The problem is that, now that one can find PS3s just sitting in stores, shipped doesn't always mean sold. Furthermore, warehouses might have even more... Still, it seems fairly likely that Sony shipped around 1.5M consoles to retailers and the like during 2006.
vgcharts.org, who seem accurate enough, estimate total PS3 sales worldwide at 1.41M so far (that implies maybe 1-2 hundred k in various display cases, not an unreasonable number) and Wii sales as 4M.
The point is, the only way to guarantee that "superior quality" is either: 1. Buy a separate special line just for one customer, denying them access to the rest of your network. or 2. Give their packets priority.
The second is a lot cheaper and a lot more reliable.
But it directly contradicts most of the descriptions people write of network neutrality. And, while people on slashdot can just say "well, no, that's okay", governments don't.
For this reason, I'm still vehemently opposed to government legislation in this area. I think people should be allowed to give higher priority to packets if they want to, because every attempt to prohibit this ends up stepping on legitimate usages.
Read the fine print. When people buy bandwidth from an ISP, they are normally getting only a guarantee of bandwidth to the ISP; they are getting no guarantee that the ISP isn't massively oversold.
Such a guarantee would cost more.
But then we're in the case where some people are paying for a service which means that their packets would bump other peoples' packets -- because ISPs will always be oversold by a huge margin.
If that's the balance, I have to disagree with you.
I can survive without Vonage.
I cannot survive if I can't null-route spammers.
I make my living on email. No email, no living. If we couldn't null-route spammers by the millions (I bet we have upwards of 10 million IP addresses in our filters, admittedly most of them in class C or larger blocks), we could not have email; I would have to win the lottery to afford big enough servers to handle even just my house and a couple of friends.
I'm not sure I like that description either. Imagine that I wish to, as a network provider, oversubscribe. Everyone does already, nothing new there. So, I want to offer customers the option of buying "guarnanteed" bandwidth -- that is to say, if they buy a T1's worth of this, I make sure that they are always getting a full T1's worth of bandwidth if they want it.
Is that a bad thing? I don't know that it is. I'm offering them an additional service, at a higher price. They can't necessarily use a service that can't give them guarantees on local bandwidth availability, but other people can't AFFORD what it would cost me to provide that service.
The case that brought this all up was a particularly dumb cable company trying to charge, not its customers, but someone else's. But what then? I already offer intentionally reduced quality of service to specific companies on the grounds that they are not providing me with value; they're called spammers.
This is one of those things where I think we are pretty close to all agreeing on what we want, but it's hard enough to say correctly that I am not at all convinced I want to spend more tax money trying to enforce a set of words about it; I am not at all convinced that any paragraph or even page of English text correctly describes what we're talking about.
Okay, so everyone says it's bad if I discriminate against a particular entity in my QoS.
Imagine that the entity is, say, the Atriks spam network.
Is it bad of me to drop their packets first, or possibly just drop them no matter what?
Explain to me how the net neutrality legislation you are advocating for provides for the desire to drop packets from spammers. Are you relying on whether or not my users have requested the packets? On something else? What's the truck?
I have seen people argue that, since I have a tiny little ISP, I ought to be treated like a common carrier.
If I am, this creates a problem for me, which is that I don't want to offer the same quality of service to cyberpromo that I do to legitimate email. (Yeah, I know cyberpromo's long-dead. You know what I mean.)
Now, obviously, most of us assume that networks are allowed to drop spam, or whatever... But pretty often, when people write up a definition of net neutrality, it ends up having the logical implication that I can't null-route spammers.
I have seen them in stores fairly frequently since I got mine on the 28th. Not necessarily very many, but I've seen them at one of the two Targets near my house, the local Best Buy had a sign up saying they had some in stock, see store clerk, and the local Gamestop had them.
No one has Wiis yet. The Gamestop guy said that, every morning, they have a line of people waiting in case they got some Wiis in.
I have a bulb that takes a while to warm up. It's 9 years old. I don't think I've had any problems with bulbs less than three or four years old, and only one or two other bulbs have acted up at all.
Gas will be WAY cheaper than electricity for heating.
Compare, say, two options:
1. 60W of light, generates 60W worth of heat too. 2. 15W of light, generates 15W worth of heat. Also, gas to cover 45W worth of heat.
Which of these is more efficient? If the former is cheaper, then you should not be using natural gas to heat your place, you should be using electricity. Think about it.
Most likely, gas is cheaper. Around here, it's about 1/3rd the cost.
I've been using these since 1997, when it was an awesome deal to be able to get some for $8 each instead of $15 at Sears.
