Stockpiling is a different story... Also, anybody who's wanted to buy something in short supply will tell you that the BestBuy inventory display shows the status as of closing time the previous day. Stores don't have a continuously active link to each other. If they're stockpiling, of course the numbers are going to be elevated. If not, the numbers aren't going to be up to date. How much do you want to bet that screenshot was from the Chesterfield, MO store? It's got typical levels of weekly sales, but none in stock. That tells me all the other stores probably sold out too, but the updated numbers won't come in until the nightly cron job runs.
Regardless of all of that... The number unsold compared to the number shipped is still a statistical anomaly when the device is sold out in most places.
How did you go from Microsoft having shipped 8 million to them having sold 10 million?
And you don't have sales figures from either company. You only have shipment figures from both companies.
Regardless, maybe 80 million consoles will be sold this generation. Maybe. The number of High-def video players is either going to be ten times that, or roughly equal to twice the number of PS3s sold. Since the PS3 is the only system with the drive built in, it will either be the largest factor in the format war (unlikely), or all consoles will be insignificant in the format war (likely).
The predictions of the Slashdot Games section comments are so myopic it is ridiculous. Try looking at the big picture.
Given that the PS3 is almost universally sold out, the difference is probably negligible. It is still very uncommon to see a PS3 in stock. I doubt that you would find more than a couple stores in the whole country which have units from their daily shipments last until the next business day.
Yeah, people aren't lining up before dawn to get them, so you might see one in the display case when you're at Target in the afternoon or something, but even the less desirable 20GB units are still selling out the day they arrive.
On the other hand, Microsoft claims to have sold 7.something million, but I'm sure that includes the pile of 20 systems at every BestBuy, Circuit City, Frys, Target, Toys R Us, Gamestop, and Walmart in the country. Maybe there are a few thousand shipped but unsold PS3s, but there must be well over a million shipped but unsold 360s. It'll be the same way for the PS3 this time next year, but this close to launch "shipped" and "sold" may as well be the same number.
Don't tell Microsoft that 1,000,000 consoles in a month and a half is a poor start. They took over three months to sell a million 360s. They launched earlier in the season, and they still didn't hit a million until February.
Only one console had a poor launch this generation, and it wasn't the PS3.
Microsoft isn't your average investor, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not Microsoft. Microsoft has something other than money that their targets need. A NFP doesn't have that kind of leverage.
A foundation can do FAR more good by moral investing than outright giving.
That is a dubious assertion, because usually you can't invest against something, and if your investment dollars don't fund a highly profitable venture, somebody else's will. Perhaps you can do no harm by avoiding "evil" investments (who's definition of evil do you use, anyway), but you can rarely do additional good by not investing.
My new machine at work has a sticker on the front that says "Intel Core 2 Duo Inside"... "Intel inside" has been their branding for how long now? I think the only real surprise here is that the "Pentium" name wasn't actually as important as they thought. Pentium was just a chip's branding, not the company's branding. Releasing a new product and calling it something different than the old one isn't "re-branding". It's "what everybody else does".
No kidding. I believe that Microsoft is having those discussions, because they are both stupid enough and arrogant enough to believe they could be in such a fortunate position..... It's not like their console is the number one seller right now even if Sony were out of the picture.
Cringly seems to be basing that prediction on the previous prediction... That Cell yields would be a problem. Seeing how IBM just last week announced considerable success with making Cell on a smaller process, I wonder if he wrote this article two weeks ago and now he's already got two wrong for 2007. Oops.
If Cell yields were to be a problem, Sony *would* be fucked though, because they're using it in pretty much all of their HDTV devices.
Verizon offers 50M/10M. And it really goes that fast. This is in the boonies too, you don't have to live in your parent's closet in an over-crowded suburb.
Datacentres are making more and more use of these huge, "consumer level" drives in "nearline" storage arrays that are used to hold less frequently accessed data.
And drive vendors have responded with "nearline" product lines to resolve the problems that occurred (and that the customer didn't expect) when customers used consumer grade drives in environments they weren't speced for.
There are always customers that want as much capacity as possible. All I'm saying is that the vast majority of the customers who have high capacity requirements without high performance and/or high reliability are individual consumers.
Human interaction isn't even required. It would be an operation a fraction the size of Dells current burn-in facilities, and take a fraction of the time to do.
I said that the customers perceive the problem to be that of the company who's name is on the label. Who's fault it actually is doesn't play into people's perceptions.
