A new iSuppli report issued Friday suggests that Sony may finally be nearing the break-even point with the PS3. It said that its teardown analysis service estimated that the design cost of the new 120-gigabyte PS3 Slim comes in around $336, while it sells for $299 in the U.S.
That means that while Sony is still losing about $37 per unit--plus somewhat more for marketing, royalties, box contents, and other expenses--it is for the first time closing in on breaking even with the console itself.
Anybody remember the days before call-waiting? Y'know the days when you called someone and if they were on it you'd get this thing called a busy signal? We live in an age where we expect people to be able to be in instant contact. I sent you a text message, you get it instantly. We IM people on the computer. Creating mobile phones allows us to call someone (or be called by someone) almost anywhere we go. Nolonger do we have, "Sorry I was at the grocery store for the past hour.." You get called while you are in front of the apples. Conversely, you can call home and find out from your wife what type of apple to get for the pie.
People have grown accustomed to this... this leash. There was a time when people didn't have cell phones or pagers for that matter. When you went to the movies, you went to the movies, and when you were in the car driving to grandmas house, she couldn't call you. Now she can call you, and I would bet that most people would answer the phone rather than wait until you could a) safely pull over or b) arrive at your destination before you answered the phone or checked to see who called and call them back.
Do I think that we'll ever change our behavior to where we don't have this desire to have instant contact? Nope, and with the young kids of today growing up with email being the slowest form of communication, they won't think twice about driving while on the phone, texting or whatever comes out next (video-conferencing via the center console mounted computer?).
1. You're claiming you wouldn't buy another piece of "IBM server equipment" yet you're complaining about the lowest end disk drive array (really just a shelf) they make. 2. You have no idea what a DS300 is. You claim it's a Fibre SAN device. However, the DS300 is an iSCSI device with RJ45 GigE ports. The DS400 is fibrechannel attached.
You could have had that shelf RMA'd 10x by now. How about picking up the phone? You do have one of those don't you?
We've all heard the stories of people walking out of Federal Research Laboratories with paperwork and thumb drives full of information such as Jessican Quintana. While stealing nuclear secrets might be a bit harder to use/sell than say 10million email addresses plus associated personal information. I'd be a bit more concerned about some angry employee grabbing a tape (which I doubt they back much up to tape) or just copying off some data onto a thumb drive and walking out the door.
This might not be so hard under their "20% personal projects plan"...
"Hey boss, I've got an idea for a personal project.. I'd like to create a google map that maps someone and all of their friend's email addresses on it! Kind of like overlaying their email address next to their home address and phone number. I just need access to that personal data."
While the CEO can say all sorts of stuff about privacy, there's nothing stopping some kid who makes 1000x less than the CEO and will never become a millionaire from walking out the door with this information and becoming a millionaire that way. If you don't want people to know a secret, don't tell them. Google shouldn't be allowed to collect this stuff anyhow, that way it can't leak out to begin with.
I've got a friend that purchased on his own a Wii (so his kids/wife can play games) and a PS3 for his hardcore (FPS and fighting) games. He received a xbox360 as a gift from a cousin. Probably has about a $1000 worth of platforms and associated games.
Yet if his wife doesn't tell him "Go to bed, it's late" he can play Mafiawars/Farmville until the sun comes up. Amazing how addictive these games are without having to have massive graphics, sound, rumble controllers, online multiplayer. Just a flash interface and a bunch of clicking.
I'm waiting for Southpark to do an episode on Farmville as a remake of the WoW episode.
I'd love to know what's going to become of all of the servers/networking gear that used to power yahoo search. Doubt they'll reformat and install windows/BING on them.
What percentage of total users use DNS that is not assigned from their ISP? I would guess a good percentage of the/. crowd uses a DNS that is not assigned via their ISP. But out of the total population of internet users, using non-IPS DNS servers has got to be pretty small.
I would assume that the average user doesn't use the CLI. Whether in windows or linux, so why should we assume that the average user would even look at man pages. Man firefox? Man calc/writer/impress? Doubt it. Take openoffice for example... let's say I want to create a textbox, so I go to the landing help page for openoffice.org and I'm presented with 4 textboxes,
-Complete Documentation Wiki -OOo FAQ on the Wiki -OOo Manuals on the Wiki -Documentation Website
How is the avg user supposed to know which one to search in and the results are just a output of a google search. It would be nice if it OO.org provided more information or catagorized the output along the lines of tutorials/videos, manuals etc rather just whatever google spits out.