They have been wonderful. Pretty much everything in my house is flourescent; there are a couple of exceptions, but very few. They come in a variety of different color temperatures, and if you mix a couple of different ones, you can get a very bright and vivid light.
I've had a couple that started dimming from old age. For instance, the 20W we put in our kitchen overhead light when we moved in, in 1997, takes about five minutes to warm up; I just can't be bothered to replace it yet. Lifespan seems to run between two and seven years, depending on usage patterns. Our power bill went down by about $80/month (3-story house, plus basement, lots of night owls) over the months we spent replacing everything that burned out with CFL.
Overall, absolutely excellent, and I'm a big fan. Now that you can get small ones cheap, they're even better; the days where CFLs were way bigger than ordinary bulbs are long gone. I like the light better, and the money savings are excellent, to say nothing of durability; I haven't had to buy light bulbs in over a year, despite this being a large house with lots of people.
It's a DVI switch, not an HDMI switch. I have nothing with HDMI except the PS3. I do, however, have a DVI switch for my computers. I would connect the PS3 to it, too, but I can't because of HDCP. The "converter" is just wires.
It's not a shortage of inputs in general -- the monitor also has component, and so on -- it's just that I'd love to be able to have a single switch, because then I could have my regular keyboard, mouse, and monitor when using the PS3.
They make HDCP-compliant DVI switches, but they cost lots extra, and I don't have the spare money.
HDMI->DVI does not bypass HDCP; it's just a question of wires. The cables are $20 or so. It's just a bunch of wires. The signal coming out of the PS3 is still HDCP-encoded.
So what I'm prevented from doing is connecting the PS3, via DVI, to ANY device that isn't HDCP, including my console switch, so I can't put the PS3 on the beautiful 24" HDCP-capable monitor I use for everything else. Since I am not about to buy another monitor just for the PS3, or spend extra money to replace a perfectly functional DVI switch with a DVI switch that also does HDCP, just for one stupid games machine, it means the PS3 gets dumped on a lower res display.
More generally, it means I can't just hook the PS3's DVI output up to a generic PC monitor; it has to have extra features, and the list of warnings about failure modes in my monitor's manual was beautiful. Apparently, if you interrupt the signal for a while, you may have to reboot to recover it, because the negotiation may need to be restarted. All this extra hardware just to try to keep people from copying movies.
1080p vs. 1080i is a pretty big difference. HDMI allows 1080p. It also, under Linux, allows 1920x1200.
FWIW, I have successfully set my component cable to 1080p output, and it was even possible to see the screen, but it looked like crap.
See, there's a common claim that HDCP applies only to blu-ray movies.
NOT SO!
If I connect my PS3 directly to an HDCP monitor (using HDMI->DVI), I get playback in everything -- XMB, games, Linux.
If I connect it through a console switch, I get static. If I connect it to a non-HDCP monitor, I get a blank screen.
HDCP is on 100% of the time on the HDMI output, no matter what you are viewing. There is no way I can find to disable it, even if you're running the Linux console in 640x480. You always get HDCP.
Now, you can just use component outs, and those will work fine up to 720p or 1080i. (You can, if you want, forcibly assert that you can do 1080p through them, but the signal is too degraded to be much good.) Then there's no HDCP, either.
But if you want the digital output, you get HDCP. And yes, so far as I can tell, this applies even when you're in VESA modes rather than NTSCP modes.
I picked up a PS3 (for Linux) and I've been hanging out with PS3 users. It's fascinating. They have no idea about content restrictions. When I posted a comment on my blog about how annoying HDCP is (if I didn't have it, I'd be running my PS3 at 1920x1200... But it's impossible in my setup because of HDCP), I got a bitchy remark from someone who insisted that Linux has full access to the hard drive, and just doesn't read the PS3 filesystem. No, Sony actually virtualizes the machine so you see only the part of the disk that doesn't have any Sony data on it.
The war between Sony's content and hardware people is pretty vivid here.
If you wanna do music production, and one of the major hardware platforms is actively trying to get in your face, use the other one. This is not complicated, and it solves the problem.
It's not as though you can't get music software for the Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't "this year" for Nintendo probably mean "the fiscal year ending March 31st"?
If it does, then that would be saying they think they can sell about another two million consoles in the next two months or so.
So what happens when someone buys their assets and pursues the case?
Dungeon Explorer? I think that was a gauntlet clone for Sega CD, or something similar.
The problem is that, now that one can find PS3s just sitting in stores, shipped doesn't always mean sold. Furthermore, warehouses might have even more... Still, it seems fairly likely that Sony shipped around 1.5M consoles to retailers and the like during 2006.
vgcharts.org, who seem accurate enough, estimate total PS3 sales worldwide at 1.41M so far (that implies maybe 1-2 hundred k in various display cases, not an unreasonable number) and Wii sales as 4M.
