I know. I was making the point that being part of an industry organization doesn't necessarily mean anything more than covering your bases. Hell, Sony sits on the steering committee of the DVD Forum.
In the case of Blu-ray Sony developed most of the technology (and presumably gets the bulk of the royalties from licensing) and has by far the most to win or lose. Many people consider the inclusion in the PS3 as an underhanded gesture to try and force the direction of the industry in their favour. I can see it argued either way, personally.
Actually what I'm saying is that there are few companies firmly in either camp. As I pointed out, most of the big names in the Blu-ray camp are also actively producing products for HD-DVD as well (and some even belong to promotional groups for both).
Most of the big names have already demonstrated their flexibility - Warner committed to doing both formats after initially pledging HD-DVD only, Hewlett Packard joined the HD-DVD promotional group and pushed for adoption of HD-DVD features (HDi and mandatory managed copy) after initially pledging Blu-ray only, and so on and so forth, back and forth.
Irrelevent in most case since even single layer HD-DVD has enough room for most content.
2. Blu-Ray has a higher max data rate
Irrelevent since HD-DVD is still comfortable in excess of the bandwidth needed for 1080p.
3. Microsoft and Toshiba control the HD DVD interactive format instead of it being based on an open-source language (BD-J is based on Java)
HDi is based on XML and ECMAscript. Not that the average computer gives a fig what language the "interactive content" is implemented in.
4. Blu-Ray has more support for recordable media. HD DVD can be a little cheaper, but not all that much, and not enough to lock us in to more Microsoft dominance.
More support how? There are recorders and writable drives for both formats and media widely available for both.
* Apple - who recently shiped Final Cut Studio 2 with support burning HD-DVD and not Blu-ray * Hewlett-Packard - who belongs to the HD-DVD promotion group and ships notebooks with HD-DVD drives and not Blu-ray * Hitachi - who manufactures HD-DVD media and recently announced a combo drive with LG * LG - who ships a combo player and annoucned a combo drive with Hitachi * Mitsubishi Electric - who was one of the first manufacturers of HD-DVD media * Philips - who manufacters HD-DVD media * Samsung - who announced a combo player last summer * Sharp - who manufactures lasers for both formats * TDK - who partnered with Fuh Yuan to manufacture the players mentioned in this article * Thomson - who's shipping an HD-DVD player (under the RCA brand) but not a Blu-ray player * Warner Bros. - who supports both format and introduced "TotalHD" hybrid discs that contains both formats.
If you made a list of HD-DVD supporters instead you'd get a similar response, enumerating all the ways the different manufacturers were hedging their bets. Neither format is a solid win at the moment.
Blu-ray Disc at least has higher picture resolution on HDTV and less noticeable artifacts even when scaled down to 960x480 for component EDTV.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD support the exact same codecs. Technically Blu-ray has a maximum bitrate, but that doesn't matter since even HD-DVD's rate is more than double what is required for HD video, even encoded with the dated MPEG-2 codec.
Where Blu-ray has an edge is in raw capacity, but how many discs are going to include more than eight hours of HD content (the approximate capacity of a dual layer HD-DVD disc).
Different product line. Do you read product announcements about dualie pickups and complain that you better gas mileage in your hybrid sedan?
(Also, power performance isn't as clear cut as that. Under load the Core 2 beats the Athlons handily but AMD has lower idle draw. Depending on the work load typical power draw can go either way.)
Exactly, which is why you shouldn't have to hold that part all the times and instead leave it in your pocket.
While I can see how that would be useful, I think that for the majority of the market the benefits of a single unit outweigh
Pretty damn often, because almost nobody has a reasonable display as it is! They're all using cellphones or PDAs, neither of which have "reasonable" displays (although the PDA screens are less unreasonable).
It depends entirely on the application. I find most cell phone displays plenty reasonable for making calls, browsing music, sending short messages and so forth. Likewise with most common PDA applications (the problem there is more commonly the input device, IMHO).
No, the "whole point" is to be that portable while still being usable and useful. And PDAs fail miserably at it (I should know; I own one)!
They fail at it for you. I know plenty of people who are incredibly happy with the form factor.
That's an argument in favor of my design, because you could wear it under your clothes (since you never need to take it out).
