If I were them I'd stop taking preorders entirely for systems. First microsoft breaks agreement and ships less, making customers furious at gamestop, now Sony.
Nobody is forcing them to take pre-orders for anything, much less systems. They do it out of their own self interests. If they take more orders than they con fulfill they have nobody to blame but themselves. Other stores didn't take pre-orders and are operating on first come/first serve... For all we know Gamestop did this on purpose to prevent customers from taking their business elsewhere even though they couldn't serve as many people as they would have liked to. If history is any example, gamers will continue to be too stupid to stop shopping at Gamestop over something like this or any of their other customer-unfriendly practices, so why Gamestop take advantage?
Of course sony isn't going to catch flack from the customers for this, because of the immediacy of gamestop being "at fault" in their eyes.
Gamestop is the only party that is "at fault" here.
"The cost of the Sonar is mainly due to the high price of laser diodes which are taken from Blu-ray disc players. The cost of a new Blu-ray disc player combined with international shipping, and import taxes raises the cost of obtaining a 405nm diode in China to approximately $1,500."
Either these guys a clinically stupid, or they're totally full of shit.
You can buy a brand new, already-imported, Sony BD-RW drive for under $500 according to the PC Connection catalog that is on my desk right now, and you can get a Sony standalone player for $799. They're paying $1500 for them? I bet they making the whole thing up and he's just holding a piece of (poorly) machined aluminum or a regular laser pointer in the picture. It's a ploy to get you to go to their website that you wouldn't have ever heard of otherwise. They priced it at $2k so that nobody would buy one, and they're hoping you'll pick up an overpriced green pointer while you're there.
It sounds bad, but to put this in perspective I believe there are still far more PS2 games playable on the PS3 than there are Xbox games.
All kidding aside, though... That list makes it look like the problems are minor... Basically HDD games aren't supported (They aren't supported on the actual PS2 anymore either) and some cut scenes have audio problems. Oh well.
I don't remember reading anything like that, and based on the good backwards compatability of PS1 games on PS2 I expected the situation to be the same.
There was PS1 -> PS2 incompatibility as well to the tune of a couple percent of the overall title list. The compatible titles differed even from revision to revision of the PS2. It sounds like the situation is the same.
If open source server software, such as Linux, cannot compete with Microsoft's marketing budget, why does Apache continue to hold its substantial majority in the webserver market?
If open source software could compete, why has Apache's market share been steadily losing ground since Windows Server 2003 was released? If you follow the current trends, in a little under two years Microsoft will have the lead.
Work in software development trying to direct sell an enterprise product for one week, and it will be impossible not to see where things are headed.
I'm a linux kernel developer by trade. I write for an embedded product that runs on linux. I've been doing this kind of stuff for 10 years. Back then hardly anybody doing enterprise stuff (Greater than 200 servers, fibre channel SAN, etc...) would even mention windows. Now you don't get in the door unless your product supports Server 2003. RedHat, and most of the development community has their head in the sand.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
Oh, how I wish this were true.... But it's not.
Every day, dozens of servers are deployed running Microsoft Exchange. These servers spread through data centers like a plague, leaving behind Active Directories and MS SQL Server databases. Users start using the non-interoperable features of the windows server and it causes DHCP, DNS, and eventually FTP and Web servers to go to windows 'because it's easier'. Somewhere in there a CIO, who only knows about software with a multi-million dollar marketing budget, figures out that it is cheaper to buy a bulk license than to buy individual Microsoft licenses. His trade magazine said he would get audited if he didn't anyway. Then the administrators are forced to use the products for every task to maximize ROI, while the CIO walks around the office spouting inaccuracies about Linux, like it's "famous inability to handle timezones" and other such trash, in order to seem smart. Before you know, while there may be a couple of Linux boxes in the company, for the first time ever Windows Server is dominating every rack in these companies datacenters where there user to be commercial UNIX. Linux's main role? Providing a stable kernel for the virtual machines that allow Microsoft multiple license fees for a single piece of hardware.
You just can't compete with that marketing budget. Not when people with no technical knowledge make the purchasing decisions. Not only is Microsoft encouraging you to buy their own products, but the thousands of other tech companies that bring in billions of dollars of revenue each year by selling products that make Microsoft's broken bloated trash usable are encouraging you to buy Microsoft so that you'll need their software to fix them. In 5 years, Microsoft will have the same stranglehold on the server market that they have on the desktop today. Ironically, they may blow the desktop market with Vista.