The point is, the only way to guarantee that "superior quality" is either:
1. Buy a separate special line just for one customer, denying them access to the rest of your network.
or
2. Give their packets priority.
The second is a lot cheaper and a lot more reliable.
But it directly contradicts most of the descriptions people write of network neutrality. And, while people on slashdot can just say "well, no, that's okay", governments don't.
For this reason, I'm still vehemently opposed to government legislation in this area. I think people should be allowed to give higher priority to packets if they want to, because every attempt to prohibit this ends up stepping on legitimate usages.
Read the fine print. When people buy bandwidth from an ISP, they are normally getting only a guarantee of bandwidth to the ISP; they are getting no guarantee that the ISP isn't massively oversold.
Such a guarantee would cost more.
But then we're in the case where some people are paying for a service which means that their packets would bump other peoples' packets -- because ISPs will always be oversold by a huge margin.
If that's the balance, I have to disagree with you.
I can survive without Vonage.
I cannot survive if I can't null-route spammers.
I make my living on email. No email, no living. If we couldn't null-route spammers by the millions (I bet we have upwards of 10 million IP addresses in our filters, admittedly most of them in class C or larger blocks), we could not have email; I would have to win the lottery to afford big enough servers to handle even just my house and a couple of friends.
I'm not sure I like that description either. Imagine that I wish to, as a network provider, oversubscribe. Everyone does already, nothing new there. So, I want to offer customers the option of buying "guarnanteed" bandwidth -- that is to say, if they buy a T1's worth of this, I make sure that they are always getting a full T1's worth of bandwidth if they want it.
Is that a bad thing? I don't know that it is. I'm offering them an additional service, at a higher price. They can't necessarily use a service that can't give them guarantees on local bandwidth availability, but other people can't AFFORD what it would cost me to provide that service.
The case that brought this all up was a particularly dumb cable company trying to charge, not its customers, but someone else's. But what then? I already offer intentionally reduced quality of service to specific companies on the grounds that they are not providing me with value; they're called spammers.
This is one of those things where I think we are pretty close to all agreeing on what we want, but it's hard enough to say correctly that I am not at all convinced I want to spend more tax money trying to enforce a set of words about it; I am not at all convinced that any paragraph or even page of English text correctly describes what we're talking about.
Okay, so everyone says it's bad if I discriminate against a particular entity in my QoS.
Imagine that the entity is, say, the Atriks spam network.
Is it bad of me to drop their packets first, or possibly just drop them no matter what?
Explain to me how the net neutrality legislation you are advocating for provides for the desire to drop packets from spammers. Are you relying on whether or not my users have requested the packets? On something else? What's the truck?
The boundaries are a little fuzzy in spots.
I have seen people argue that, since I have a tiny little ISP, I ought to be treated like a common carrier.
If I am, this creates a problem for me, which is that I don't want to offer the same quality of service to cyberpromo that I do to legitimate email. (Yeah, I know cyberpromo's long-dead. You know what I mean.)
Now, obviously, most of us assume that networks are allowed to drop spam, or whatever... But pretty often, when people write up a definition of net neutrality, it ends up having the logical implication that I can't null-route spammers.
I have seen them in stores fairly frequently since I got mine on the 28th. Not necessarily very many, but I've seen them at one of the two Targets near my house, the local Best Buy had a sign up saying they had some in stock, see store clerk, and the local Gamestop had them.
No one has Wiis yet. The Gamestop guy said that, every morning, they have a line of people waiting in case they got some Wiis in.
No access to GPU at all; all you get is a framebuffer.
Huh! I have no clue what gametap is, or how to use it. Maybe I have to boot Windows again and find out.
It'll be easier to say how well it works when more than one installment has come out.
And, yes, I looked it up, and yes, I will download Episode 2 the day after tomorrow. Looking forward to it, in fact.
Because no one actually has a PS3 or plays games on it; they just exist to get flipped on eBay!
(Disclaimer: I have one, and it's not getting resold.)
A few HOURS of use? Something's wrong.
I have a bulb that takes a while to warm up. It's 9 years old. I don't think I've had any problems with bulbs less than three or four years old, and only one or two other bulbs have acted up at all.
Gas will be WAY cheaper than electricity for heating.
Compare, say, two options:
1. 60W of light, generates 60W worth of heat too.
2. 15W of light, generates 15W worth of heat. Also, gas to cover 45W worth of heat.
Which of these is more efficient? If the former is cheaper, then you should not be using natural gas to heat your place, you should be using electricity. Think about it.
Most likely, gas is cheaper. Around here, it's about 1/3rd the cost.
