Actually, I wholeheartedly and resoundingly agree with what they've done. They may as well get at least some benefit from piracy...
They're already getting some benefit. Free word-of-mouth advertising. Some estimates (mostly from indy devs) suggest that every 20-25 pirated copies will result in 1 extra sale. Obviously for games like Spore, it has the inverse effect.
Their actions are quite irresponsible. Did they even bother checking for viruses/trojans/rootkits? Probably not...:/
But those are expensive, defeating the purpose of using PS3s in the first place. They could have gone to IBM and bulk ordered a pile of CELL equipped blade servers but its cheaper to buy the PS3 which Sony, like every other console manufacturer, sells below cost and make up the difference with game sales.
USAF buys literally tons of loss-leading PS3s but no games? I think you just hit on why Sony doesn't care about the problem the Air Force faces now.
They don't sell it "below cost". They easily make a hundred percent profit on the hardware. It's possible that they need three hundred percent profit to pay off the Cell R&D, but whose fault is that?
They're willing to sell it to millions of gamers for that low. Scientific research probably accounts for less than 1% of the PS3's sold, and is for a good cause. They should've just written it off as charity (not the tax deductible kind) or investment in the future.
And how do I know this? From all the original articles quoting the dropping price to manufacture the PS3, which claimed that Sony was losing several hundred dollars on each unit. The parts costs were skewed, though. At the time those articles came out, I was able to get parts like HDDs an average of 40% cheaper than the quoted amounts, and I'm a nobody. I'd imagine a company manufacturing millions of units would be able to get far better prices than I could. They manufacture many of the components themselves, too, so that reduces parts costs even further. (Unless they want to make a profit, moving parts from one devision to another)
There are distribution costs, but I'm sure they've got that down to an art. If I can get a single console shipped from China for ~$50, I'm betting it costs closer to ~$20 for them, imported by the thousands.
Do they have a right to lots of profit? Absolutely. Any company or companies that plop down tens of billions before getting a return shouldn't be criticized for wanting 100%+ profit. There's a lot of fields where profit margins are 1000%+, so this isn't at all extreme.
But I'm tired of hearing that they're selling below cost. They aren't. They still make money on every PS3 sold to a scientist - it's just that they lose the chance to sell expensive Cell supercomputers, and there's no further licensing revenue from purchased games.
I've even sworn off of Blizzard with their announcement that they're killing LAN play on the sequels to the games that practically MADE LANs proliferate. I'm not going to say that the original StarCraft and Diablo games singlehandedly made LANs popular, but they sure as hell helped, and they were so supportive of it that they'd let you install spawns on your friends' computers so they could play too. Now that Blizzard is ALREADY filthy rich, they're just getting greedier? Fuck that.
Apparently you connect through the lobby (requires an internet connection), then do LAN play locally. Not the best solution, but meh. I can understand, considering all the pirated copies of their other games that are in use. However, understanding doesn't make it any less annoying.
Simple, safe & secure web appliances will make the basics of e-mail, web surfing and reading common format documents cheap and easy for everyone (this includes the poorer countries of the world).
We have them. They are called Android, WebOS, and iPhone phones. And now the iPad.
LOL.
I don't know how you can compare an iPad to the $35 chinese netbooks flooding eBay right now. One of those - shipped worldwide for $50-60 - would be perfect for some of the poorer developing nations.
Of course, right now they're all lame WinCE 5/6 netbooks. ChromeOS or even Android on one of those would vastly enhance the usability.
Firefox is getting faster. Every single new version has performance improvements, in rendering and javascript.
I've got an old Athlon XP computer that has migrated from Firefox 1 all the way to Firefox 3.6. I assure you that it's improving with every release, even as I pile more and more extensions into it.
But Chrome is incredibly fast. The V8 JIT helps an unimaginable amount.
It's funny that 8 years ago, I had arguments with people over implementing a javascript JIT in a browser. Nobody believed it would work, making stupid arguments like "It'd take too long to compile the webpage.", or "There's no point. Web apps aren't going anywhere important."
Thank you Google for the HUGE ego boost you gave me. I'm a visionary!;D
You click on the menu button (right side of the screen - looks like a piece of letter paper), then pick "Print" from the drop-down list...
Informative? Honestly, have any of you even used Chrome? It took me 5 seconds to find that... There's only two menu buttons, so even if you read all the options, you're looking at 30 seconds before you stumble upon it.