Higher data density produces marginal performance increases, but only if the capacity increasing technology works at the same angular velocity as the previous technologies. Adding an additional spindle can significantly increase performance (relative to the usual 12 to 20% bump in capacity). Regardless, these high densities are not finding their way into the 10k and 15k rpm drives yet, because vendors can't produce high RPM disks at these capacities with the 4,000,000 hour MTBF that many datacenters demand and the vibrational tolerance that all datacenters require. Many high capacity disks actually perform significantly worse in a datacenter or array setting than they do in a workstation because the vibrations associated with the environment cause the heads to lose the track on the platter more frequently than occurs otherwise. By significant, I mean 75% reduction in throughput in an array compared to running the drive by itself. This phenomenon can cause larger capacity drive to perform worse than the smaller drives even though they should be faster in theory. Also keep in mind that while the trend in increasing data density is making its way into datacenters, this is mostly in the form of reduction in physical device size, and not in a capacity increase. Seagate in particular (who this article is about) is moving their enterprise roadmap in the 2.5" direction.
Notice that in both of my comments I carefully chose between "many" and "all" when I was making statements. I'm also not considering anything with a single array to be a "datacenter".
Back to the American audience. I am American, if it matters. I will speak of Americans, here, as they since I am not a sheep:) The majority of Americans are sheep, know very little and/or don't care enough to learn about the things, that matter around them. From politics, to technology, to rights as citizens, to government, and everything else, in between. They will take anything they like, regardless of it causes cancer, makes them fat, infected with DRM, etc. if it satiates their "must consume" at all cost mindset. You have to know that DRM keeps getting worse and worse because the majority of American, and the world at large, do not care enough to speak with their wallets, in terms of not buying such fucked up products. Corporations are slowly, but surely, ruling the world, making the laws, and are no longer selling us products, instead, only issuing us temporary licenses to use the products,we thought, we bought. It's virtual ownership in the real world. It's bullshit, but people don't care enough to stop consuming it. They are ambivalent and addicted. When will people stop being sheep and put an end to this bullshit?
That is so right and so wrong all at the same time when it comes to video game systems.
It doesn't matter if the platform is poorly designed, unreliable, or over priced (to some extent). If the system plays the games that people want to play, they'll buy it. I don't think that is "not caring enough to speak with their wallets". I think that is speaking with their wallets loudly and clearly. They just don't care about the same stuff you do. Most people would rather be happy than outraged.
People know what "battery" and "fire" are. It was on the news a lot (for something like a product recall)
Almost everybody associates the problem with Dell, not with Sony. Quite honestly, they are right to. Dell sold the batteries, and they should have tested them to see if they were faulty. They also should have designed their chargers to prevent the problem.
Almost nobody with an exploding Sony battery purchased a package that said Sony on it anywhere.
Datacenters don't necessarily want larger disks. Frequently, they are performance oriented and are more interested in spreading their dataset across a larger number of spindles for increased performance. They end up using terabytes of capacity for gigabytes of data. Seagate in particular has shifted their roadmap from capacity to performance in their enterprise and business class products. High capacity is reserved mostly for end users.
But 95% of them have probably never written a single line of eBay related code. The article speaks of them like they are actively working on eBay's behalf. In reality, most of the them really aren't developers, and the rest are all coding for their own self interest.
Gee, I wonder why you singled out that particular developer in your post?
I don't understand why people would run a distribution like Yellow Dog on hardware supported by a mainstream distribution. Historically, all Yellow Dog brought to the table was support for platforms not supported by RedHat, like PowerMacs. When all the mainstream distributions started to support PPC as well, Yellow Dog remained the Slashdot headliner distribution even though it was always behind the times. Now that Yellow Dog was first on the PS3 but the platform was later supported by Fedora, I have to wonder. Why would you run Yellow Dog when you can go straight to the cow (so to speak)?
Personally, I'll wait for Debian support (and a compelling reason to buy a PS3).
Intel has consistently held a significant process advantage at its fabs (fabrication facilities) over the life of the x86 architecture. Essentially, no one else can deliver the volume and performance of chips that Intel can. Even AMD is struggling to compete against Intel (90 nm vs 60 nm).
While that is nice and all, even if AMD held the process lead it wouldn't change anything. Indeed, IBM long held the process lead over intel (and still does in some ways), but still x86 made inroads to the embedded and appliance space, taking huge amounts of market share away from high-end PowerPC.
