PS: I like my dark-green pieces of trash thank you very much:)
That only applies to some pieces of Cisco equipment. They have two types. The kind with lots of ports and a high speed backplane, and the over-priced over rated stuff.
The legality of non-compete clauses is largely regional. In the US alone, the degrees to which such clauses are valid varies from state to state. From country to country the differences are even greater.
- The proxy server can have content inspection, SSL session proxying have byte limits
You don't need SSL to encrypt to bypass the proxy server.
You don't need to transmit your data in a single session.
Inconvienience is an excuse to develop an app. What do you think most Peer to Peer filesharing clients are tese days but fancy interfaces that hide the inconvienience associated with firewalls, lawsuits, filtering, and complexity?
You can spend all the money you want on buzzword rich, overpriced, overhyped, broken, dark-green-blue pieces of trash (appologies to the cisco fanboys), but you still can't stop the piracy without making your network useless.
That means they shipped 3.2 million... Not that they sold 3.2 million. Now that they aren't sold out anymore, those numbers aren't the same. Subtract *at least* two times the number of Target, Wal-mart, and Best-Buy stores...
At it's peak it had 1 million subscribers according to Wikipedia... Plus it was built in to Dish Networks recievers for a while...
Unfortunatly, since so many different manufacturers made and sold the boxes, there is no single source for the stats. 3 million is probably a conservative estimate.
I'd have been nice, but since you were an asshole... Let's apply some reading comprehension to your post so we can show how much of an idiot you made yourself out to be just so you could sling a cheap insult.
the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple
Apple sells 5-8 million macs a quarter. The PS2, at it's peak, sold 25 million units per year. The Xbox hit 8. We won't count Nintendo since they already used IBM chips. 8 million/quarter vs 8.25 million per quarter... Where's the order of magnitude again? Forget plural... There isn't even close to one.
And about Apple putting 2 IBM chips in each box...don't the XBox and PS3 each ship with more than 2 IBM chips? Isn't it 3 per XB360 and like 8 for the PS3?
No.
Oh, and while I'm at it, aren't the bulk of Apple's quarterly unit-volume sales ipods?
Clearly, I was talking about Macintosh sales. iPod sales would make this no-contest.
b)console sales will generate hype themselves which will likely be similarly (read: not very) powerful; c)the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple;
That's just plain wrong. The original Xbox never achieved quarterly sales greater than 25% of Apple's quarterly sales by unit volume... And Apple put *two* of IBM's chips in a lot of those machines.
On those guy's resume's, the failure is often listed as a success.... "XYZ startup: Director of Foo project, 2001-2003, Reason for leaving - Sold company for X million dollars" The omited detail is usually that X is signifigantly less than the projected market value of the company when the investors put their money in, and usually less than the amount of capital the company raised.
In this case though, Microsoft bought this guy's failu^H^H^H^H company for a meager (by bubble standards) $470 million dollars. I presume he came along with the deal.
...the never successful WebTV... But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season."
Shouldn't we wait until the 360 has outsold WebTV before we make that declaration?
Numbers like this get reported because journalists like to publish statistical outliers. The outrageous number gets you to read the story/click the link/stay tuned through the commercial break. As a result, analysts looking to make a name for themselves sometimes 'forget' things like market saturation when doing their analysis, just so they get their name in the article.
That's why you see things like "EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION" in virtual currency, or "PS3 TO COST $900 TO BUILD", etc...
If you canceled, you should be getting the bi-monthly e-mails inviting you to come back for $0.50 less than the previous mail...
The last one I got was 3 movies at a time for $11.99/month. Too bad I don't want to subscribe again... Practically half of the movies I mailed back to them never arrived and had to be reported as missing.
Now either the engineers at Havok are crappy at optimizing, or Intel/AMD needs to make their CPUs ~500 times faster before physics will run acceptably on a CPU.
Neither... The CPUs have to be more parallelized, and until they are the developers have to be more conservative with the number of discrete objects they track... With quad core CPUs on the horizon, we're on our way there. In the long term, the only way we have a 'physics processing unit' in every machine is if some IO component, probably the video card because those companies have absurd margins and are always looking for a marketing edge, pulls the functionality on board.
Personally, I'd love if somebody came up with an interconnect that made IO processors obsolete. The graphics industry really needs a paradigm shift to get them out of this funk they're in where they keep refining a 15 year old technique with new layers of hacks. If realtime graphics processing didn't require special hardware anymore, maybe we'd see some new creative approach. It was unfortunate that when 3dFX started to work towards something new, nVidia bought them to kill the tech. Hopefully now that they're embracing some of that work, we'll start to see some real improvements in realism instead of the plastic look that we've been seeing with shaders and shader-happy developers.