You wear a belt under your clothes?:)
Seriously, though, I don't doubt that for your particular use cases the device you describe would be ideal. I do doubt, however, that there it would be particularly well-suited for mass market.
The thing about those comparisons is that it assumes that you use the stupid "home row" keys in the first place. I never understood why anyone would need one of those weird curved ergonomic keyboards until I tried typing that way on a lark.
Re:Who cares about X on CentOS
on
CentOS 5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd say integrated virtualization is a big feature. Likewise the updates on all the major infrastructure packages - apache, php, postgresql, mysql, etc. The inclusion of Red Hat Directory Serverer. Encrypted filesystem support. Extended SElinux support, including policy debugging. Installation on iSCSI devices. Better NUMA support. Blah blah blah, etc, etc, etc.
There's also new features on the desktop, but that's to be expected since Red Hat is pushing a desktop variant as well. (And for the record, I know plenty of people who ran RHEL or CentOS 4 on the desktop as well. Some of us appreciate not having to upgrade every twelve to eighteen months on our desktops as well.)
Arguing battery life as a benefit of adding redundant electronics, not to mention powering an additional bluetooth device, is a bit silly. Aside from increasing the cumulative power requirements for the same functionality, it also adds an additional device you might forget to charge. You could get more benefit with less bulk by carrying an extra battery.
In terms of portability, the "brains" would be both the heaviest and bulkiest device by a long shot, and really how often would most people not need a reasonably display? The whole point of PDAs is to be portable enough to be carried everywhere all the time.
For ergonomics, you have to take into account manufacturing (a single is a lot cheaper to manufacure which means lower retail cost), reliability (a single board in a reasonably hardened case is a whole hell of a lot more durable than a segmented design), practicality (do we really want the issue of "I didn't bring my phone because it clashed with my outfit) and market (how many people actually want such a thing anyways?). Most people who need more power or space will also need more screen space and a more traditional keyboard, so they're better served by a palmtop, tablet or subnote (which have been available at under a pound since the 80s).
Cutting edge of performance or not, they're custom components. Which means if they want more produced per month, they need to contract the vendor to increase production. In either case it's likely going to require an upfront investment to generate the fabrication capacity as well as an increase in the minimum volume. With ATI it's more complicated, since they don't actually own any fabs, which means they have to contract additional capacity as well.
And that ignores the rest of the component. The accelerometer is state of the art. The eDRAM ASIC is a custom design from NEC and MoSYS which uses a fair number of advanced fab processes. Then there's the custom optical drive which handles 8cm discs. And so on and so forth.
Nintendo must have an awful lot of hardcore fanboys considering the lines pretty much everyone else saw and the number of vendors who exhausted their allotment of pre-orders in a matter of days (or even hours, like Amazon).
That personally sounds like a mess to me. Instead of grabbing one device, you think convergence should mean carrying three or four? No thanks.
I don't mind a headset - that buys me hands-free operation, but there's no reason not to take advantage of the nice flat surface of the "brick" by putting the screen on it. If I'm dedicating pocket space to that anyways, what does a seperate touchscreen buy me?
If that's an odd notion, then MySQL is odd already. Solid and Berkley existed as databases long before they become options for MySQL table backends. There would be some value to having a MySQL interface to the arguably more capable (for certain tasks) Postgres storage engine.
NPD publishes "full market" figures; that is, numbers meant to represent 100% of retail sales. It's true they don't have data from all retailers. They model projections based on the 65% of the market they do get PoS data from with some level of correction from publisher feedback.
Break it down by day and you get a more accurate picture - 19483/day in December, 14065/day in January, 11943/day in February. Look at Japan's weekly figures - first week of January was 195331 units, then 93708, 86395, 83754... Hasn't broken 80k in a week once since January. They were even outsold by the PSP for a couple of weeks.
The Wii may not be readily found on shelves yet (demand started significantly higher than supply, afterall) but it's hardly unobtainable. The few people I knew who set out to buy them got them (unbundled) in a matter of a couple of days. (Thanks to my wife's foresight, she got two on launch day.)
Taper may have been a poor choice of words.. I don't mean to imply I think they're going to fall behind in sales in comparison to the other consoles or the like. But over time demand tends to stabalize - more people who want one will already have one (unless they manage to grow their market by at least as many people as they sold to month over month).
