Are you going back through all my old comments just to disagree with me or something? If so you've failed. You'll notice that I said the same exact thing in a followup to this comment.
Having the most market share isn't a metric that anybody sane uses to measure success anyway. At least not since the dot-com boom ended. In the real world, success is typically measured in profit on a balance sheet and through survival on a resume. On the balance sheet, Sony and Nintendo both won, Sega lost, and Microsoft lost big. On their resumes, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all succeeded, and Sega lost big. Consumers care about survival, and investors care about profit. Only fanboys care about market share.
Have you ever worked in retail? Cloths have a 300% mark up, as does anything in food services. Electorinics range from 25% mark up to 300% depedning on the items.
Worked retail? Yeah, because joe associate knows shit about how the company makes money.
This more than anything should be the final stake in the heart of MD5
No, no it won't be. It won't be, because MD5 is useful for many things where the existance of an "easy" (in quotes because easy is relative) method of generating colisions is irrelavant.
It won't even kill off the use of MD5 checksums as a signature for verifying authenticity, because if your data is smaller than the checksum there may not be a colision at all, and an exploit wouldn't matter.
This is an important discovery, but it doesn't make MD5 useless any more than CRC32 is useless.
GDDR3 ram is expensive, so your estimate is pretty off
You can get video cards with 256MB of it at retail for under $100. The memory is *not* the most expensive component on those cards. You do realize that the difference between GDDR3 and older technologies (like regular DDR, DDR2 and GDDR2) is that they *simplified* it to make it cheaper to manufacture, right? The reason they don't use it for general purpose PC memory isn't because it's more expensive. It's because they hacked features out of it. It's totally unsuitable, for example, for being used on a DIMM, or with long traces.
Now they sell it to wallmart/EB/Circuit city ect... for $150 and the retailer marks it up to $499. Microsoft has now lost $300 on each box.
Remember retail stores don't sell things for free. The standard mark up is to triple to wholesale price.
Let's stop right there.
There is no "standard markup". The markup depends on the product. Typically only "service" products have a markup greater than 100%. 25% is considered excelent for general retail goods. When the PS2 launched, retailers only made $2 in profit per sale. The wholsale price was only $2 less than the retail price. With Xbox, the wholsale price and retail price were identical... No profit. Stores sold them anyway, because margins are high on games and (especially) accessories. That's why stores sell bundles. If stores are selling the 360 for $499, you can bet that Microsoft is getting almost all of that... At least for the first few months. Even in the waning years of a console's life cycle, the margins never get up past 20%.
Ok, now that we've debunked your assumptions, there's really no point in discussing the rest of your comment.
there's also no other way to do it without either spending ridiculous amounts of money or being dependent on a single piece of hardware.
That's not true. along with some other things you've mentioned from various marketing materials.
For starters, there's no such thing as "shared nothing" clustering. You have to have a shared resource to have a cluster. Solutions that claim to be "shared nothing" actually share a network. Once you've gone that far, there's no reason not to do replicated network block devices, which some larger vendors do (One sibling comment mentions DB2). It can even be fast if you're clever about where you issue your acknowledgements.
There are third party cluster middleware products that make this process transparent to the database. Most of them focus on Oracle. You can also fool some shared storage cluster products into thinking you have some big, expensive, high-performance, SAN array by pointing them at a linux DRBD. Anyway, the point is that there are plenty of ways to do so-called shared nothing database clustering without any expensive hardware.
Why do people bother to argue with "estimated" data? Especially when the estimated data has tyipcally been wrong in the past?
I wish I could get actual numbers, but I can't because nobody releases them. I'd bet money though that the 360 only costs $450 to make in volume. Look at what's in it. Where does the money go?
I should be more specific than "All three.". since there were four. Sega lost. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony won.
You could probably make an argument for Microsoft losing too, since they lost money on their product, but it was available and maintained demand through the entire generation so I'd say they 'won' just like the others.
That way I can make stuff up and get ad revenue for it.
This article would be great, but it's based on two longshot assumptions. First, that Microsoft will lower the price of the 360 any time in the next 18-24 months. They probably won't. They certainly wont if it's still selling well at the higher price. Second, that Halo 3 will be ready in time for the PS3 launch. It probably won't. The tenative release date is "Fall 2006" right now (Two seasons past the tenative PS3 release). That's before you factor in the inevitable delays.
Let's stop paying attention to fanboy prediction and just wait and see. Just like every other console generation in history, the winner(s) will be system(s) with the best games. There certainly doesn't have to be a single winner (though the trade rags would love there to be one, because it gives them copy to attach ads to), since hardcore gamers will buy all the ones with compelling games. The only people left fighting over which is best are the children who can only get their mommies to buy one of the three, and feel the need to explain why the one that they have is the best to everybody else (them and adults who haven't grown up yet). Silly business manuvers that aren't backed up with the games usually leave the company that pulls them with egg on their face.
$661.49 at "Tech for Less" was the cheapest price. (Ok, that's "just over $600" by some definition I suppose), but! It's open box with "minor cosmetic blemishes".