That does sound interesting, any source?
Just personal experience. They're scared to death of the word 'ASIC' though. If you can do it on an FPGA, or just a collection of existing components and some glue software, they love you. The perception is that the barrier to entry is too low for pure software, so you're bound to have a bunch of competitors.
Intel and AMD would both be quick to tell you that the vector engines built into their processors (remember MMX, and SSE?) are perfectly suited for these tasks, and that this is a software problem. One of the two of them would do well to come out with a library for this kind of thing (that only works on their processor, of course), and put these guys out of business in the process.
For example, the 3D performance of an old low end video card will still smoke the software renderer on a high end CPU.
That is because of the IO bottleneck moreso than because the purpose built processor is more powerful for the particular task. That's why 2D acceleration is still important, even though modern CPUs can render 2D scenes in signifigantly faster than real time. IO intesive tasks, of which graphics display is one, are well suited to specialized hardware.
Physics is not an IO intensive process, and the calculations required are well suited to general purpose CPUs.
Interestingly enough, it's much easier to obtain venture capital for a piece of hardware than an API...
The write the games for the hardware that is out there. If the GPU sales strategy didn't work, you'd see more games for lower powered cards, not more people with machines that can't handle modern games.
This isn't a zero sum game. There isn't any perticular reason it would be impossible for the shareholders of Adobe to be bought out at a premium (Albiet in freshly created Apple shares), and for Apple's share price to remain the same dispite the increase in outstanding shares.
All that would be required for that to happen is for the market to percieve the value of Apple+Adobe as higher than the combined values of the two seperate companies.
On the "first-to-market" advantage: the three consoles you listed were from Sega
I wonder where the decision makers from Sega work now...
Quarterly figures mean nothing. Look at last generation. The PS2 was obscenely expensive, and the Xbox was elegant and commodity. What happened as time went on? PS2 got cheaper to make and became a cash cow, and the Xbox got more expensive to make and became a burden that Microsoft couldn't drop support for quickly enough.
Pick any five year period you like, and you'll see that in that period Sony has raked in the cash. They'll eat losses now so they end up with a platform with longevity.
This isn't an argument about which machine is better. This is an argument about who knows the business better, and Sony wins that battle hands down.
Oh, and guess what, print these words out and get back to me in 5 years
I'd love to, but you posted as Anonymous. Here's my bet for five years from now... You'll still be able to buy the PSthree and new games for it, Sony will be selling the hardware at a 50% profit, and the PS4 will either be out or out soon... The 360 won't be available on store shelves anymore except for used boxes, and the next Xbox will have replaced it entirely, alienating the entier 360 install base if Microsoft is even still in the market at all.
If the 360 doesn't turn a profit by January 2008, Microsoft will call it quits. The PS3 is guaranteed to turn a profit, because people outside the US don't want 360s.
It doens't matter why the margins are different, just that they are.
It does matter. It matters because Microsoft can't pull the kinds of margins they're used to pulling now that they have a hardware product. Why should the shareholders tolerate Microsoft putting their money into something that pays worse than their core business? They won't tolerate it if Microsoft doesn't show them signifigant success soon.
And what makes Sony shareholders so much different?
That's an easy question. Sony's shareholders know they can't tell Sony to pull the plug on the Playstation line, or their earnings will tank. Microsoft shareholders know that if the Xbox isn't in the black soon they can tell Microsoft to pull the plug on the Xbox and the earnings will go up. That means Sony's shareholders will be more tolerant to a 'battle'. At the end of the day it doesn't matter who has the money for it as much as it matters who's got the will to burn the capital, because what those numbers really say is that they can both afford it. I would argue that Sony is the only one of the two willing to put it all on the line, and the difference between 'all' for Sony and 'all' for Microsoft isn't enough to make a difference.
(This is all moot. There isn't going to be a battle because the chances that the PS3 won't be profitable in the long term are nil. They have too much developer good-will left. Any mistakes they make this time around can't hurt them until next generation. The only two possible outcomes are that the PS3 and the 360 co-exist, or that Microsoft exits the market.)
Slashdot Mirror
...won't have that world record very long...
Oh, wait, you mean we're not holding our breath for a March 2007 release... Well that clears that up.
Peapod seems to me to be kept in business by lazy office managers that don't know any better.
When you're spending other people's money, why not use peapod?
PS: I like my dark-green pieces of trash thank you very much :)
That only applies to some pieces of Cisco equipment. They have two types. The kind with lots of ports and a high speed backplane, and the over-priced over rated stuff.
but I am inclined to think they are legal
The legality of non-compete clauses is largely regional. In the US alone, the degrees to which such clauses are valid varies from state to state. From country to country the differences are even greater.