Try turning off shadows. They seem to cause the problem... Runs smooth a silk for me with a 7800GTX at 1680x1050 with everything else at max. If I turn on shadows I get 10 or so FPS.
Repeat after me: There we no Weapons of Mass Destruction! It was a lie then. It remains a blatant lie today.
There is a difference between being wrong and lying. If the decisions of our leaders are to be judged as if they had the benefit of hindsight even when they did not then even when we have a leader you approve of he will be doomed to failure.
Oh, one more thing. Rummy did a GREAT JOB telling the world that if you don't have nuclear weapons, you better get some quick like North Korea, or you'll end up like Iraq. See Iran for more on this subject.
Clearly you have an impeccable grasp on matters of international diplomacy... All I have to say is thank god we don't have you making the diplomatic decisions. Here's the deal: you have to deal with some situations differently than others; having a double standard does not necessarily make you wrong or a hypocrite. Additionally, you can read all the headlines and bumper stickers you want; it will never get you the whole story.
If you're outraged, generally you're too busy to be paying attention.
If you're outraged, you certainly aren't making decisions with your brain.
Now, if you wanted on-campus warranty support through the campus computer shop, you needed to buy a laptop through the school, but I think that's valid.
That's how the school I went to did it too, but both my sister and my sister-in-law were given a short-list (Both were IBM) and were required to purchase one of the laptops on the list through the school. My sister's school (this was only two years ago. She went to Marist College, though I hear since she left they upgraded...) had a token ring network, so you may have been able to attach whatever you wanted to the network, you were certainly not going to have an easy time finding modern devices that would be compatible.
That's a loaded question though, because the 'obvious' answer is different now than it was 6.5 years ago.
Rumsfeld takes a lot of undeserved flak though, mostly because he usually tells it like it is even when how it is isn't what people wish they were hearing. People are used to hearing from politicians who sum everything up in ten catchy words after applying sufficient spin to make themselves look good. Rumsfeld always got stuck in a position where he had to present a nuanced situation, and his decision based on that situation, without being able to give people all of the (classified) facts that led him to a decision that may be the best decision at the time, but isn't necessarily a popular one.
What is unfortunate that, more than anything else, he is being forced to leave simply to avoid unjustified investigations that would prevent him from doing his job.
Desire? I don't know about that... Many times you don't have a choice though. Many school and corporate IT departments provide a short list of hardware that is supported on their network. In the case of schools, many just flat out require you to buy a (dell|IBM) just so they can get the kickback the manufacturer pays to them every time a student buys one of their laptops. That's regardless of whether you already have a machine of your own or if the machine you already have is better or even exactly the same.
Admittedly, I use Flashblock, but 400k in 2 seconds is no big deal these days. With a $29/month internet connection I can easily do that in 5 tabs at once. Most big name sites can easily push out 200k/second, and 15Mbit internet connections are cheaper than AOL these days.
You can already buy a PC from Dell without Windows on it. This is about Laptops, which for the most part you cannot build yourself without Windows. If you could, I suspect that if you could build your own laptop, Dell would offer Windows-free laptops in order to reclaim some of the built-it-myself laptop market.
For example, DVD-CSS doesn't prevent copying, or illegal distribution. It is intended to prevent perfectly legal cross-region distribution.
The reason the media industry pressured the US congress to make it illegal to bypass DRM was so that they could use DRM to grant themselves rights that the government was not willing to grant through law.
The correct statement of point would be that DRM is intended to prevent undesired use and distribution of digital media. The law has nothing to do with it.
I have to disagree with being in the minority, though. Think about all the bragging gamers do about their scores in various games, or their accomplishments. It's a HUGE part of gaming, and an even bigger part of online gaming. The new PSU has trophies you can win by beating the hardest bosses online. (It's more complicated than that, but still.)
I'm thinking about all the gamers I know, and the only people I know who think like that (with the exception of one guy) are in the highschool to college age... And I'm not talking about all the people I know in that age range. A good 75% of them would rather play either PC games that don't have a central score system (mostly first person shooters), casual games, or just plain single-player games (Oblivion and HoMMV were big this year, as is NWN2 right now). You've also got to remember that console online gaming is still only used by a very small minority of console owners... Xboxes of either variety are still only owned by small minority of console owners...