I just worked on an embedded project where the point to point interconnects of AMD's processors would have been a *huge* performance win over the shared bus architecture that intel can't seem to manage to get away from yet. We had to go with intel over AMD anyway though, because the costs of sourcing all the services that intel would provide for us were too high to justify.
The reason is that intel provides better infrastructure and services that any other high performance microprocessor vendor in the industry. When Motorola or IBM tried to make a sale, intel would swoop in and offer to develop the customer's entire board for them. The variety of intel reference designs is unmatched. Intel not only provides every chip you need for a full solution, but they do it for more possible solution sets than you can imagine. Intel will manufacture your entire product including chassis and bezel. Nobody even comes close to intel's infrastructure services. That is why even when other vendors have had superior processors for periods of time over the years, intel has held on to market leadership. There may be other reasons too, but there don't have to be. That one alone is sufficient.
The other answer, of course, is that we don't always... ARM/xScale has become *very* widely used, but that is still coming from intel. There are also probably more MIPS processors in people's homes than x86 processors since the cores are embedded in everything.
Largely, I agree with you. When I originally typed that sentence, I wrote "no risk to you" and then revised it to "lower risk". I think that in human interaction you are completely correct in saying that usually being a little trusting and more generous than average is the way to go, but there are also situations in life where that isn't true. Regardless of all that, being greedy in BitTorrent participation isn't human interaction, it is interaction between deterministic algorithms. You can dynamically determine how greedy you can be to maximize your benefit. Also, given that we are talking about avoiding upload to protect the downloader from prosecution for their illegal download, perceptions of ethics and morality are already going to be messed up in any given community of these users.
I didn't get into any of that in my comment though, because my intention with that post was really to get the submitter to think about the fact that most of the people he is "file sharing" with aren't in it for the sense of community, they're in it for personal gain. He shouldn't be so offended when he finds out that somebody is taking advantage of his generosity because if he opened his eyes and took a good look around he would probably realize that the majority of the peers he is trading packets with are doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Stockpiling is a different story... Also, anybody who's wanted to buy something in short supply will tell you that the BestBuy inventory display shows the status as of closing time the previous day. Stores don't have a continuously active link to each other. If they're stockpiling, of course the numbers are going to be elevated. If not, the numbers aren't going to be up to date. How much do you want to bet that screenshot was from the Chesterfield, MO store? It's got typical levels of weekly sales, but none in stock. That tells me all the other stores probably sold out too, but the updated numbers won't come in until the nightly cron job runs.
Regardless of all of that... The number unsold compared to the number shipped is still a statistical anomaly when the device is sold out in most places.
How did you go from Microsoft having shipped 8 million to them having sold 10 million?
And you don't have sales figures from either company. You only have shipment figures from both companies.
Regardless, maybe 80 million consoles will be sold this generation. Maybe. The number of High-def video players is either going to be ten times that, or roughly equal to twice the number of PS3s sold. Since the PS3 is the only system with the drive built in, it will either be the largest factor in the format war (unlikely), or all consoles will be insignificant in the format war (likely).
The predictions of the Slashdot Games section comments are so myopic it is ridiculous. Try looking at the big picture.
I'm clairvoyant, so I can tell you what you will see in a porn shop in six months.
The majority of the titles will be published on........ DVD!
Given that the PS3 is almost universally sold out, the difference is probably negligible. It is still very uncommon to see a PS3 in stock. I doubt that you would find more than a couple stores in the whole country which have units from their daily shipments last until the next business day.
Yeah, people aren't lining up before dawn to get them, so you might see one in the display case when you're at Target in the afternoon or something, but even the less desirable 20GB units are still selling out the day they arrive.
On the other hand, Microsoft claims to have sold 7.something million, but I'm sure that includes the pile of 20 systems at every BestBuy, Circuit City, Frys, Target, Toys R Us, Gamestop, and Walmart in the country. Maybe there are a few thousand shipped but unsold PS3s, but there must be well over a million shipped but unsold 360s. It'll be the same way for the PS3 this time next year, but this close to launch "shipped" and "sold" may as well be the same number.
Don't tell Microsoft that 1,000,000 consoles in a month and a half is a poor start. They took over three months to sell a million 360s. They launched earlier in the season, and they still didn't hit a million until February.
Only one console had a poor launch this generation, and it wasn't the PS3.
Similarly, I was not arguing that it was impossible. I said that it was not usually possible.