- The proxy server can have content inspection, SSL session proxying have byte limits
You don't need SSL to encrypt to bypass the proxy server.
You don't need to transmit your data in a single session.
Inconvienience is an excuse to develop an app. What do you think most Peer to Peer filesharing clients are tese days but fancy interfaces that hide the inconvienience associated with firewalls, lawsuits, filtering, and complexity?
You can spend all the money you want on buzzword rich, overpriced, overhyped, broken, dark-green-blue pieces of trash (appologies to the cisco fanboys), but you still can't stop the piracy without making your network useless.
That means they shipped 3.2 million... Not that they sold 3.2 million. Now that they aren't sold out anymore, those numbers aren't the same. Subtract *at least* two times the number of Target, Wal-mart, and Best-Buy stores...
At it's peak it had 1 million subscribers according to Wikipedia... Plus it was built in to Dish Networks recievers for a while...
Unfortunatly, since so many different manufacturers made and sold the boxes, there is no single source for the stats. 3 million is probably a conservative estimate.
I'd have been nice, but since you were an asshole... Let's apply some reading comprehension to your post so we can show how much of an idiot you made yourself out to be just so you could sling a cheap insult.
the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple
Apple sells 5-8 million macs a quarter. The PS2, at it's peak, sold 25 million units per year. The Xbox hit 8. We won't count Nintendo since they already used IBM chips. 8 million/quarter vs 8.25 million per quarter... Where's the order of magnitude again? Forget plural... There isn't even close to one.
And about Apple putting 2 IBM chips in each box...don't the XBox and PS3 each ship with more than 2 IBM chips? Isn't it 3 per XB360 and like 8 for the PS3?
No.
Oh, and while I'm at it, aren't the bulk of Apple's quarterly unit-volume sales ipods?
Clearly, I was talking about Macintosh sales. iPod sales would make this no-contest.
b)console sales will generate hype themselves which will likely be similarly (read: not very) powerful; c)the console market requires chip volumes a couple of orders of magnitude higher than Apple;
That's just plain wrong. The original Xbox never achieved quarterly sales greater than 25% of Apple's quarterly sales by unit volume... And Apple put *two* of IBM's chips in a lot of those machines.
Macintosh quarterly unit sales: 8 million
Xbox entire lifecycle unit sales: 22 million (2.4 million/quarter average)
Which of those two would you rather have as a customer?
On those guy's resume's, the failure is often listed as a success.... "XYZ startup: Director of Foo project, 2001-2003, Reason for leaving - Sold company for X million dollars" The omited detail is usually that X is signifigantly less than the projected market value of the company when the investors put their money in, and usually less than the amount of capital the company raised.
In this case though, Microsoft bought this guy's failu^H^H^H^H company for a meager (by bubble standards) $470 million dollars. I presume he came along with the deal.
Only people who count market share instead of dollars when judging success would call the Xbox anything but a failure.
...the never successful WebTV... But Baker finally has a hot seller with the Xbox 360, Microsoft's video game console launched worldwide last holiday season."
Shouldn't we wait until the 360 has outsold WebTV before we make that declaration?
Numbers like this get reported because journalists like to publish statistical outliers. The outrageous number gets you to read the story/click the link/stay tuned through the commercial break. As a result, analysts looking to make a name for themselves sometimes 'forget' things like market saturation when doing their analysis, just so they get their name in the article.
That's why you see things like "EIGHT HUNDRED AND EIGHTY MILLION" in virtual currency, or "PS3 TO COST $900 TO BUILD", etc...
If you canceled, you should be getting the bi-monthly e-mails inviting you to come back for $0.50 less than the previous mail...
The last one I got was 3 movies at a time for $11.99/month. Too bad I don't want to subscribe again... Practically half of the movies I mailed back to them never arrived and had to be reported as missing.
Now either the engineers at Havok are crappy at optimizing, or Intel/AMD needs to make their CPUs ~500 times faster before physics will run acceptably on a CPU.
Neither... The CPUs have to be more parallelized, and until they are the developers have to be more conservative with the number of discrete objects they track... With quad core CPUs on the horizon, we're on our way there. In the long term, the only way we have a 'physics processing unit' in every machine is if some IO component, probably the video card because those companies have absurd margins and are always looking for a marketing edge, pulls the functionality on board.
Personally, I'd love if somebody came up with an interconnect that made IO processors obsolete. The graphics industry really needs a paradigm shift to get them out of this funk they're in where they keep refining a 15 year old technique with new layers of hacks. If realtime graphics processing didn't require special hardware anymore, maybe we'd see some new creative approach. It was unfortunate that when 3dFX started to work towards something new, nVidia bought them to kill the tech. Hopefully now that they're embracing some of that work, we'll start to see some real improvements in realism instead of the plastic look that we've been seeing with shaders and shader-happy developers.