Thinking about it, though, there is one confounding factor - by the time they've caught up with the backlogged demand, they may well be gearing up for the inevitable holiday surge. And that may justify a capacity increase.
Beyond the fact that most people who don't have HDTVs aren't gamers at all.
There's only about 20 million households that own HDTVs. There were about 77 million consoles sold last generation. Are you saying that 57 million non-gamers bought consoles or that every gamer bought almost four consoles (and at least two PS2s)?
by "new game consoles" I meant consoles that are actually new, as opposed to the Wii which is just a gussied-up GameCube with a new controller.
Ah, redefining terms in your favour. Gotcha.
Most people who were willing to pay $600 for a PS3 either already have an HDTV or will be getting one very soon.
Neither of the people I personally know who have a PS3 has or plans on getting an HDTV any time soon. Anecdote isn't data, of course, but then neither is bald conjecture and speculation.
Remember that not only are HDTV prices going down quickly, but that you don't have to get a big expensive one to see the significant improvements in graphical quality.
Trends in sales are still showing more large SD sets than HD sets. People want bigger televisions regardless of picture quality (explains projection screens).
What makes you think most people without HDTV aren't in the market for new consoles? Most of the people I know who've bought consoles recently don't have HD. Hell, one is currently using a trash-picked 19".
Ramping production would mean getting every one of their suppliers to ramp production, tooling more production lines, training more workers, building out QA and testing facilities, blah, blah, etc, etc. You don't make that kind of investment when demand is tapering (604k units in December, 436k in January, 335k in February). By time time you have the additional capacity, you don't need it.
Or for people who's performance needs are met by any currently marketed processor from either company. For typical desktop applications - internet applications, office suites, finance applications, basic photo-editing - even midrange processors are a waste.
The only reason I recently retired my primary desktop at home (an Athlon 800 built in 2000) is because a free Athlon 64 fell into my hands.
Slashdot Mirror
I know. I was making the point that being part of an industry organization doesn't necessarily mean anything more than covering your bases. Hell, Sony sits on the steering committee of the DVD Forum.
In the case of Blu-ray Sony developed most of the technology (and presumably gets the bulk of the royalties from licensing) and has by far the most to win or lose. Many people consider the inclusion in the PS3 as an underhanded gesture to try and force the direction of the industry in their favour. I can see it argued either way, personally.
Actually what I'm saying is that there are few companies firmly in either camp. As I pointed out, most of the big names in the Blu-ray camp are also actively producing products for HD-DVD as well (and some even belong to promotional groups for both).
Most of the big names have already demonstrated their flexibility - Warner committed to doing both formats after initially pledging HD-DVD only, Hewlett Packard joined the HD-DVD promotional group and pushed for adoption of HD-DVD features (HDi and mandatory managed copy) after initially pledging Blu-ray only, and so on and so forth, back and forth.
1. Blu-Ray stores more
Irrelevent in most case since even single layer HD-DVD has enough room for most content.
2. Blu-Ray has a higher max data rate
Irrelevent since HD-DVD is still comfortable in excess of the bandwidth needed for 1080p.
3. Microsoft and Toshiba control the HD DVD interactive format instead of it being based on an open-source language (BD-J is based on Java)
HDi is based on XML and ECMAscript. Not that the average computer gives a fig what language the "interactive content" is implemented in.
4. Blu-Ray has more support for recordable media. HD DVD can be a little cheaper, but not all that much, and not enough to lock us in to more Microsoft dominance.
More support how? There are recorders and writable drives for both formats and media widely available for both.
* Apple - who recently shiped Final Cut Studio 2 with support burning HD-DVD and not Blu-ray
* Hewlett-Packard - who belongs to the HD-DVD promotion group and ships notebooks with HD-DVD drives and not Blu-ray
* Hitachi - who manufactures HD-DVD media and recently announced a combo drive with LG
* LG - who ships a combo player and annoucned a combo drive with Hitachi
* Mitsubishi Electric - who was one of the first manufacturers of HD-DVD media
* Philips - who manufacters HD-DVD media
* Samsung - who announced a combo player last summer
* Sharp - who manufactures lasers for both formats
* TDK - who partnered with Fuh Yuan to manufacture the players mentioned in this article
* Thomson - who's shipping an HD-DVD player (under the RCA brand) but not a Blu-ray player
* Warner Bros. - who supports both format and introduced "TotalHD" hybrid discs that contains both formats.