I think you're in the minority. I think that you don't think you are in the minority because people like you are also thousands of times more likely to post about their gaming habits on the internet. Perhaps I'm biased though, because the ranking crap is exactly the thing that turns me off the most about Live and games like WoW.
You do make me wish it was easy to figure out what somebody's xbox gamer tag was though. It would be valuable information to have about somebody when deciding who to hire.
Now more than ever the browser is an application platform. Microsoft has had the vast majority of the market share in that department leading to a practically guaranteed torrent of revenue. If non-microsoft browsers gain enough market share, application developers will tend towards adding support for the new platform. That would force Microsoft to spend more money on development in order to stay competitive (no more 5 year release schedule). That would lead to a significant drop in Microsoft's profit margins.
Of course the Firefox users jumped on the bandwagon and downloaded 2.0 (which is buggy and crash-prone, glad I'm still using 1.5 at work because my home browser is barely useable).
Out of curiosity, what are you doing with it that is making it crash? Since I've switched, the only difference I've noticed is the spell checking in forms, and that it's significantly faster... Is it less stable on Windows or something?
You don't have to ask who came first because both of them operate in different industries. They could probably both register exactly the same trademarked name, but since one would have to specify their business as digital video hosting and the other as industrial tubing manufacturing, they could both co-exist because it is technically impossible for one of those companies to take the other's business. Their product lines don't overlap.
I'm not disputing that one will be disabled to increase yields. I'm merely stating that you are misinterpreting the reserved portion.
If you want to argue about this with a fanboy, you are in the wrong thread. If you want to be a racist you're going to have to talk to somebody else. Even if you're right, there are still 6 cores left for games. You would have to be an (Xbox|Wii) fanboy to consider that a 'lack of functionality'.
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If I were them I'd stop taking preorders entirely for systems. First microsoft breaks agreement and ships less, making customers furious at gamestop, now Sony.
Nobody is forcing them to take pre-orders for anything, much less systems. They do it out of their own self interests. If they take more orders than they con fulfill they have nobody to blame but themselves. Other stores didn't take pre-orders and are operating on first come/first serve... For all we know Gamestop did this on purpose to prevent customers from taking their business elsewhere even though they couldn't serve as many people as they would have liked to. If history is any example, gamers will continue to be too stupid to stop shopping at Gamestop over something like this or any of their other customer-unfriendly practices, so why Gamestop take advantage?
Of course sony isn't going to catch flack from the customers for this, because of the immediacy of gamestop being "at fault" in their eyes.
Gamestop is the only party that is "at fault" here.
Crap. I forgot to preview, and I blew the link. The link to the $799 player is as follows:
5 241
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductDetail?Sku=723
From TFA:
"The cost of the Sonar is mainly due to the high price of laser diodes which are taken from Blu-ray disc players. The cost of a new Blu-ray disc player combined with international shipping, and import taxes raises the cost of obtaining a 405nm diode in China to approximately $1,500."
Either these guys a clinically stupid, or they're totally full of shit.
You can buy a brand new, already-imported, Sony BD-RW drive for under $500 according to the PC Connection catalog that is on my desk right now, and you can get a Sony standalone player for $799. They're paying $1500 for them? I bet they making the whole thing up and he's just holding a piece of (poorly) machined aluminum or a regular laser pointer in the picture. It's a ploy to get you to go to their website that you wouldn't have ever heard of otherwise. They priced it at $2k so that nobody would buy one, and they're hoping you'll pick up an overpriced green pointer while you're there.
Really, what Zonk meant to say was:
It sounds bad, but to put this in perspective I believe there are still far more PS2 games playable on the PS3 than there are Xbox games.
All kidding aside, though... That list makes it look like the problems are minor... Basically HDD games aren't supported (They aren't supported on the actual PS2 anymore either) and some cut scenes have audio problems. Oh well.
I don't remember reading anything like that, and based on the good backwards compatability of PS1 games on PS2 I expected the situation to be the same.
There was PS1 -> PS2 incompatibility as well to the tune of a couple percent of the overall title list. The compatible titles differed even from revision to revision of the PS2. It sounds like the situation is the same.