Let me just start by saying... You are soooo cool. You're running an Operating System from 2003. I hope you're not in IT. I can imagine you telling your management, "we're running Solaris 8/9 and have never applied any patches." I also hope you're not a developer that has made updates/fixes to your products so you can say to your customers, "How come you've never applied any of my updates? I've slaved over this code for the past seven years!"
And since this is/., where everyone brags about their personal machine in their basement, I hope you've never run apt-get update and still run firefox 1.x/2.x (or whatever version was around in 2003).
Or do you think that all fixes in linux/firefox are better than even service packs in winXP...
I also hope you've never fixed your car or a leaky faucet..
'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flawed, as in many fire departments or houses there are multiple crews. You've got 3 days 'in the house' then 3 days 'at home' followed by '4 days in the house' then 4 days 'at home.' When you're in the house, you're responsible for any and all calls that come in. So firefighters get paid for the time they are in the house. Just like most people are paid for the time they are in the office, but aren't paid for Saturdays and Sundays.
If he wants to correct the analogy, he should say that firefighters who are in the 'at home' phase, get called in, but don't get paid for it. They do get paid for it, just like Police Officers that work overtime or off-shift.
If you have a portfolio in which your risk/exposure is such that you could lose half during your trip, you shouldn't be taking a trip away from your portfolio.
Two choices.
1) Sell your entire portfolio. Cash doesn't go up or down. 2) Invest the entire portfolio in some equity that doesn't move (like CDs).
Just leave your laptop at home. Enjoy your trip to the jungle and avoid having to bring your laptop around with you, through the rain, and having it potentially stolen while you sit at some cafe drinking your rainforest destroying frappacino'.
Google has never wanted to damage Microsoft, but they sure want to take every step possible to make sure that they 'play nice'
Is damage a euphemism for "reduce marketshare"? I'm sure that google exec's would love to have the desktop marketshare that MSFT enjoys today. Outside of the Apple users, there aren't that many people today that could experience any google services or applications without some form of MSFT products. If Apple had the installed base of MSFT, google would be specifically targeting Apple, however, with google's current portfolio they are attacking both MSFT and Apple.
Three monitors actually would work better on a laptop... you'd open up the lid and then fold out the left and right sections. The laptop while being quite wide, would still be balanced.
By having the two screens split down the middle you can never look at the objects directly in front of the keyboard. You're always forced to look slightly left or slightly right of the divide. This isn't exactly the most ergonomic position for your head. If the secondary screen is off to the side, with the primary screen dead center, then most of the time you will be looking straight ahead (which is a good ergonomic position) and occasionally looking off to the side (say to preview a video).
I can't wait for Google to record all of our conversations, run them through a voice to text converter and then email/SMS/call me with "targeted" advertisements.
Speaking of bogus blogs... What really ticks me off is if I'm searching for a answer to a technical problem, I often find the same message thread on 10 different sites. I wish google would realize these are all the exact same thread and combine them into a single response.
Corp america doesn't care how many millions of kids become engineers or scientists. It'll always be cheaper to hire an engineer in India/China than in the US. My company (large IT company), hasn't had any layoffs, but all the hiring that has been happening has been overseas. So when the CEO gets on the quarterly call and says that the company has continued to hire people; he leaves out the little footnote about how 90% of them are overseas.
I've been sending flowers to my mother for years using the exact same florist. That florist happens to know who my mother is and where we live. So when I call around mothers day and tell them my name, the florist already knows where to send them to. Without me having to tell her where my mother lives.
obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient
OK, I'll bite on this one. If anyone is a frequent shopper at a store whereby the salesclerk knows you quite well, and you walk into a store and the clerk makes a suggestion based solely on the feedback you give them "I need a gift for a 3yr old boy", then they are using sources of information (the clerk's knowledge of gifts appropriate for a 3yr old boy, and not your knowledge) that is a source "other than the gift giver and recipient".