If you made a list of HD-DVD supporters instead you'd get a similar response, enumerating all the ways the different manufacturers were hedging their bets. Neither format is a solid win at the moment.
Blu-ray Disc at least has higher picture resolution on HDTV and less noticeable artifacts even when scaled down to 960x480 for component EDTV.
Blu-ray and HD-DVD support the exact same codecs. Technically Blu-ray has a maximum bitrate, but that doesn't matter since even HD-DVD's rate is more than double what is required for HD video, even encoded with the dated MPEG-2 codec.
Where Blu-ray has an edge is in raw capacity, but how many discs are going to include more than eight hours of HD content (the approximate capacity of a dual layer HD-DVD disc).
Different product line. Do you read product announcements about dualie pickups and complain that you better gas mileage in your hybrid sedan?
(Also, power performance isn't as clear cut as that. Under load the Core 2 beats the Athlons handily but AMD has lower idle draw. Depending on the work load typical power draw can go either way.)
How many users are running desktops with server class chips in them? :)
They don't have data from online sales or Walmart, but the numbers reflect 100% of the market (through extrapolation).
Exactly, which is why you shouldn't have to hold that part all the times and instead leave it in your pocket.
:)
While I can see how that would be useful, I think that for the majority of the market the benefits of a single unit outweigh
Pretty damn often, because almost nobody has a reasonable display as it is! They're all using cellphones or PDAs, neither of which have "reasonable" displays (although the PDA screens are less unreasonable).
It depends entirely on the application. I find most cell phone displays plenty reasonable for making calls, browsing music, sending short messages and so forth. Likewise with most common PDA applications (the problem there is more commonly the input device, IMHO).
No, the "whole point" is to be that portable while still being usable and useful. And PDAs fail miserably at it (I should know; I own one)!
They fail at it for you. I know plenty of people who are incredibly happy with the form factor.
That's an argument in favor of my design, because you could wear it under your clothes (since you never need to take it out).
You wear a belt under your clothes?
Seriously, though, I don't doubt that for your particular use cases the device you describe would be ideal. I do doubt, however, that there it would be particularly well-suited for mass market.
The thing about those comparisons is that it assumes that you use the stupid "home row" keys in the first place. I never understood why anyone would need one of those weird curved ergonomic keyboards until I tried typing that way on a lark.
I'd say integrated virtualization is a big feature. Likewise the updates on all the major infrastructure packages - apache, php, postgresql, mysql, etc. The inclusion of Red Hat Directory Serverer. Encrypted filesystem support. Extended SElinux support, including policy debugging. Installation on iSCSI devices. Better NUMA support. Blah blah blah, etc, etc, etc.
There's also new features on the desktop, but that's to be expected since Red Hat is pushing a desktop variant as well. (And for the record, I know plenty of people who ran RHEL or CentOS 4 on the desktop as well. Some of us appreciate not having to upgrade every twelve to eighteen months on our desktops as well.)
Arguing battery life as a benefit of adding redundant electronics, not to mention powering an additional bluetooth device, is a bit silly. Aside from increasing the cumulative power requirements for the same functionality, it also adds an additional device you might forget to charge. You could get more benefit with less bulk by carrying an extra battery.
In terms of portability, the "brains" would be both the heaviest and bulkiest device by a long shot, and really how often would most people not need a reasonably display? The whole point of PDAs is to be portable enough to be carried everywhere all the time.
For ergonomics, you have to take into account manufacturing (a single is a lot cheaper to manufacure which means lower retail cost), reliability (a single board in a reasonably hardened case is a whole hell of a lot more durable than a segmented design), practicality (do we really want the issue of "I didn't bring my phone because it clashed with my outfit) and market (how many people actually want such a thing anyways?). Most people who need more power or space will also need more screen space and a more traditional keyboard, so they're better served by a palmtop, tablet or subnote (which have been available at under a pound since the 80s).
Cutting edge of performance or not, they're custom components. Which means if they want more produced per month, they need to contract the vendor to increase production. In either case it's likely going to require an upfront investment to generate the fabrication capacity as well as an increase in the minimum volume. With ATI it's more complicated, since they don't actually own any fabs, which means they have to contract additional capacity as well.