If open source server software, such as Linux, cannot compete with Microsoft's marketing budget, why does Apache continue to hold its substantial majority in the webserver market?
e y.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_surv
If open source software could compete, why has Apache's market share been steadily losing ground since Windows Server 2003 was released? If you follow the current trends, in a little under two years Microsoft will have the lead.
Work in software development trying to direct sell an enterprise product for one week, and it will be impossible not to see where things are headed.
I'm a linux kernel developer by trade. I write for an embedded product that runs on linux. I've been doing this kind of stuff for 10 years. Back then hardly anybody doing enterprise stuff (Greater than 200 servers, fibre channel SAN, etc...) would even mention windows. Now you don't get in the door unless your product supports Server 2003. RedHat, and most of the development community has their head in the sand.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
Oh, how I wish this were true.... But it's not.
Every day, dozens of servers are deployed running Microsoft Exchange. These servers spread through data centers like a plague, leaving behind Active Directories and MS SQL Server databases. Users start using the non-interoperable features of the windows server and it causes DHCP, DNS, and eventually FTP and Web servers to go to windows 'because it's easier'. Somewhere in there a CIO, who only knows about software with a multi-million dollar marketing budget, figures out that it is cheaper to buy a bulk license than to buy individual Microsoft licenses. His trade magazine said he would get audited if he didn't anyway. Then the administrators are forced to use the products for every task to maximize ROI, while the CIO walks around the office spouting inaccuracies about Linux, like it's "famous inability to handle timezones" and other such trash, in order to seem smart. Before you know, while there may be a couple of Linux boxes in the company, for the first time ever Windows Server is dominating every rack in these companies datacenters where there user to be commercial UNIX. Linux's main role? Providing a stable kernel for the virtual machines that allow Microsoft multiple license fees for a single piece of hardware.
You just can't compete with that marketing budget. Not when people with no technical knowledge make the purchasing decisions. Not only is Microsoft encouraging you to buy their own products, but the thousands of other tech companies that bring in billions of dollars of revenue each year by selling products that make Microsoft's broken bloated trash usable are encouraging you to buy Microsoft so that you'll need their software to fix them. In 5 years, Microsoft will have the same stranglehold on the server market that they have on the desktop today. Ironically, they may blow the desktop market with Vista.
Try turning off shadows. They seem to cause the problem... Runs smooth a silk for me with a 7800GTX at 1680x1050 with everything else at max. If I turn on shadows I get 10 or so FPS.
Repeat after me: There we no Weapons of Mass Destruction! It was a lie then. It remains a blatant lie today.
There is a difference between being wrong and lying. If the decisions of our leaders are to be judged as if they had the benefit of hindsight even when they did not then even when we have a leader you approve of he will be doomed to failure.
Oh, one more thing. Rummy did a GREAT JOB telling the world that if you don't have nuclear weapons, you better get some quick like North Korea, or you'll end up like Iraq. See Iran for more on this subject.
Clearly you have an impeccable grasp on matters of international diplomacy... All I have to say is thank god we don't have you making the diplomatic decisions. Here's the deal: you have to deal with some situations differently than others; having a double standard does not necessarily make you wrong or a hypocrite. Additionally, you can read all the headlines and bumper stickers you want; it will never get you the whole story.
If you're outraged, generally you're too busy to be paying attention.
If you're outraged, you certainly aren't making decisions with your brain.
Now, if you wanted on-campus warranty support through the campus computer shop, you needed to buy a laptop through the school, but I think that's valid.
That's how the school I went to did it too, but both my sister and my sister-in-law were given a short-list (Both were IBM) and were required to purchase one of the laptops on the list through the school. My sister's school (this was only two years ago. She went to Marist College, though I hear since she left they upgraded...) had a token ring network, so you may have been able to attach whatever you wanted to the network, you were certainly not going to have an easy time finding modern devices that would be compatible.
- should there have been a war?
That's a loaded question though, because the 'obvious' answer is different now than it was 6.5 years ago.
Rumsfeld takes a lot of undeserved flak though, mostly because he usually tells it like it is even when how it is isn't what people wish they were hearing. People are used to hearing from politicians who sum everything up in ten catchy words after applying sufficient spin to make themselves look good. Rumsfeld always got stuck in a position where he had to present a nuanced situation, and his decision based on that situation, without being able to give people all of the (classified) facts that led him to a decision that may be the best decision at the time, but isn't necessarily a popular one.