Considering that most people are migrating away from IE, this is quite an improvement over 2 menu bars, a titlebar, 6 toolbars, an address and favourites bar... In IE I've seen half the screen get used by toolbars on desktop PCs. The way people click through installers, it quickly becomes unusable on netbooks - not enough vertical space.
But beyond that google or any other search Provider, has no business building up some kinda advertising profile of my wed history.
I answered your primary complaint.
As I already said, they will still be tracking you - they just won't use it to customize search results, and they won't have an account to associate with their tracking data and statistics.
so google isn't this do no evil company,there just getting there slower then everyone else.
I agree. But unlike many companies, they haven't stopped innovating. If you look at the other giants in the industry, they have to rely on attacking their competitors. Google makes the occasional questionable move, but they still primarily innovate to survive. That's good.
Unity exists today, and is great for the minimalist, stateless configurations that suit a dual-boot environment. But in order embrace it for our Netbook UI, we’ll need to design some new capabilities, and implement them during this cycle. ... The two primary pieces we need to put in place are:
Support for many more applications, and adding / removing applications. Instant-on environments are locked down, while netbook environments should support anybody’s applications, not just those favored in the Launcher.
Support for file management, necessary for an environment that will be the primary working space for the user rather than an occasional web-focused stopover.
It says exactly the opposite of what you implied? They WANT proper file management, but haven't got around to it yet. That's what happens when you're rolling your own distro - you start with a terminal, then start adding in X11, a desktop environment, etc.
Right now they're focusing on the instant-on stuff, for use in the same situation as ExpressGate. (which isn't supposed to have much except a browser) But despite that, they WANT Ubuntu NBR to be fully configurable.
P.S. If you look at the mockups, what do you see a big fat icon depicting? A file folder!
Then... 1) Don't login while searching. 2) Clear your flash cookies. 3) If you logged in while searching, regularly clear your search history from the Google control panel. It will still be retained for several months, but probably won't be actively used to serve you anything. Just passively used for larger scale statistics.
Hey, they have to stay afloat somehow. I'd rather have it be targeted advertising than outright selling my info or spamming me. That makes them better than 95% of the advertising networks on the internet.
Using Google's services improves the end user experience, and Google can only provide those services if they make money.
Gamers seriously care about 20% faster frame rates, especially at the edge cases. The difference between 28fps and 34fps is sometimes the difference between playable and unplayable.
True. But quite often these benchmarks are done at low quality. Few gamers care about 200fps vs 240fps.
And as soon as you raise the quality, so the GPU is the bottleneck, suddenly the difference drops below 20%. Benchmarks like this suggest 8-16% is more common than 20+%
There are a few games that truly benefit from fewer, faster cores. But it's not like we're comparing 28->34fps. For most, any modern CPU and GPU will manage 60+ fps. Take a look at L4D2 - even Dragon Age is way above 100fps.
Given identical prices, I think a lot of people will go for the extra cores. Whether that's a smart choice is determined by the buyer, because only the buyer knows how he will use it.
Last time around many people picked up Q6600's rather than E6600's, because even though it wasn't as fast in games, more cores meant they'd be set for when games used more cores. The odd time they ran multiple multi-core programs at once, they'd also be set.
I'm guessing many will go for more cores this time around, too.
Who needs benchmarks? This is about marketing, and right now AMD has more cores. They must be better!
P.S. Some of those same benchmarks used to tell you that a fast dual-core beats a quad-core. Try running multiple benchmarks at once, and suddenly it's a different story. Many people went with quads despite them being worse for gaming, because of them being "future-proof" and "fast-enough". Given more cores for the same price(and a negligible performance difference), many people will go for more cores.
And yes, it is negligible. Nobody cares if the i5-750 is 20% faster at X task, when it's only 10 vs 12 seconds.
I'm in BC, which I believe is on the Telus backbone. Where I live I can only get 3mbit internet. I'm happy with their service, so I contacted them to ask if I could pay annually for their service. They gave me a 10% discount!
$27/mo, for 3mbit/640kbit with 200GB cap. It suits me just fine.
My ISP (Teksavvy - Canada) offers 200GB for $30/mo. If I go over that, I get charged $10 for another 100GB. Or I can opt to pay $10 extra every month, for unlimited bandwidth.
So it's worse than double billing, in my opinion. Bell gets to charge premium rent on their capital investment, even though they aren't paying the real cost – for backbone traffic. The independent DSL providers are double billed - for backbone and for Bell's premium rent on the copper line to the DSLAM. While Bell did submit some evidence that their DSLAM's are saturated, I suspect they've intentionally failed to upgrade their DSLAM's precisely to bring about saturation as evidence before the CRTC of the need for fees.