And that ignores the rest of the component. The accelerometer is state of the art. The eDRAM ASIC is a custom design from NEC and MoSYS which uses a fair number of advanced fab processes. Then there's the custom optical drive which handles 8cm discs. And so on and so forth.
Nintendo must have an awful lot of hardcore fanboys considering the lines pretty much everyone else saw and the number of vendors who exhausted their allotment of pre-orders in a matter of days (or even hours, like Amazon).
That personally sounds like a mess to me. Instead of grabbing one device, you think convergence should mean carrying three or four? No thanks.
I don't mind a headset - that buys me hands-free operation, but there's no reason not to take advantage of the nice flat surface of the "brick" by putting the screen on it. If I'm dedicating pocket space to that anyways, what does a seperate touchscreen buy me?
The original poster alluded to a "port problem" - hardware sales and software ports are two completely different things.
Launch sales can also be deceiving. Fast forward two months and PSP sales sagged below both the DS and the Gameboy Advance SP.
If that's an odd notion, then MySQL is odd already. Solid and Berkley existed as databases long before they become options for MySQL table backends. There would be some value to having a MySQL interface to the arguably more capable (for certain tasks) Postgres storage engine.
Right. Nintendo should snap their fingers so that more consoles magically appear.
It also sucks a whopping 173W playing back even standard definition DVDs. No thank you.
NPD publishes "full market" figures; that is, numbers meant to represent 100% of retail sales. It's true they don't have data from all retailers. They model projections based on the 65% of the market they do get PoS data from with some level of correction from publisher feedback.
Break it down by day and you get a more accurate picture - 19483/day in December, 14065/day in January, 11943/day in February. Look at Japan's weekly figures - first week of January was 195331 units, then 93708, 86395, 83754... Hasn't broken 80k in a week once since January. They were even outsold by the PSP for a couple of weeks.
The Wii may not be readily found on shelves yet (demand started significantly higher than supply, afterall) but it's hardly unobtainable. The few people I knew who set out to buy them got them (unbundled) in a matter of a couple of days. (Thanks to my wife's foresight, she got two on launch day.)
Taper may have been a poor choice of words.. I don't mean to imply I think they're going to fall behind in sales in comparison to the other consoles or the like. But over time demand tends to stabalize - more people who want one will already have one (unless they manage to grow their market by at least as many people as they sold to month over month).
Thinking about it, though, there is one confounding factor - by the time they've caught up with the backlogged demand, they may well be gearing up for the inevitable holiday surge. And that may justify a capacity increase.
Beyond the fact that most people who don't have HDTVs aren't gamers at all.
There's only about 20 million households that own HDTVs. There were about 77 million consoles sold last generation. Are you saying that 57 million non-gamers bought consoles or that every gamer bought almost four consoles (and at least two PS2s)?
by "new game consoles" I meant consoles that are actually new, as opposed to the Wii which is just a gussied-up GameCube with a new controller.
Ah, redefining terms in your favour. Gotcha.
Most people who were willing to pay $600 for a PS3 either already have an HDTV or will be getting one very soon.
Neither of the people I personally know who have a PS3 has or plans on getting an HDTV any time soon. Anecdote isn't data, of course, but then neither is bald conjecture and speculation.
Remember that not only are HDTV prices going down quickly, but that you don't have to get a big expensive one to see the significant improvements in graphical quality.
Trends in sales are still showing more large SD sets than HD sets. People want bigger televisions regardless of picture quality (explains projection screens).
What makes you think most people without HDTV aren't in the market for new consoles? Most of the people I know who've bought consoles recently don't have HD. Hell, one is currently using a trash-picked 19".
Ramping production would mean getting every one of their suppliers to ramp production, tooling more production lines, training more workers, building out QA and testing facilities, blah, blah, etc, etc. You don't make that kind of investment when demand is tapering (604k units in December, 436k in January, 335k in February). By time time you have the additional capacity, you don't need it.
Or for people who's performance needs are met by any currently marketed processor from either company. For typical desktop applications - internet applications, office suites, finance applications, basic photo-editing - even midrange processors are a waste.
The only reason I recently retired my primary desktop at home (an Athlon 800 built in 2000) is because a free Athlon 64 fell into my hands.