The chepest new-in-box version of that model from a reputable vendor was from Sears for $850. Still a far cry from $150.
If you ask some average Joe which of two TVs is "Better," he's going to point to the bigger one, not the one with the high def picture. If he's got $1000 to spend on a TV, which do you think he'll get? The 27" HD tube, the 36" Trinitron SD model, or the 45" SD rear projection? I bet money that nine times out of ten the answer is "The biggest one that will fit in the available space, HD or otherwise."
Given the uncertain state of copy protection legislation, you'd be stupid to buy an HD set right now anyway. All the early adopters that bought TVs before HDCP now have a 2 year old, $10,000 obsolete piece of junk. If new broadcast flag legislation gets passed, that could happen again.
Looked at the prices of HD and non-HD TVs lately? You're talking the difference between spending $150 for a standard and $1000 (minimum - All those sub $1000 sets have no tuner) for a set in the 27" range.
Non-HD sets are *cheap*. HD sets will be a luxury-only item for years to come.
They didn't "report" anything. They made it up. That's what analysts do.
As long as the PS3 is about the same price as the 360, and the 360 is selling well, you can bet that Microsoft will keep the price as high as they can. Until sales slow down there won't be a price drop. Look how long it took the PS2 and Xbox to drop from $299 to $199, dispite the cube being less expensive. Don't expect the prices of the next gen systems to drop any faster. Also, given how Nintendo managed to have the lowest price for the entirety of the current generation, don't underestimate their ability to do it again.
Linksys is owned by Cisco, and people are starting to realize it. That means in business settings, where there used to be only Cisco wireless gear, there are lots of WRT54Gs sitting around now. I'd find it hard to believe that this change isn't at least slightly motivated by the high-end Cisco side of the business wanting that market share back.
When you say:
they would rather you buy a cheap router from then than an expensive one from their competition
you've got to remember that their competition with the high priced gear, at least when it comes to business sales, is themselves.
Also, the attach rate for Xbox (which had the highes in the history of system launches) was only 2.4.
The weak launch title lineup seems to indicate (to me at least) that it will be *lower* this time, not higher. Unless, like I said, they play with the numbers by re-definine what counts as a sale.
You won't be getting a memory card if you got the hard drive.
Also, expect extra controller sales to be lower this time around, since this is the first console to ever ship with online multi-player in a meaningful fashion. Instead of a friend pulling up an extra controller, they're going to be playing you online with the controller that came with their Xbox.
The first Xbox had an attach rate of 2.4 games/accessories per unit, and it was the highest ever. There is no reason to expect that they're going to magically beat that by 25% for premium systems and 50% for the low end budget minded systems this time around. In fact, you can probably safely bet that the low end system will have a corresponding lower attach rate due to the budget consious customers it will attract.
This is also the first console that has online multi-player on release day in any meaningful way, so I suspect that accessory controller sales are going to be less common than usual too. Additional players will probably have gotten their controller "free" with their Xbox.
Remember how every EB was "sold out" of 360 pre-orders a month ago? They all magically have a seemingly unlimited number available now. The star shaped "Sold Out" post-it notes have come off of the boxes (who picked the box colors for this thing anyway? They're ugly) and have been replaced with "Pre-Order Now!" stickers.
If you pre-ordered more than one in hopes of selling it on eBay for a profit, I'd suggest getting your deposits back now.
So let's say that they sell their 2.75 million Xboxes. For that to be $1.5billion in revenue, they all have to be the $399 version and also have to sell $146 in games and accessories per buyer. Alternatively, the people buying the $299 version have to spend $246 on extras and games on average. They're really counting on an unnaturally high attach rate to get these numbers. Either they're doing something shady to guarantee the numbers come out like that (like counting units shipped to retailers as "sold"), or they're not going to hit $1.5billion on that few consoles.
Because business analysts pull this stuff out of their asses. That and in any company, marketing, business development, engineering, and manufacturing are locked in an eternal struggle in which there always has to be at least one loser.
What is the difference between a company taking risks to establish itself in a new market and it trying to run the existing players into the ground? How can you tell the difference?
It's hard to tell the difference. It takes years in court to tell the difference because you're prosecuting intent rather than reality. If there's some internal Microsoft memo or some other sort of proof that their intent was to distroy the competition in order to take over the market, you'd have a smoking gun. If not, and that was their intent, they might get away with it.
Usually you have to succeed at doing something bad to get in trouble for it though, and Microsoft hasn't succeeded at taking out *any* of the competition yet, so this discussion is pretty pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
The collision may be larger than the original file, but it's still a collision.
Hardly matters if you're also verifying data length, or you have limited input length.
Besides, what is the point on doing an MD5 for a file that is smaller than the hash itself?
Millions of password files can answer this question for you.
Are you going back through all my old comments just to disagree with me or something? If so you've failed. You'll notice that I said the same exact thing in a followup to this comment.