They also cranked up their max offered speed to 5x what Telus used to offer. That's got to have an impact on over-saturation!
First of all, any computer organization text will inform you that as the number of cores increase - scheduling amongst those cores becomes an exponentially costly issue in itself. This scheduling/load balancing of course has to be ultra low latency to maintain a reasonable throughput. Not to mention the fact, that on software side managing threading and choosing instructions to parallelize is a big headache. Many decent programmers cannot get it right so that in itself defeats the presence of different cores.
That's why we need to rethink our current architectures. I once heard that when it comes to games, most games would be faster running off a single core rather than attempting to split things to two cores. With early dual-core systems, this seemed quite true.
But if we simplified the cores a bit, we'd lose 40% performance each... and be able to pack in 20x as many. Just think - 120 cores available. Anything that you can run in parallel has a core available. That's going to be a lot easier to code for, since new assumptions can be made.
Intel has been working on it for years. Look up their 80-core prototypes.
I guarantee that with so many cores available, we can figure out ways to split algorithms to multiple cores and gain speed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. Apple is already preparing for it, with their Grand Central Dispatch.
To add further insult, money saved from AMD motherboards being cheaper (in particular SLI/xfire AMD boards are a good whack cheaper) will let you put money towards more storage, a SSD or a step up in CPU speed.
Or a better videocard.
With a highly limited budget, knocking $100 off the CPU might bump your GPU funds from $120 to $220 - which will give a HUGE framerate increase.
And all you lose is 10% performance for CPU-only tasks, and some overclockability.
Slashdot Mirror
$5-$10 a month for something as ubiquitous as Facebook would be well worth the money, in my opinion.
I'd pay $12/year. Okay, maybe $15, because Paypal takes a cut.
While true, I doubt they put much effort into ensuring that's the case.
At least some games aren't the exact same game, which makes them worth the price.
Others... not so much.
It's far more likely they ran some antivirus scans and set it loose.
Remember, this is Rockstar that we're talking about.
Actually, I wholeheartedly and resoundingly agree with what they've done. They may as well get at least some benefit from piracy...
They're already getting some benefit. Free word-of-mouth advertising. Some estimates (mostly from indy devs) suggest that every 20-25 pirated copies will result in 1 extra sale. Obviously for games like Spore, it has the inverse effect.
Their actions are quite irresponsible. Did they even bother checking for viruses/trojans/rootkits? Probably not... :/
But those are expensive, defeating the purpose of using PS3s in the first place. They could have gone to IBM and bulk ordered a pile of CELL equipped blade servers but its cheaper to buy the PS3 which Sony, like every other console manufacturer, sells below cost and make up the difference with game sales.
USAF buys literally tons of loss-leading PS3s but no games? I think you just hit on why Sony doesn't care about the problem the Air Force faces now.
They don't sell it "below cost". They easily make a hundred percent profit on the hardware. It's possible that they need three hundred percent profit to pay off the Cell R&D, but whose fault is that?
They're willing to sell it to millions of gamers for that low. Scientific research probably accounts for less than 1% of the PS3's sold, and is for a good cause. They should've just written it off as charity (not the tax deductible kind) or investment in the future.
And how do I know this? From all the original articles quoting the dropping price to manufacture the PS3, which claimed that Sony was losing several hundred dollars on each unit. The parts costs were skewed, though. At the time those articles came out, I was able to get parts like HDDs an average of 40% cheaper than the quoted amounts, and I'm a nobody. I'd imagine a company manufacturing millions of units would be able to get far better prices than I could. They manufacture many of the components themselves, too, so that reduces parts costs even further. (Unless they want to make a profit, moving parts from one devision to another)
There are distribution costs, but I'm sure they've got that down to an art. If I can get a single console shipped from China for ~$50, I'm betting it costs closer to ~$20 for them, imported by the thousands.
Do they have a right to lots of profit? Absolutely. Any company or companies that plop down tens of billions before getting a return shouldn't be criticized for wanting 100%+ profit. There's a lot of fields where profit margins are 1000%+, so this isn't at all extreme.
But I'm tired of hearing that they're selling below cost. They aren't. They still make money on every PS3 sold to a scientist - it's just that they lose the chance to sell expensive Cell supercomputers, and there's no further licensing revenue from purchased games.
If it's only available via digital distribution, then I guess I'm not the target audience, no matter how much of a gamer I am.