That does sound interesting, any source?
Just personal experience. They're scared to death of the word 'ASIC' though. If you can do it on an FPGA, or just a collection of existing components and some glue software, they love you. The perception is that the barrier to entry is too low for pure software, so you're bound to have a bunch of competitors.
It wasn't meant to.
2 34656
Read elsewhere: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184496&cid=15
Even though you both expressed opposite views, you both missed the point.
Respect the office, otherwise when somebody you agree with holds that office it won't mean enough to matter.
Intel and AMD would both be quick to tell you that the vector engines built into their processors (remember MMX, and SSE?) are perfectly suited for these tasks, and that this is a software problem. One of the two of them would do well to come out with a library for this kind of thing (that only works on their processor, of course), and put these guys out of business in the process.
For example, the 3D performance of an old low end video card will still smoke the software renderer on a high end CPU.
That is because of the IO bottleneck moreso than because the purpose built processor is more powerful for the particular task. That's why 2D acceleration is still important, even though modern CPUs can render 2D scenes in signifigantly faster than real time. IO intesive tasks, of which graphics display is one, are well suited to specialized hardware.
Physics is not an IO intensive process, and the calculations required are well suited to general purpose CPUs.
Interestingly enough, it's much easier to obtain venture capital for a piece of hardware than an API...
The write the games for the hardware that is out there. If the GPU sales strategy didn't work, you'd see more games for lower powered cards, not more people with machines that can't handle modern games.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm arguing that this would happen. I'm mearly arguing that it could happen.
The rest of your points are arguable, but irrelevant to the line of conversation.
This isn't a zero sum game. There isn't any perticular reason it would be impossible for the shareholders of Adobe to be bought out at a premium (Albiet in freshly created Apple shares), and for Apple's share price to remain the same dispite the increase in outstanding shares.
All that would be required for that to happen is for the market to percieve the value of Apple+Adobe as higher than the combined values of the two seperate companies.
On the "first-to-market" advantage: the three consoles you listed were from Sega
I wonder where the decision makers from Sega work now...
Quarterly figures mean nothing. Look at last generation. The PS2 was obscenely expensive, and the Xbox was elegant and commodity. What happened as time went on? PS2 got cheaper to make and became a cash cow, and the Xbox got more expensive to make and became a burden that Microsoft couldn't drop support for quickly enough.
Pick any five year period you like, and you'll see that in that period Sony has raked in the cash. They'll eat losses now so they end up with a platform with longevity.
This isn't an argument about which machine is better. This is an argument about who knows the business better, and Sony wins that battle hands down.
Oh, and guess what, print these words out and get back to me in 5 years
I'd love to, but you posted as Anonymous. Here's my bet for five years from now... You'll still be able to buy the PSthree and new games for it, Sony will be selling the hardware at a 50% profit, and the PS4 will either be out or out soon... The 360 won't be available on store shelves anymore except for used boxes, and the next Xbox will have replaced it entirely, alienating the entier 360 install base if Microsoft is even still in the market at all.
If the 360 doesn't turn a profit by January 2008, Microsoft will call it quits. The PS3 is guaranteed to turn a profit, because people outside the US don't want 360s.
It doens't matter why the margins are different, just that they are.
It does matter. It matters because Microsoft can't pull the kinds of margins they're used to pulling now that they have a hardware product. Why should the shareholders tolerate Microsoft putting their money into something that pays worse than their core business? They won't tolerate it if Microsoft doesn't show them signifigant success soon.
And what makes Sony shareholders so much different?
That's an easy question. Sony's shareholders know they can't tell Sony to pull the plug on the Playstation line, or their earnings will tank. Microsoft shareholders know that if the Xbox isn't in the black soon they can tell Microsoft to pull the plug on the Xbox and the earnings will go up. That means Sony's shareholders will be more tolerant to a 'battle'. At the end of the day it doesn't matter who has the money for it as much as it matters who's got the will to burn the capital, because what those numbers really say is that they can both afford it. I would argue that Sony is the only one of the two willing to put it all on the line, and the difference between 'all' for Sony and 'all' for Microsoft isn't enough to make a difference.
(This is all moot. There isn't going to be a battle because the chances that the PS3 won't be profitable in the long term are nil. They have too much developer good-will left. Any mistakes they make this time around can't hurt them until next generation. The only two possible outcomes are that the PS3 and the 360 co-exist, or that Microsoft exits the market.)