Microsoft isn't your average investor, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not Microsoft. Microsoft has something other than money that their targets need. A NFP doesn't have that kind of leverage.
A foundation can do FAR more good by moral investing than outright giving.
That is a dubious assertion, because usually you can't invest against something, and if your investment dollars don't fund a highly profitable venture, somebody else's will. Perhaps you can do no harm by avoiding "evil" investments (who's definition of evil do you use, anyway), but you can rarely do additional good by not investing.
My new machine at work has a sticker on the front that says "Intel Core 2 Duo Inside"... "Intel inside" has been their branding for how long now? I think the only real surprise here is that the "Pentium" name wasn't actually as important as they thought. Pentium was just a chip's branding, not the company's branding. Releasing a new product and calling it something different than the old one isn't "re-branding". It's "what everybody else does".
No kidding. I believe that Microsoft is having those discussions, because they are both stupid enough and arrogant enough to believe they could be in such a fortunate position..... It's not like their console is the number one seller right now even if Sony were out of the picture.
Cringly seems to be basing that prediction on the previous prediction... That Cell yields would be a problem. Seeing how IBM just last week announced considerable success with making Cell on a smaller process, I wonder if he wrote this article two weeks ago and now he's already got two wrong for 2007. Oops.
If Cell yields were to be a problem, Sony *would* be fucked though, because they're using it in pretty much all of their HDTV devices.
What would you consider realistic?
Verizon offers 50M/10M. And it really goes that fast. This is in the boonies too, you don't have to live in your parent's closet in an over-crowded suburb.
Datacentres are making more and more use of these huge, "consumer level" drives in "nearline" storage arrays that are used to hold less frequently accessed data.
And drive vendors have responded with "nearline" product lines to resolve the problems that occurred (and that the customer didn't expect) when customers used consumer grade drives in environments they weren't speced for.
There are always customers that want as much capacity as possible. All I'm saying is that the vast majority of the customers who have high capacity requirements without high performance and/or high reliability are individual consumers.
You're clueless if you think it's not.
Human interaction isn't even required. It would be an operation a fraction the size of Dells current burn-in facilities, and take a fraction of the time to do.
No, that's not what I said.
I said that the customers perceive the problem to be that of the company who's name is on the label. Who's fault it actually is doesn't play into people's perceptions.
Higher data density produces marginal performance increases, but only if the capacity increasing technology works at the same angular velocity as the previous technologies. Adding an additional spindle can significantly increase performance (relative to the usual 12 to 20% bump in capacity). Regardless, these high densities are not finding their way into the 10k and 15k rpm drives yet, because vendors can't produce high RPM disks at these capacities with the 4,000,000 hour MTBF that many datacenters demand and the vibrational tolerance that all datacenters require. Many high capacity disks actually perform significantly worse in a datacenter or array setting than they do in a workstation because the vibrations associated with the environment cause the heads to lose the track on the platter more frequently than occurs otherwise. By significant, I mean 75% reduction in throughput in an array compared to running the drive by itself. This phenomenon can cause larger capacity drive to perform worse than the smaller drives even though they should be faster in theory. Also keep in mind that while the trend in increasing data density is making its way into datacenters, this is mostly in the form of reduction in physical device size, and not in a capacity increase. Seagate in particular (who this article is about) is moving their enterprise roadmap in the 2.5" direction.
Notice that in both of my comments I carefully chose between "many" and "all" when I was making statements. I'm also not considering anything with a single array to be a "datacenter".
Way to miss the forest through the trees there, buddy.
Back to the American audience. I am American, if it matters. I will speak of Americans, here, as they since I am not a sheep:) ,we thought, we bought. It's virtual ownership in the real world. It's bullshit, but people don't care enough to stop consuming it. They are ambivalent and addicted. When will people stop being sheep and put an end to this bullshit?
The majority of Americans are sheep, know very little and/or don't care enough to learn about the things, that matter around them. From politics, to technology, to rights as citizens, to government, and everything else, in between. They will take anything they like, regardless of it causes cancer, makes them fat, infected with DRM, etc. if it satiates their "must consume" at all cost mindset. You have to know that DRM keeps getting worse and worse because the majority of American, and the world at large, do not care enough to speak with their wallets, in terms of not buying such fucked up products. Corporations are slowly, but surely, ruling the world, making the laws, and are no longer selling us products, instead, only issuing us temporary licenses to use the products
That is so right and so wrong all at the same time when it comes to video game systems.