Now I highly doubt the patent means "sole sources of information other than gift giver or recipient." Otherwise, that would be a random guess. How would any system know upon you entering the store what would be appropriate for the recipient without knowing atleast some information about said recipient. I believe that would be a random guess. Just because I bought a table saw on my last visit to Amazon does not mean that power tools are what I'm looking for in a gift for my 3yr old nephew.
Don't supermarkets already do this? They look at what I just bought and make a recommendation for some related product, by printing out a coupon at the cash register.
Yet another reason why private healthcare must be stopped. Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
What makes you think that public healthcare system wouldn't try to keep people from taking advantage of the system? Just because a healthcare system is run by the gov't doesn't mean that they will automatically pay out the maximum amount for any claim. You can bet they would be canceling the coverage of some moron that claims they have a bad back and then posts pictures of themselves skiing in Tahoe. People seem to equate public healthcare with a provider that will give out money all the time. Just because Obama has been handing out billions to the financial industry does not mean he's going to hand out billions to you when you break your leg.
In my contract with ATT for my cell phone, it clearly states that the warranty does not cover any damage due to water. In fact there's a white sticker on the inside that turns colored if it gets wet.
Apple should be putting all sorts of detection stickers inside their cases, and modifying the warranty on new purchases.
I've worked on old computers all my life, and you can bet if it looks dusty from the outside, it's probably a lot worse on the inside, I always wear a mask when opening those up. Apple just doesn't want to pay for masks/gloves/glasses (aka safety equipment).
What would happen if you bought a second hand computer which was owned by a smoker and then brought it in for repair? Does apple have a qualification program to determine if your computer is able to be qualified by their AppleCare program? Is it like health insurance whereby you need to visit your Dr. to get a clean bill of health before some insurance company will cover you?
Slashdot Mirror
Sony's even close to breaking even on the PS3...
http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-10414022-52.html
A new iSuppli report issued Friday suggests that Sony may finally be nearing the break-even point with the PS3. It said that its teardown analysis service estimated that the design cost of the new 120-gigabyte PS3 Slim comes in around $336, while it sells for $299 in the U.S.
That means that while Sony is still losing about $37 per unit--plus somewhat more for marketing, royalties, box contents, and other expenses--it is for the first time closing in on breaking even with the console itself.
...helps Firefox run...
Ba-dum Tish...
I'll be here all week, try the lamb.
Anybody remember the days before call-waiting? Y'know the days when you called someone and if they were on it you'd get this thing called a busy signal? We live in an age where we expect people to be able to be in instant contact. I sent you a text message, you get it instantly. We IM people on the computer. Creating mobile phones allows us to call someone (or be called by someone) almost anywhere we go. Nolonger do we have, "Sorry I was at the grocery store for the past hour.." You get called while you are in front of the apples. Conversely, you can call home and find out from your wife what type of apple to get for the pie.
People have grown accustomed to this... this leash. There was a time when people didn't have cell phones or pagers for that matter. When you went to the movies, you went to the movies, and when you were in the car driving to grandmas house, she couldn't call you. Now she can call you, and I would bet that most people would answer the phone rather than wait until you could a) safely pull over or b) arrive at your destination before you answered the phone or checked to see who called and call them back.
Do I think that we'll ever change our behavior to where we don't have this desire to have instant contact? Nope, and with the young kids of today growing up with email being the slowest form of communication, they won't think twice about driving while on the phone, texting or whatever comes out next (video-conferencing via the center console mounted computer?).
I claim BS.
1. You're claiming you wouldn't buy another piece of "IBM server equipment" yet you're complaining about the lowest end disk drive array (really just a shelf) they make.
2. You have no idea what a DS300 is. You claim it's a Fibre SAN device. However, the DS300 is an iSCSI device with RJ45 GigE ports. The DS400 is fibrechannel attached.
You could have had that shelf RMA'd 10x by now. How about picking up the phone? You do have one of those don't you?
Try calling 1-800-IBM-FAST next time.
We've all heard the stories of people walking out of Federal Research Laboratories with paperwork and thumb drives full of information such as Jessican Quintana. While stealing nuclear secrets might be a bit harder to use/sell than say 10million email addresses plus associated personal information. I'd be a bit more concerned about some angry employee grabbing a tape (which I doubt they back much up to tape) or just copying off some data onto a thumb drive and walking out the door.
This might not be so hard under their "20% personal projects plan"...