I've been using these since 1997, when it was an awesome deal to be able to get some for $8 each instead of $15 at Sears.
They have been wonderful. Pretty much everything in my house is flourescent; there are a couple of exceptions, but very few. They come in a variety of different color temperatures, and if you mix a couple of different ones, you can get a very bright and vivid light.
I've had a couple that started dimming from old age. For instance, the 20W we put in our kitchen overhead light when we moved in, in 1997, takes about five minutes to warm up; I just can't be bothered to replace it yet. Lifespan seems to run between two and seven years, depending on usage patterns. Our power bill went down by about $80/month (3-story house, plus basement, lots of night owls) over the months we spent replacing everything that burned out with CFL.
Overall, absolutely excellent, and I'm a big fan. Now that you can get small ones cheap, they're even better; the days where CFLs were way bigger than ordinary bulbs are long gone. I like the light better, and the money savings are excellent, to say nothing of durability; I haven't had to buy light bulbs in over a year, despite this being a large house with lots of people.
Tell me about it! I spent over six months trying to find that game, finally found one of the reprint copies.
And man, was it fun. Ask any of my roommates what I did for the first week or so of our big studio vacation. OBJECTION!
It's a DVI switch, not an HDMI switch. I have nothing with HDMI except the PS3. I do, however, have a DVI switch for my computers. I would connect the PS3 to it, too, but I can't because of HDCP. The "converter" is just wires.
It's not a shortage of inputs in general -- the monitor also has component, and so on -- it's just that I'd love to be able to have a single switch, because then I could have my regular keyboard, mouse, and monitor when using the PS3.
They make HDCP-compliant DVI switches, but they cost lots extra, and I don't have the spare money.
HDMI->DVI does not bypass HDCP; it's just a question of wires. The cables are $20 or so. It's just a bunch of wires. The signal coming out of the PS3 is still HDCP-encoded.
So what I'm prevented from doing is connecting the PS3, via DVI, to ANY device that isn't HDCP, including my console switch, so I can't put the PS3 on the beautiful 24" HDCP-capable monitor I use for everything else. Since I am not about to buy another monitor just for the PS3, or spend extra money to replace a perfectly functional DVI switch with a DVI switch that also does HDCP, just for one stupid games machine, it means the PS3 gets dumped on a lower res display.
More generally, it means I can't just hook the PS3's DVI output up to a generic PC monitor; it has to have extra features, and the list of warnings about failure modes in my monitor's manual was beautiful. Apparently, if you interrupt the signal for a while, you may have to reboot to recover it, because the negotiation may need to be restarted. All this extra hardware just to try to keep people from copying movies.
1080p vs. 1080i is a pretty big difference. HDMI allows 1080p. It also, under Linux, allows 1920x1200.
FWIW, I have successfully set my component cable to 1080p output, and it was even possible to see the screen, but it looked like crap.
HDCP is, in fact, an issue.
See, there's a common claim that HDCP applies only to blu-ray movies.
NOT SO!
If I connect my PS3 directly to an HDCP monitor (using HDMI->DVI), I get playback in everything -- XMB, games, Linux.
If I connect it through a console switch, I get static. If I connect it to a non-HDCP monitor, I get a blank screen.
HDCP is on 100% of the time on the HDMI output, no matter what you are viewing. There is no way I can find to disable it, even if you're running the Linux console in 640x480. You always get HDCP.
Now, you can just use component outs, and those will work fine up to 720p or 1080i. (You can, if you want, forcibly assert that you can do 1080p through them, but the signal is too degraded to be much good.) Then there's no HDCP, either.
But if you want the digital output, you get HDCP. And yes, so far as I can tell, this applies even when you're in VESA modes rather than NTSCP modes.
I picked up a PS3 (for Linux) and I've been hanging out with PS3 users. It's fascinating. They have no idea about content restrictions. When I posted a comment on my blog about how annoying HDCP is (if I didn't have it, I'd be running my PS3 at 1920x1200... But it's impossible in my setup because of HDCP), I got a bitchy remark from someone who insisted that Linux has full access to the hard drive, and just doesn't read the PS3 filesystem. No, Sony actually virtualizes the machine so you see only the part of the disk that doesn't have any Sony data on it.
The war between Sony's content and hardware people is pretty vivid here.
Er, no, I'm not trolling.
If you wanna do music production, and one of the major hardware platforms is actively trying to get in your face, use the other one. This is not complicated, and it solves the problem.
It's not as though you can't get music software for the Mac.
"How do others deal with these issues?"
They use a mac for their production work.
Duh.
p.s.: Dear lameness filter: I know it is like yelling, THAT'S WHY THAT WAS IN ALL CAPS.