It doesn't matter if the platform is poorly designed, unreliable, or over priced (to some extent). If the system plays the games that people want to play, they'll buy it. I don't think that is "not caring enough to speak with their wallets". I think that is speaking with their wallets loudly and clearly. They just don't care about the same stuff you do. Most people would rather be happy than outraged.
People know what "battery" and "fire" are. It was on the news a lot (for something like a product recall)
Almost everybody associates the problem with Dell, not with Sony. Quite honestly, they are right to. Dell sold the batteries, and they should have tested them to see if they were faulty. They also should have designed their chargers to prevent the problem.
Almost nobody with an exploding Sony battery purchased a package that said Sony on it anywhere.
Datacenters don't necessarily want larger disks. Frequently, they are performance oriented and are more interested in spreading their dataset across a larger number of spindles for increased performance. They end up using terabytes of capacity for gigabytes of data. Seagate in particular has shifted their roadmap from capacity to performance in their enterprise and business class products. High capacity is reserved mostly for end users.
But 95% of them have probably never written a single line of eBay related code. The article speaks of them like they are actively working on eBay's behalf. In reality, most of the them really aren't developers, and the rest are all coding for their own self interest.
Gee, I wonder why you singled out that particular developer in your post?
I don't understand why people would run a distribution like Yellow Dog on hardware supported by a mainstream distribution. Historically, all Yellow Dog brought to the table was support for platforms not supported by RedHat, like PowerMacs. When all the mainstream distributions started to support PPC as well, Yellow Dog remained the Slashdot headliner distribution even though it was always behind the times. Now that Yellow Dog was first on the PS3 but the platform was later supported by Fedora, I have to wonder. Why would you run Yellow Dog when you can go straight to the cow (so to speak)?
Personally, I'll wait for Debian support (and a compelling reason to buy a PS3).
Intel has consistently held a significant process advantage at its fabs (fabrication facilities) over the life of the x86 architecture. Essentially, no one else can deliver the volume and performance of chips that Intel can. Even AMD is struggling to compete against Intel (90 nm vs 60 nm).
While that is nice and all, even if AMD held the process lead it wouldn't change anything. Indeed, IBM long held the process lead over intel (and still does in some ways), but still x86 made inroads to the embedded and appliance space, taking huge amounts of market share away from high-end PowerPC.
I just worked on an embedded project where the point to point interconnects of AMD's processors would have been a *huge* performance win over the shared bus architecture that intel can't seem to manage to get away from yet. We had to go with intel over AMD anyway though, because the costs of sourcing all the services that intel would provide for us were too high to justify.
The reason is that intel provides better infrastructure and services that any other high performance microprocessor vendor in the industry. When Motorola or IBM tried to make a sale, intel would swoop in and offer to develop the customer's entire board for them. The variety of intel reference designs is unmatched. Intel not only provides every chip you need for a full solution, but they do it for more possible solution sets than you can imagine. Intel will manufacture your entire product including chassis and bezel. Nobody even comes close to intel's infrastructure services. That is why even when other vendors have had superior processors for periods of time over the years, intel has held on to market leadership. There may be other reasons too, but there don't have to be. That one alone is sufficient.
The other answer, of course, is that we don't always... ARM/xScale has become *very* widely used, but that is still coming from intel. There are also probably more MIPS processors in people's homes than x86 processors since the cores are embedded in everything.
Apologies for the caps and for the swearing, but what the fuck?
Want to improve eBay's efficiency? Ditch 39,500 of those developers.
Or by developers do they mean "people who have downloaded the API docs"?
Largely, I agree with you. When I originally typed that sentence, I wrote "no risk to you" and then revised it to "lower risk". I think that in human interaction you are completely correct in saying that usually being a little trusting and more generous than average is the way to go, but there are also situations in life where that isn't true. Regardless of all that, being greedy in BitTorrent participation isn't human interaction, it is interaction between deterministic algorithms. You can dynamically determine how greedy you can be to maximize your benefit. Also, given that we are talking about avoiding upload to protect the downloader from prosecution for their illegal download, perceptions of ethics and morality are already going to be messed up in any given community of these users.
I didn't get into any of that in my comment though, because my intention with that post was really to get the submitter to think about the fact that most of the people he is "file sharing" with aren't in it for the sense of community, they're in it for personal gain. He shouldn't be so offended when he finds out that somebody is taking advantage of his generosity because if he opened his eyes and took a good look around he would probably realize that the majority of the peers he is trading packets with are doing the same thing.