I liked the PS3 controller better. This was at the Wii launch party, so don't blame me if the Wii's weren't set up properly.
Fav game was motostorm (PS3). The desert rally section looked a lot like Rally of the Rim (a real rally race) Very impressive. NBA07 on PS3 looked too real - come on guys the floor is not *that* shiny. RR7 same issue, cars don't stay that shiny on the streets for very long, and whats with the weird trailing effects? Tony Hawk had the most unlifelike falls ever, your body flys through the air and and then hovers above the ground in a heap. Its weird and it happens in a semi-slow motion thing too, like they thought it would be cool. Uhm, forget the rest.
Will probably replace the DVD player with a PS3 in the spring.
If apple makes $20 on each iPod, why would they turn down making $20 from each creative zen as well? Once their market share gets chipped away a little more, they will license it.
I'll be heading to China for a month in January (from Chengdu/Hunan to Honk Kong overland) to get a first hand impression.
I just wanted to point out that the search is "Tiananmen Square tank" on google images. Put that in regular google images, you get a screens full of the famous one man stand off.
Put that in google.cn images and you get "no results were found for your search".
I agree with a previous poster, it's probably less about censorhsip then controlling the information flow to the 1.4B undereducated people. Their economic policies are very very smart. The communist party chairman (they rotate the chair position) in China is not some dimbulb general, they are very well organized. One step at a time.
As of 11:00am eastern time in the US the only method of payment available to refill your blance is "credit card" or "gift certificate". Both are down with "sorry we cannot accept credit cards at this time" messages.
I missed it, and I only have $4 left.:(
How are you suppoed to use XROST when the site has no way to redeem it at allofmp3?
Ah... Remember back in the day when games didn't worry about having THE flashiest graphics, but rather focused on being, oh i don't know, good games? I mean how much of that 25 gig do you think is actually playable content? How much of that game is actually good stuff?
Back in the day, games were ALWAYS worried about the flashiest graphics. Always. Every game had screen shots on the back of the box, usually picked from the best of many supported platforms, and bragged about their great graphics. I remember what a 'waste' VGA was and what an outcry there was about VGA games 'ruining the game with fancy graphics'. Who needs 256 colors! it's about the gameplay, and 16color EGA games are just more fun!! Besides a 386 with a VGA card was outrageously expensive.
Don't even get me started on CD ROM based games - what an outrage, 800MB of PURE UTTER CRAP how could they possibly need all that space? it must be junk!
etc, etc.
10 years from now, when BlueRay2 is out we will here the same old complaints...1Terabyte? why? oh why? I had tons of fun playing 4.3G DVD's..developers are just greedy and lazy.
Slashdot Mirror
The press release says nothing about reduced ps/2 support. Sony never said that. Period. And slashdot has launched another massive anti-sony tirade for no reason at all! Way to go!
Just think, if you guys can kill Sony, then Microsoft will be free to take over the living room just like they did with the office! Won't that be great!?
JON
Yeah, beacuse everyone in school is taking comp sci or engineering.
Or maybe 90% of the are NOT taking comp sci, engineering and 50%+ don't even take a MATH CLASS (for christs sake) at the 100 level. Universities are a good cross section of the general population not a bunch of geeks running around waving penguins at each other.
You did not answer *any* of the OP questions, you just assumed that every single student should learn/master the archaic world of free linux software. Right, that will work great- just like it works outside of the school environment!
Someone needs to get their head out of their arse: you.
JON
You can get a PS3 without even trying.
Not in Toronto. Sigh. I keep hearing about 'piles' of unsold PS3's. But there are none available around here, none available online and none show up on ps3seeker.com anywhere within driving range. So where the heck are they? Send them up here!
JON
Uh, no there are in fact two sets of books :one for public consumption (available at www.sec.gov for US filers) and one for tax purposes. That's called 'accounting'. It is routine for corps to make huge profits in their public statements while climbing losses on their tax statements. The differences in depreciation rates for high tech gear alone can cause huge differences in expenses between the two sets (and thus difference in Net Income). R&D expenditures are also a big source of difference. You really think corps base their tax return on their SEC10-k form numbers? Come on!
:)
I haven't bothered to look up Warners numbers, but there are many may ways to manipulate these figures. Just like the dot com boys spun them UP, Warner could spin them down when politically convienent. My guess is there expenses suddeny shot up last year, maybe those lawyer bills are starting to add up. We also know that they are releasing fewer albums year over year, so their overhead stays constant while product releases drop (an idle recording studio still 'costs' to acquire and use). Finally, we know that one huge hit album can skew sales. So comparing quarter to quarter isn't really useful if last yeara there was a huge hit for Warner in that quarter and this year there was none.
