For all it's faults, MySQL does scale with a largely read-only data set. We currently have twenty-eight production servers running and about twenty development and testing machines. On the busiest servers we're pushing somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 queries a second sustained.
Write performance can certainly be an issue, but it depends largely on the application and the table backend. For example, if you can avoid doing deletes on a MyISAM table INSERTs get appended, allowing concurrent reads.
I've not looked at how MT uses the database, but blog software would imply large variable length writes. Definitely not an ideal application for MySQL.
Phobia-like aversion? Huh? Some people don't like formats that you can't legally play without paying for a license and which won't work out of the box on major Linux distributions. Fear has jack to do with it.
According to Nintendo's last financial statement, from April to September the GBA sold 1.66M units (including 1.56M SPs) and the DS sold 10.09M units (including 8.48M Lites).
Current sales figures out of Japan are even more tilted. Latest week I could find there were 201,378 DS Lites sold and only 2526 GBAs of any flavour (including SP and Micro).
There's 44 release games (41 third party), another 103 confirmed in development, and another 71 announced projects. Doesn't seem shabby for a system that's less than a month old.
Those numbers appear to be in the United States only. Sony currently quotes 22.94 million units shipped as of 2006-09-30 on their website. Nintendo currently quotes 26.82 million units sold. Not too shabby in the "to date" department, though Sony only reports shipments and not sales, which skews the numbers in their favour.
Looking at current retail sales reports paints a much grimmer picture for Sony, though. The latest figures that have been released have DS & DS Lite sales outpacing PSP 2:1 in the American and European markets and 5:1 in the Japanese market.
Even just looking at the article you quoted, notice that the sames of the GBA, Nintendo's last generation system, are higher than the PSP. Not a particularly good trend.
PG&E has a regional monopoly. ComEd has a regional monopoly. Verizon has a regional monopoly. AT&T has a regional monopoly. Being a company that provides a service to the public isn't what makes you a public utility.
1) Good point. Though many people might find it annoying to have to reboot to play games. Though I doubt "many" people (as in a significant percentage of buyers) have a non-OEM copy of Windows lying around. The average consumer gets their copy pre-installed by the manufacturer.
2) Who said they were comparable? I was using that to illustrate that the cost of running WinXP on a Mac was a significant amount of money above and beyond the initial purchase cost.
Dell has machines starting at $279 through their close-out deals. And from the new line-up they start at $329 (for the E521), not $359.
On a side note, the entry level Mac is a 1.67GHz Core Duo (not a Core 2 Duo).
3) Of course one computer is more convienent. And more often than not that will be one machine running exclusively Windows, especially for gamers. The only option Apple offers that takes a high-end video card is the Mac Pro, which starts at $2499 for a config with the same entry level video card they ship with the 24" iMac. You can get a Windows gaming machine with a shiny 1GB new dual GPU 7950 GX2 for half that.
but with the new Macs booting Windows... after laying out almost as much as a PC system for a copy of Parallels and Windows XP ($269.98, $10 less than you can pick up a Dimension B110 from Dell).
I think that will be less of an issue.
I don't think the lure of MacOS X is as strong as a lot of people think it is.
As much people moan about pricing, they're in the same ballpark as cell phone games which don't seem to have any problem selling.:) I expect they're pretty darn close to ideal market price.
I seriously doube the bar will be as low for video quality on portable devices in 25 years. Even assuming it does, just because something is possible doesn't mean it's marketable. As capacity approaches useful threshold, other features become more important - display size, battery life, form factor. The utility of have carrying around 127 years of video in your pocket is ultimately pretty damn low.
Where are you etting "doubling every 14 months". It took two years to go from 40GB to 80GB in the 1.8" form factor. It took over two years to go from 100GB to 200GB in the 2.5" form factor. It took about two years to go from 250GB to 500GB in the 3.5" form factor. And industry leaders project grown of about 40% per year.