"Hey boss, I've got an idea for a personal project.. I'd like to create a google map that maps someone and all of their friend's email addresses on it! Kind of like overlaying their email address next to their home address and phone number. I just need access to that personal data."
While the CEO can say all sorts of stuff about privacy, there's nothing stopping some kid who makes 1000x less than the CEO and will never become a millionaire from walking out the door with this information and becoming a millionaire that way. If you don't want people to know a secret, don't tell them. Google shouldn't be allowed to collect this stuff anyhow, that way it can't leak out to begin with.
Have you looked in their trash bin of confiscated items?
I always wondered why all the 'suspect items' or 'potentially explosive liquids' are all dumped into the exact same garbage can...
I've got a friend that purchased on his own a Wii (so his kids/wife can play games) and a PS3 for his hardcore (FPS and fighting) games. He received a xbox360 as a gift from a cousin. Probably has about a $1000 worth of platforms and associated games.
Yet if his wife doesn't tell him "Go to bed, it's late" he can play Mafiawars/Farmville until the sun comes up. Amazing how addictive these games are without having to have massive graphics, sound, rumble controllers, online multiplayer. Just a flash interface and a bunch of clicking.
I'm waiting for Southpark to do an episode on Farmville as a remake of the WoW episode.
Did they come up with their own definitions for all these words? Did they "scrape" someone else's dictionary? Or pay someone for their content?
I'd love to know what's going to become of all of the servers/networking gear that used to power yahoo search. Doubt they'll reformat and install windows/BING on them.
What percentage of total users use DNS that is not assigned from their ISP? I would guess a good percentage of the /. crowd uses a DNS that is not assigned via their ISP. But out of the total population of internet users, using non-IPS DNS servers has got to be pretty small.
I would assume that the average user doesn't use the CLI. Whether in windows or linux, so why should we assume that the average user would even look at man pages. Man firefox? Man calc/writer/impress? Doubt it. Take openoffice for example... let's say I want to create a textbox, so I go to the landing help page for openoffice.org and I'm presented with 4 textboxes,
-Complete Documentation Wiki
-OOo FAQ on the Wiki
-OOo Manuals on the Wiki
-Documentation Website
How is the avg user supposed to know which one to search in and the results are just a output of a google search. It would be nice if it OO.org provided more information or catagorized the output along the lines of tutorials/videos, manuals etc rather just whatever google spits out.
And OO.org is one of the better sites.
Let me just start by saying... You are soooo cool. You're running an Operating System from 2003. I hope you're not in IT. I can imagine you telling your management, "we're running Solaris 8/9 and have never applied any patches." I also hope you're not a developer that has made updates/fixes to your products so you can say to your customers, "How come you've never applied any of my updates? I've slaved over this code for the past seven years!"
And since this is /., where everyone brags about their personal machine in their basement, I hope you've never run apt-get update and still run firefox 1.x/2.x (or whatever version was around in 2003).
Or do you think that all fixes in linux/firefox are better than even service packs in winXP...
I also hope you've never fixed your car or a leaky faucet..
Because that would make you a hypocrite.
'Many companies see the on-call issue as analogous to a fire fighter's job. Most of the time, a fire fighter is off-duty but on call, hanging around the firehouse, cooking, sleeping, or whatever. What that person really gets paid for is the relatively small, but crucial, amount of time he spends walking into a burning building with an ax.
This is flawed, as in many fire departments or houses there are multiple crews. You've got 3 days 'in the house' then 3 days 'at home' followed by '4 days in the house' then 4 days 'at home.' When you're in the house, you're responsible for any and all calls that come in. So firefighters get paid for the time they are in the house. Just like most people are paid for the time they are in the office, but aren't paid for Saturdays and Sundays.
If he wants to correct the analogy, he should say that firefighters who are in the 'at home' phase, get called in, but don't get paid for it. They do get paid for it, just like Police Officers that work overtime or off-shift.
If you have a portfolio in which your risk/exposure is such that you could lose half during your trip, you shouldn't be taking a trip away from your portfolio.
Two choices.
1) Sell your entire portfolio. Cash doesn't go up or down.
2) Invest the entire portfolio in some equity that doesn't move (like CDs).
Just leave your laptop at home. Enjoy your trip to the jungle and avoid having to bring your laptop around with you, through the rain, and having it potentially stolen while you sit at some cafe drinking your rainforest destroying frappacino'.