How to tell? If the stock price has not dropped in relation to their 'profits' then there are some adjustments going on . Stock analysts will look at the 10-k, read the footnotes and the fine print and build their OWN set of 'reality adjusted' accounting statements. They base the stock value on their own set, not what Warner provided. If the stock price really is trending down along with their statments margins than they probably are in decline. Looking at warners sotck it does seem to be settling down, so maybe they really are losing money
Warner's problem is their market, and sales, are shrinking and there costs aren't. Rather than adjusting to new reailty they are fighting to keep those CD sales coming in. Not going to happen.
JON
It's your lucky day....
3 065&page=14
3 065&page=4
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/showthread.php?t=
They also have Sony CEo on the aircraft carrier:
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/showthread.php?t=
Clever people, those HD geeks.
JON
By contrast, perhaps PS3 & 360 development is more expensive. But if you're developing for PS3 and 360 and PC (and possibly Mac) then much of the expense is common to all platforms - graphics, artwork, models, engines (Unreal, Havok, PhysX etc.) a large percentage of the code, QA, marketing etc.
The Wii is going to be the odd man out here.
Shhhh...there is NO future. Only 5% of America has a HDTV and it will stay that way, forever. 'no one' wants a HD movie player in their living room; NO ONE. And it will stay that way forever. Here on slashdot we are frozen in game/TV time. The Wii is the perfect system for today. The Xbox360 is the perfect next gen system for today. The PS3 is stupid because they force you to buy a BD player AND a hard drive. No one wants that. Nothing will ever change. Please do not attempt to extrapolate into the future. Thank you.
On a side note, a few of the Wii's I know are already packed away with boondoggle and pictionary, waiting for the next party to come out and play for a bit. Four years from now, when the XBOX540 (with HD player! Hard drive! wireless net! HDMI1080p!) comes out THEN we can say the Wii is screwed...unless you buy a 'Wii too'.
JON
Yeah because a 600M investment for a less than 3M tax break (per year, which 30 years from now will be worthless...) is *SUCH* a bad deal for NC!
200 jobs at 50k per job and 15% tax rate (Sate only...) gives 1,500,000 back to NC per year anyway bringing the net 'loss' to the state of 1.5M a year, decreasing over time as salaries go up.
It's not unusual for large corps to get 1:1 tax breakes. ie if you build a 500M car plant, you get 500M or more in tax breaks.
If this is google being evil, they sure suck at it!
JON
You know things are bad when former spin offs (what would become Accenture) pay 1.2B to AA to NOT use the Anderson name
JON
Sequels to what? Oh yeah, successful, original, innovative games. Version 1 gets the market interested, version 2, etc proves the concept. I am sure Quake II outsold Doom, but if it wasn't for Doom...
JON
You mean like IBM's UNIX and Mainframes have done for the last 30 years? It would be great to upgrade a z/OS machine and make as *few* as 27 calls....
JON
If you bought, at any time in the past, one single item from Micrsoft on their vloume purchasing plan, you have a contract with them. You are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.
Unless you have been 100% Micrsoft free for 10+ years they can, and will, audit you anytime at your expense.
Remember that 10pack of Office95 you bought in '96? Well the file formats that version supporters are now obsolete and you have not bought the upgrades to 98/2000/XP/2003 - time to audit your office licenses!
JON
Well they are ONLY doing this in the UK, not in the US....
JON
The Us dollar is at record lows w.r.t to the Euro. You can't use Todays spot exchange rate to get a real idea of cost/valu. The reailty is the US dollar does not buy as much in the last few years. Lately, everything looks very expensive when converted to USD!
h tml
In canada, The PS3 60G is listed at $699 at best buy (sold out, of course). Here in Ontario we add the 14% vat/sales tax to that to get a total of $796CDN. In Europe, the VAT is usually included in the price, so a 600 Euro works out to around $900CDN with tax. So there is about a $100 higher price in Europe, not the 200-300 difference the article header would imply. For the additional complexity of serving all those country standards (what, 9 different power cords?) that is not unreasonable.
I apologize for being rational.
JON
http://www.forexblog.org/2006/06/usd_near_oneyea.
Uh, yeah becasue no one in America or Europe bought a PS/2. Ever. Son'y can only use the Japanes market for the PS/3. You used the Japan only sales. Actual sales were triple that worldwide, over 1 million/month.
It will not take long for the PS/3 to outsell the xbox360 at that rate!
Note: I don't think 1M ps/3 per month is realistic in the next few years, but they can certainly catch up.
JON
It is not uncommon for spacecraft to have individual hinges and latches on single solar arrays or antennas hang up. Such a mechanism failure is, for example, suspected in the apparent loss of the NASA Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft (AW&ST Nov. 27, p. 53). But to have all major solar array and antenna deployments halted by a broader failure is almost unheard of in modern satellite operations.