Some digital distribution is entirely DRM Free.
http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/
http://www.wolfire.com/humble
Many indy games certainly are.
http://www.torchlightgame.com/
I've even sworn off of Blizzard with their announcement that they're killing LAN play on the sequels to the games that practically MADE LANs proliferate. I'm not going to say that the original StarCraft and Diablo games singlehandedly made LANs popular, but they sure as hell helped, and they were so supportive of it that they'd let you install spawns on your friends' computers so they could play too. Now that Blizzard is ALREADY filthy rich, they're just getting greedier? Fuck that.
Apparently you connect through the lobby (requires an internet connection), then do LAN play locally. Not the best solution, but meh. I can understand, considering all the pirated copies of their other games that are in use. However, understanding doesn't make it any less annoying.
I call it a joystick nub, or pointer nub.
Simple, safe & secure web appliances will make the basics of e-mail, web surfing and reading common format documents cheap and easy for everyone (this includes the poorer countries of the world).
We have them.
They are called Android, WebOS, and iPhone phones. And now the iPad.
LOL.
I don't know how you can compare an iPad to the $35 chinese netbooks flooding eBay right now. One of those - shipped worldwide for $50-60 - would be perfect for some of the poorer developing nations.
Of course, right now they're all lame WinCE 5/6 netbooks. ChromeOS or even Android on one of those would vastly enhance the usability.
I already own most of them, but I'll probably toss $10 in, weighted towards the EFF.
Aquaria is the one I still don't have.
Firefox is getting faster. Every single new version has performance improvements, in rendering and javascript.
I've got an old Athlon XP computer that has migrated from Firefox 1 all the way to Firefox 3.6. I assure you that it's improving with every release, even as I pile more and more extensions into it.
But Chrome is incredibly fast. The V8 JIT helps an unimaginable amount.
It's funny that 8 years ago, I had arguments with people over implementing a javascript JIT in a browser. Nobody believed it would work, making stupid arguments like "It'd take too long to compile the webpage.", or "There's no point. Web apps aren't going anywhere important."
Thank you Google for the HUGE ego boost you gave me. I'm a visionary! ;D
You click on the menu button (right side of the screen - looks like a piece of letter paper), then pick "Print" from the drop-down list...
Informative? Honestly, have any of you even used Chrome? It took me 5 seconds to find that... There's only two menu buttons, so even if you read all the options, you're looking at 30 seconds before you stumble upon it.
Considering that most people are migrating away from IE, this is quite an improvement over 2 menu bars, a titlebar, 6 toolbars, an address and favourites bar... In IE I've seen half the screen get used by toolbars on desktop PCs. The way people click through installers, it quickly becomes unusable on netbooks - not enough vertical space.
But beyond that google or any other search Provider, has no business building up some kinda advertising profile of my wed history.
I answered your primary complaint.
As I already said, they will still be tracking you - they just won't use it to customize search results, and they won't have an account to associate with their tracking data and statistics.
so google isn't this do no evil company,there just getting there slower then everyone else.
I agree. But unlike many companies, they haven't stopped innovating. If you look at the other giants in the industry, they have to rely on attacking their competitors. Google makes the occasional questionable move, but they still primarily innovate to survive. That's good.
Talk about selective quoting.
Unity exists today, and is great for the minimalist, stateless configurations that suit a dual-boot environment. But in order embrace it for our Netbook UI, we’ll need to design some new capabilities, and implement them during this cycle.
...
The two primary pieces we need to put in place are:
It says exactly the opposite of what you implied? They WANT proper file management, but haven't got around to it yet. That's what happens when you're rolling your own distro - you start with a terminal, then start adding in X11, a desktop environment, etc.
Right now they're focusing on the instant-on stuff, for use in the same situation as ExpressGate. (which isn't supposed to have much except a browser) But despite that, they WANT Ubuntu NBR to be fully configurable.
P.S. If you look at the mockups, what do you see a big fat icon depicting? A file folder!
Then...
1) Don't login while searching.
2) Clear your flash cookies.
3) If you logged in while searching, regularly clear your search history from the Google control panel. It will still be retained for several months, but probably won't be actively used to serve you anything. Just passively used for larger scale statistics.
Note: You will still be tracked. For more info, read on: http://www.ghostery.com/
P.S. I respect Google for being so truthful about how things are.
Hey, they have to stay afloat somehow. I'd rather have it be targeted advertising than outright selling my info or spamming me. That makes them better than 95% of the advertising networks on the internet.
Using Google's services improves the end user experience, and Google can only provide those services if they make money.