So to fix your math: 204.8 * 1.4^10 = 5923.9 hours of video. Currently IMDB lists 471,241 movies. Don't think that's going to cut it.:)
Yeah, I deliberately lowballed the estimates, since the claim was ludicrous without going into extended media.
Doubling every year is even very optimistic. It took over two years to go from 40GB to 80GB in the 1.8" form factor, and various industry heads project about 40% growth in capacity a year. That puts capacity at more like 2.26TB in ten years.
Well, IMDB currently lists 471,241 movies. Let's assume those are about 90 minutes each. That's 42,411,690 of video. They also list 367,066 episodes of television shows. Let's assume those are about 22 minutes each (to account for commercials, we'll ignore hour long shows for now). That's another 8,075,452.
Encoded at 320x240 15fps mpeg-4 that comes to approximately 197TB. I'm willing to bet a kidney we won't have small form factor hard drives capaple of storing that in less than ten years.
Even if we did, it's a hell of a lot more likely that we'll see higher resolution video on portable devices, or ultra-ultra portable video devices (think thin, like new cell phones), or both.
The Windows version of iTunes wasn't released until October 2003, about a half a year after the 3G iPods. Prior to that there was limited compatability through Musicmatch Jukebox, released simultaneously with the 2G iPod in July 2002. The first generation iPod did not ship with any Windows compatability.
This is a study of a single client, which pretty much guarantees the results aren't universal. The client admits that their developers and engineers are more familiar with Windows. All the Linux sites are dynamic, while only half of the Windows sites are. The doofs are running a desktop oriented operating system on servers (Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS would make a lot more sense than Fedora).
You'd end up with the CPU running idle as you push into swap. :-)
Or dislikes incredibly poor pacing (not to mention ludicrous plot holes and freshman level philosophy, but all three movies had that).
For all it's faults, MySQL does scale with a largely read-only data set. We currently have twenty-eight production servers running and about twenty development and testing machines. On the busiest servers we're pushing somewhere in the neighborhood of 4000 queries a second sustained.
Write performance can certainly be an issue, but it depends largely on the application and the table backend. For example, if you can avoid doing deletes on a MyISAM table INSERTs get appended, allowing concurrent reads.
I've not looked at how MT uses the database, but blog software would imply large variable length writes. Definitely not an ideal application for MySQL.
Did you miss the part where they're not investigating it?
Phobia-like aversion? Huh? Some people don't like formats that you can't legally play without paying for a license and which won't work out of the box on major Linux distributions. Fear has jack to do with it.
I have a 480p TV, as does almost everyone still.
Most people probably still have standard-def analog sets, which are 480i, not 480p.
I know a laptop repair tech who would heartily disagree with you on that.
Erm. 125,000,000 + 77,400,000 = 202,400,000.
You also forgot gba = 500k * 69 = 34,500,000.
That brings us to 236,900,000, which I'm pretty sure is bigger than 200,000,000.
Would seem Nintendo is the winner here, no?
According to Nintendo's last financial statement, from April to September the GBA sold 1.66M units (including 1.56M SPs) and the DS sold 10.09M units (including 8.48M Lites).
Current sales figures out of Japan are even more tilted. Latest week I could find there were 201,378 DS Lites sold and only
2526 GBAs of any flavour (including SP and Micro).
There's 44 release games (41 third party), another 103 confirmed in development, and another 71 announced projects. Doesn't seem shabby for a system that's less than a month old.
Those numbers appear to be in the United States only. Sony currently quotes 22.94 million units shipped as of 2006-09-30 on their website. Nintendo currently quotes 26.82 million units sold. Not too shabby in the "to date" department, though Sony only reports shipments and not sales, which skews the numbers in their favour.
Looking at current retail sales reports paints a much grimmer picture for Sony, though. The latest figures that have been released have DS & DS Lite sales outpacing PSP 2:1 in the American and European markets and 5:1 in the Japanese market.
Even just looking at the article you quoted, notice that the sames of the GBA, Nintendo's last generation system, are higher than the PSP. Not a particularly good trend.
Which monopoly was that?