Emphasis mine. It's all in the scale. The thing is space junk. No functions. Dead. Three years to replace.
JON
what about it? Tons of great games, killer media applications, cheap expandble storage...how is this a let down?
Mine plays all GB, GBC, GBA, NES, SNES games as well. All of my old GBC games take up ~20M!
My only 'letdown' is I can't get the intellevision emulator to work. Really wanted Tresure of Tarmin. Shrug.
JON
AFAIK, only the Player and Server are free-as-in-beer. The Player can't actually create the VM, or install a guest OS, etc...and I'm assuming that the free Server is crippled as well.
I'll assume you know nothing at all about virtualization, and ignore everything else you said in your post. Oh wait, I don't have to assume because you proved it! nice work!
Question 1) How can a 'player' that 'plays' be crippled? is Microsoft's Word Viewer 'crippled' because it can't make new documents?
Answer 1) And no, the server is not 'crippled' in any way...no matter how bizarrely you define 'crippled'
JON
agreed, but wrong target.
c/panasonic/samsung and you've got it.
JON
for those who don't get it (not sure on parent sarcasm, but I have heard this statement before that they 'lose more on the high end machines')
It costs sony ~ $34 more to make a premium machine. They charge $100 more for it.
So, yes, they lose more on the base machine as they 'make' an additional ~$66 on the high end ones.
somewhat on topic: I played the WII, X360, PS3 side by side for several hours yesterday. The Wii graphic looks like the PS/2, and I found the controller tiring/annoying - Zelda was tricky to get the hang of and I am not sure the game play was any better with the double controller setup. I was not able to throw a knife at the bunny (not sure on the game- a seris of carnival games) and we passed the controller around and most of us just gave up on it. General impressions were similar to mine : this looks old and is hard to use. (No wonder it is so cheap - it doesn't look or play any better than the PS/2) All consoles were on LCD panels and the Wii looked truly awful - like using an analog VGA card and a LCD panel on your computer. The X360 and PS3 looked similar, very sharp, but I liked the PS3 controller better. This was at the Wii launch party, so don't blame me if the Wii's weren't set up properly.
Fav game was motostorm (PS3). The desert rally section looked a lot like Rally of the Rim (a real rally race) Very impressive. NBA07 on PS3 looked too real - come on guys the floor is not *that* shiny. RR7 same issue, cars don't stay that shiny on the streets for very long, and whats with the weird trailing effects? Tony Hawk had the most unlifelike falls ever, your body flys through the air and and then hovers above the ground in a heap. Its weird and it happens in a semi-slow motion thing too, like they thought it would be cool. Uhm, forget the rest.
Will probably replace the DVD player with a PS3 in the spring.
JON
If apple makes $20 on each iPod, why would they turn down making $20 from each creative zen as well? Once their market share gets chipped away a little more, they will license it.
JON
I'll be heading to China for a month in January (from Chengdu/Hunan to Honk Kong overland) to get a first hand impression.
e n+Square+tank&btnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2%E5%9B%BE%E7% 89%87
I just wanted to point out that the search is "Tiananmen Square tank" on google images. Put that in regular google images, you get a screens full of the famous one man stand off.
Put that in google.cn images and you get "no results were found for your search".
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh-CN&q=Tiananm
I agree with a previous poster, it's probably less about censorhsip then controlling the information flow to the 1.4B undereducated people. Their economic policies are very very smart. The communist party chairman (they rotate the chair position) in China is not some dimbulb general, they are very well organized. One step at a time.
JON
This is slashdot. Your rational, level headed, well thought out statements are not welcome here!
But thanks for trying.
JON
As of 11:00am eastern time in the US the only method of payment available to refill your blance is "credit card" or "gift certificate". Both are down with "sorry we cannot accept credit cards at this time" messages.
:(
I missed it, and I only have $4 left.
How are you suppoed to use XROST when the site has no way to redeem it at allofmp3?
JON
Your 'WTF' should be followed by "was I smoking when I posted that?"
JON
Back in the day, games were ALWAYS worried about the flashiest graphics. Always. Every game had screen shots on the back of the box, usually picked from the best of many supported platforms, and bragged about their great graphics. I remember what a 'waste' VGA was and what an outcry there was about VGA games 'ruining the game with fancy graphics'. Who needs 256 colors! it's about the gameplay, and 16color EGA games are just more fun!! Besides a 386 with a VGA card was outrageously expensive.
Don't even get me started on CD ROM based games - what an outrage, 800MB of PURE UTTER CRAP how could they possibly need all that space? it must be junk!
etc, etc.
10 years from now, when BlueRay2 is out we will here the same old complaints...1Terabyte? why? oh why? I had tons of fun playing 4.3G DVD's..developers are just greedy and lazy.
Duh.
Duh.
JON