What is unfortunate that, more than anything else, he is being forced to leave simply to avoid unjustified investigations that would prevent him from doing his job.
Desire? I don't know about that... Many times you don't have a choice though. Many school and corporate IT departments provide a short list of hardware that is supported on their network. In the case of schools, many just flat out require you to buy a (dell|IBM) just so they can get the kickback the manufacturer pays to them every time a student buys one of their laptops. That's regardless of whether you already have a machine of your own or if the machine you already have is better or even exactly the same.
If you ask me that's just as bad. Why do I want to give $x to SuSE for a linux that I don't want to use?
Admittedly, I use Flashblock, but 400k in 2 seconds is no big deal these days. With a $29/month internet connection I can easily do that in 5 tabs at once. Most big name sites can easily push out 200k/second, and 15Mbit internet connections are cheaper than AOL these days.
You can already buy a PC from Dell without Windows on it. This is about Laptops, which for the most part you cannot build yourself without Windows. If you could, I suspect that if you could build your own laptop, Dell would offer Windows-free laptops in order to reclaim some of the built-it-myself laptop market.
For example, DVD-CSS doesn't prevent copying, or illegal distribution. It is intended to prevent perfectly legal cross-region distribution.
The reason the media industry pressured the US congress to make it illegal to bypass DRM was so that they could use DRM to grant themselves rights that the government was not willing to grant through law.
The correct statement of point would be that DRM is intended to prevent undesired use and distribution of digital media. The law has nothing to do with it.
I have to disagree with being in the minority, though. Think about all the bragging gamers do about their scores in various games, or their accomplishments. It's a HUGE part of gaming, and an even bigger part of online gaming. The new PSU has trophies you can win by beating the hardest bosses online. (It's more complicated than that, but still.)
I'm thinking about all the gamers I know, and the only people I know who think like that (with the exception of one guy) are in the highschool to college age... And I'm not talking about all the people I know in that age range. A good 75% of them would rather play either PC games that don't have a central score system (mostly first person shooters), casual games, or just plain single-player games (Oblivion and HoMMV were big this year, as is NWN2 right now). You've also got to remember that console online gaming is still only used by a very small minority of console owners... Xboxes of either variety are still only owned by small minority of console owners...
I think you're in the minority. I think that you don't think you are in the minority because people like you are also thousands of times more likely to post about their gaming habits on the internet. Perhaps I'm biased though, because the ranking crap is exactly the thing that turns me off the most about Live and games like WoW.
You do make me wish it was easy to figure out what somebody's xbox gamer tag was though. It would be valuable information to have about somebody when deciding who to hire.
Now more than ever the browser is an application platform. Microsoft has had the vast majority of the market share in that department leading to a practically guaranteed torrent of revenue. If non-microsoft browsers gain enough market share, application developers will tend towards adding support for the new platform. That would force Microsoft to spend more money on development in order to stay competitive (no more 5 year release schedule). That would lead to a significant drop in Microsoft's profit margins.
Of course the Firefox users jumped on the bandwagon and downloaded 2.0 (which is buggy and crash-prone, glad I'm still using 1.5 at work because my home browser is barely useable).
Out of curiosity, what are you doing with it that is making it crash? Since I've switched, the only difference I've noticed is the spell checking in forms, and that it's significantly faster... Is it less stable on Windows or something?
You don't have to ask who came first because both of them operate in different industries. They could probably both register exactly the same trademarked name, but since one would have to specify their business as digital video hosting and the other as industrial tubing manufacturing, they could both co-exist because it is technically impossible for one of those companies to take the other's business. Their product lines don't overlap.
You're so funny.
Clearly because you have superior mocking skills you must have correct technical information as well.
I'm not disputing that one will be disabled to increase yields. I'm merely stating that you are misinterpreting the reserved portion.
If you want to argue about this with a fanboy, you are in the wrong thread. If you want to be a racist you're going to have to talk to somebody else. Even if you're right, there are still 6 cores left for games. You would have to be an (Xbox|Wii) fanboy to consider that a 'lack of functionality'.
From what I heard, though, they aren't taking pre-orders in their stores. It will simply be first-come, first-served.
There is hope. No matter what EB/Gamestop has said, Wal-Mart is getting more units than any other single company, and they're not taking pre-orders.