Google has never wanted to damage Microsoft, but they sure want to take every step possible to make sure that they 'play nice'
Is damage a euphemism for "reduce marketshare"? I'm sure that google exec's would love to have the desktop marketshare that MSFT enjoys today. Outside of the Apple users, there aren't that many people today that could experience any google services or applications without some form of MSFT products. If Apple had the installed base of MSFT, google would be specifically targeting Apple, however, with google's current portfolio they are attacking both MSFT and Apple.
Three monitors actually would work better on a laptop... you'd open up the lid and then fold out the left and right sections. The laptop while being quite wide, would still be balanced.
By having the two screens split down the middle you can never look at the objects directly in front of the keyboard. You're always forced to look slightly left or slightly right of the divide. This isn't exactly the most ergonomic position for your head. If the secondary screen is off to the side, with the primary screen dead center, then most of the time you will be looking straight ahead (which is a good ergonomic position) and occasionally looking off to the side (say to preview a video).
I can't wait for Google to record all of our conversations, run them through a voice to text converter and then email/SMS/call me with "targeted" advertisements.
Speaking of bogus blogs... What really ticks me off is if I'm searching for a answer to a technical problem, I often find the same message thread on 10 different sites. I wish google would realize these are all the exact same thread and combine them into a single response.
Corp america doesn't care how many millions of kids become engineers or scientists. It'll always be cheaper to hire an engineer in India/China than in the US. My company (large IT company), hasn't had any layoffs, but all the hiring that has been happening has been overseas. So when the CEO gets on the quarterly call and says that the company has continued to hire people; he leaves out the little footnote about how 90% of them are overseas.
Fine.
I've been sending flowers to my mother for years using the exact same florist. That florist happens to know who my mother is and where we live. So when I call around mothers day and tell them my name, the florist already knows where to send them to. Without me having to tell her where my mother lives.
obtaining delivery information for a gift from one or more information sources other than the gift giver and recipient
OK, I'll bite on this one. If anyone is a frequent shopper at a store whereby the salesclerk knows you quite well, and you walk into a store and the clerk makes a suggestion based solely on the feedback you give them "I need a gift for a 3yr old boy", then they are using sources of information (the clerk's knowledge of gifts appropriate for a 3yr old boy, and not your knowledge) that is a source "other than the gift giver and recipient".
Now I highly doubt the patent means "sole sources of information other than gift giver or recipient." Otherwise, that would be a random guess. How would any system know upon you entering the store what would be appropriate for the recipient without knowing atleast some information about said recipient. I believe that would be a random guess. Just because I bought a table saw on my last visit to Amazon does not mean that power tools are what I'm looking for in a gift for my 3yr old nephew.
Don't supermarkets already do this? They look at what I just bought and make a recommendation for some related product, by printing out a coupon at the cash register.
Yet another reason why private healthcare must be stopped. Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
What makes you think that public healthcare system wouldn't try to keep people from taking advantage of the system? Just because a healthcare system is run by the gov't doesn't mean that they will automatically pay out the maximum amount for any claim. You can bet they would be canceling the coverage of some moron that claims they have a bad back and then posts pictures of themselves skiing in Tahoe. People seem to equate public healthcare with a provider that will give out money all the time. Just because Obama has been handing out billions to the financial industry does not mean he's going to hand out billions to you when you break your leg.
In my contract with ATT for my cell phone, it clearly states that the warranty does not cover any damage due to water. In fact there's a white sticker on the inside that turns colored if it gets wet.
Apple should be putting all sorts of detection stickers inside their cases, and modifying the warranty on new purchases.
I've worked on old computers all my life, and you can bet if it looks dusty from the outside, it's probably a lot worse on the inside, I always wear a mask when opening those up. Apple just doesn't want to pay for masks/gloves/glasses (aka safety equipment).
What would happen if you bought a second hand computer which was owned by a smoker and then brought it in for repair? Does apple have a qualification program to determine if your computer is able to be qualified by their AppleCare program? Is it like health insurance whereby you need to visit your Dr. to get a clean bill of health before some insurance company will cover you?
Obviously, you've forgotten your history lessons taught by Mel Brooks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE7tTT8khf0