PG&E has a regional monopoly. ComEd has a regional monopoly. Verizon has a regional monopoly. AT&T has a regional monopoly. Being a company that provides a service to the public isn't what makes you a public utility.
1) Good point. Though many people might find it annoying to have to reboot to play games. Though I doubt "many" people (as in a significant percentage of buyers) have a non-OEM copy of Windows lying around. The average consumer gets their copy pre-installed by the manufacturer.
2) Who said they were comparable? I was using that to illustrate that the cost of running WinXP on a Mac was a significant amount of money above and beyond the initial purchase cost.
Dell has machines starting at $279 through their close-out deals. And from the new line-up they start at $329 (for the E521), not $359.
On a side note, the entry level Mac is a 1.67GHz Core Duo (not a Core 2 Duo).
3) Of course one computer is more convienent. And more often than not that will be one machine running exclusively Windows, especially for gamers. The only option Apple offers that takes a high-end video card is the Mac Pro, which starts at $2499 for a config with the same entry level video card they ship with the 24" iMac. You can get a Windows gaming machine with a shiny 1GB new dual GPU 7950 GX2 for half that.
but with the new Macs booting Windows ... after laying out almost as much as a PC system for a copy of Parallels and Windows XP ($269.98, $10 less than you can pick up a Dimension B110 from Dell).
I think that will be less of an issue.
I don't think the lure of MacOS X is as strong as a lot of people think it is.
As much people moan about pricing, they're in the same ballpark as cell phone games which don't seem to have any problem selling. :) I expect they're pretty darn close to ideal market price.
I seriously doube the bar will be as low for video quality on portable devices in 25 years. Even assuming it does, just because something is possible doesn't mean it's marketable. As capacity approaches useful threshold, other features become more important - display size, battery life, form factor. The utility of have carrying around 127 years of video in your pocket is ultimately pretty damn low.
Where are you etting "doubling every 14 months". It took two years to go from 40GB to 80GB in the 1.8" form factor. It took over two years to go from 100GB to 200GB in the 2.5" form factor. It took about two years to go from 250GB to 500GB in the 3.5" form factor. And industry leaders project grown of about 40% per year.
:)
So to fix your math: 204.8 * 1.4^10 = 5923.9 hours of video. Currently IMDB lists 471,241 movies. Don't think that's going to cut it.
Yeah, I deliberately lowballed the estimates, since the claim was ludicrous without going into extended media.
Doubling every year is even very optimistic. It took over two years to go from 40GB to 80GB in the 1.8" form factor, and various industry heads project about 40% growth in capacity a year. That puts capacity at more like 2.26TB in ten years.
Well, IMDB currently lists 471,241 movies. Let's assume those are about 90 minutes each. That's 42,411,690 of video. They also list 367,066 episodes of television shows. Let's assume those are about 22 minutes each (to account for commercials, we'll ignore hour long shows for now). That's another 8,075,452.
Encoded at 320x240 15fps mpeg-4 that comes to approximately 197TB. I'm willing to bet a kidney we won't have small form factor hard drives capaple of storing that in less than ten years.
Even if we did, it's a hell of a lot more likely that we'll see higher resolution video on portable devices, or ultra-ultra portable video devices (think thin, like new cell phones), or both.
The Windows version of iTunes wasn't released until October 2003, about a half a year after the 3G iPods. Prior to that there was limited compatability through Musicmatch Jukebox, released simultaneously with the 2G iPod in July 2002. The first generation iPod did not ship with any Windows compatability.
This is a study of a single client, which pretty much guarantees the results aren't universal. The client admits that their developers and engineers are more familiar with Windows. All the Linux sites are dynamic, while only half of the Windows sites are. The doofs are running a desktop oriented operating system on servers (Red Hat Enterprise or CentOS would make a lot more sense than Fedora).
Nah, Fozzyuw already made that point. Didn't want to be redundant.
Or they would still lose $300, but sell at a more competitive price point. :)
Joe Random User won't get as far as locating, downloading and installling a beta plugin.