Gamers seriously care about 20% faster frame rates, especially at the edge cases. The difference between 28fps and 34fps is sometimes the difference between playable and unplayable.
True. But quite often these benchmarks are done at low quality. Few gamers care about 200fps vs 240fps.
And as soon as you raise the quality, so the GPU is the bottleneck, suddenly the difference drops below 20%. Benchmarks like this suggest 8-16% is more common than 20+%
There are a few games that truly benefit from fewer, faster cores. But it's not like we're comparing 28->34fps. For most, any modern CPU and GPU will manage 60+ fps. Take a look at L4D2 - even Dragon Age is way above 100fps.
Given identical prices, I think a lot of people will go for the extra cores. Whether that's a smart choice is determined by the buyer, because only the buyer knows how he will use it.
Last time around many people picked up Q6600's rather than E6600's, because even though it wasn't as fast in games, more cores meant they'd be set for when games used more cores. The odd time they ran multiple multi-core programs at once, they'd also be set.
I'm guessing many will go for more cores this time around, too.
Who needs benchmarks? This is about marketing, and right now AMD has more cores. They must be better!
P.S. Some of those same benchmarks used to tell you that a fast dual-core beats a quad-core. Try running multiple benchmarks at once, and suddenly it's a different story. Many people went with quads despite them being worse for gaming, because of them being "future-proof" and "fast-enough". Given more cores for the same price(and a negligible performance difference), many people will go for more cores.
And yes, it is negligible. Nobody cares if the i5-750 is 20% faster at X task, when it's only 10 vs 12 seconds.
Yep, they're my ISP too, and they are awesome.
I'm in BC, which I believe is on the Telus backbone. Where I live I can only get 3mbit internet. I'm happy with their service, so I contacted them to ask if I could pay annually for their service. They gave me a 10% discount!
$27/mo, for 3mbit/640kbit with 200GB cap. It suits me just fine.
My ISP (Teksavvy - Canada) offers 200GB for $30/mo. If I go over that, I get charged $10 for another 100GB. Or I can opt to pay $10 extra every month, for unlimited bandwidth.
Unfortunately, they go through Bell...
So it's worse than double billing, in my opinion. Bell gets to charge premium rent on their capital investment, even though they aren't paying the real cost – for backbone traffic. The independent DSL providers are double billed - for backbone and for Bell's premium rent on the copper line to the DSLAM. While Bell did submit some evidence that their DSLAM's are saturated, I suspect they've intentionally failed to upgrade their DSLAM's precisely to bring about saturation as evidence before the CRTC of the need for fees.
They also cranked up their max offered speed to 5x what Telus used to offer. That's got to have an impact on over-saturation!
First of all, any computer organization text will inform you that as the number of cores increase - scheduling amongst those cores becomes an exponentially costly issue in itself. This scheduling/load balancing of course has to be ultra low latency to maintain a reasonable throughput.
Not to mention the fact, that on software side managing threading and choosing instructions to parallelize is a big headache. Many decent programmers cannot get it right so that in itself defeats the presence of different cores.
That's why we need to rethink our current architectures. I once heard that when it comes to games, most games would be faster running off a single core rather than attempting to split things to two cores. With early dual-core systems, this seemed quite true.
But if we simplified the cores a bit, we'd lose 40% performance each... and be able to pack in 20x as many. Just think - 120 cores available. Anything that you can run in parallel has a core available. That's going to be a lot easier to code for, since new assumptions can be made.
Intel has been working on it for years. Look up their 80-core prototypes.
I guarantee that with so many cores available, we can figure out ways to split algorithms to multiple cores and gain speed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen. Apple is already preparing for it, with their Grand Central Dispatch.
The $195 6 core/6 thread chip overclocks to 4ghz too, according to xtremesystems.org.
That puts value quite firmly on AMD's side. Expect price drops for Intel, soon.
Wait - so your defense is Intel only costs $170 more for ECC support?
(High end AMD boards are going for $150 or less - not $200)
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131631 (cheaper if you know where to look)
Maybe I'm a cheapskate, but I'd rather buy an AMD 6-core for $200, and save $280 ($110+$170) across all components.
To add further insult, money saved from AMD motherboards being cheaper (in particular SLI/xfire AMD boards are a good whack cheaper) will let you put money towards more storage, a SSD or a step up in CPU speed.
Or a better videocard.
With a highly limited budget, knocking $100 off the CPU might bump your GPU funds from $120 to $220 - which will give a HUGE framerate increase.
And all you lose is 10% performance for CPU-only tasks, and some overclockability.