Having the most market share isn't a metric that anybody sane uses to measure success anyway. At least not since the dot-com boom ended. In the real world, success is typically measured in profit on a balance sheet and through survival on a resume. On the balance sheet, Sony and Nintendo both won, Sega lost, and Microsoft lost big. On their resumes, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all succeeded, and Sega lost big. Consumers care about survival, and investors care about profit. Only fanboys care about market share.
Have you ever worked in retail? Cloths have a 300% mark up, as does anything in food services. Electorinics range from 25% mark up to 300% depedning on the items.
Worked retail? Yeah, because joe associate knows shit about how the company makes money.
Oh, and yes I've worked retail.
BTW, You're just plain wrong. "consumer electronics margins typically average 15%-20%, compared with 25%-30% in other categories".
This more than anything should be the final stake in the heart of MD5
No, no it won't be. It won't be, because MD5 is useful for many things where the existance of an "easy" (in quotes because easy is relative) method of generating colisions is irrelavant.
It won't even kill off the use of MD5 checksums as a signature for verifying authenticity, because if your data is smaller than the checksum there may not be a colision at all, and an exploit wouldn't matter.
This is an important discovery, but it doesn't make MD5 useless any more than CRC32 is useless.
GDDR3 ram is expensive, so your estimate is pretty off
You can get video cards with 256MB of it at retail for under $100. The memory is *not* the most expensive component on those cards. You do realize that the difference between GDDR3 and older technologies (like regular DDR, DDR2 and GDDR2) is that they *simplified* it to make it cheaper to manufacture, right? The reason they don't use it for general purpose PC memory isn't because it's more expensive. It's because they hacked features out of it. It's totally unsuitable, for example, for being used on a DIMM, or with long traces.
Now they sell it to wallmart/EB/Circuit city ect... for $150 and the retailer marks it up to $499. Microsoft has now lost $300 on each box.
Remember retail stores don't sell things for free. The standard mark up is to triple to wholesale price.
Let's stop right there.
There is no "standard markup". The markup depends on the product. Typically only "service" products have a markup greater than 100%. 25% is considered excelent for general retail goods. When the PS2 launched, retailers only made $2 in profit per sale. The wholsale price was only $2 less than the retail price. With Xbox, the wholsale price and retail price were identical... No profit. Stores sold them anyway, because margins are high on games and (especially) accessories. That's why stores sell bundles. If stores are selling the 360 for $499, you can bet that Microsoft is getting almost all of that... At least for the first few months. Even in the waning years of a console's life cycle, the margins never get up past 20%.
Ok, now that we've debunked your assumptions, there's really no point in discussing the rest of your comment.
there's also no other way to do it without either spending ridiculous amounts of money or being dependent on a single piece of hardware.
That's not true. along with some other things you've mentioned from various marketing materials.
For starters, there's no such thing as "shared nothing" clustering. You have to have a shared resource to have a cluster.
Solutions that claim to be "shared nothing" actually share a network. Once you've gone that far, there's no reason not to do replicated network block devices, which some larger vendors do (One sibling comment mentions DB2). It can even be fast if you're clever about where you issue your acknowledgements.
There are third party cluster middleware products that make this process transparent to the database. Most of them focus on Oracle. You can also fool some shared storage cluster products into thinking you have some big, expensive, high-performance, SAN array by pointing them at a linux DRBD. Anyway, the point is that there are plenty of ways to do so-called shared nothing database clustering without any expensive hardware.
Why do people bother to argue with "estimated" data? Especially when the estimated data has tyipcally been wrong in the past?
I wish I could get actual numbers, but I can't because nobody releases them. I'd bet money though that the 360 only costs $450 to make in volume. Look at what's in it. Where does the money go?
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
I should be more specific than "All three.". since there were four. Sega lost. Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony won.
You could probably make an argument for Microsoft losing too, since they lost money on their product, but it was available and maintained demand through the entire generation so I'd say they 'won' just like the others.
All three.
That way I can make stuff up and get ad revenue for it.
This article would be great, but it's based on two longshot assumptions. First, that Microsoft will lower the price of the 360 any time in the next 18-24 months. They probably won't. They certainly wont if it's still selling well at the higher price. Second, that Halo 3 will be ready in time for the PS3 launch. It probably won't. The tenative release date is "Fall 2006" right now (Two seasons past the tenative PS3 release). That's before you factor in the inevitable delays.
Let's stop paying attention to fanboy prediction and just wait and see. Just like every other console generation in history, the winner(s) will be system(s) with the best games. There certainly doesn't have to be a single winner (though the trade rags would love there to be one, because it gives them copy to attach ads to), since hardcore gamers will buy all the ones with compelling games. The only people left fighting over which is best are the children who can only get their mommies to buy one of the three, and feel the need to explain why the one that they have is the best to everybody else (them and adults who haven't grown up yet). Silly business manuvers that aren't backed up with the games usually leave the company that pulls them with egg on their face.
I double checked your Froogling. You're wrong.
$661.49 at "Tech for Less" was the cheapest price. (Ok, that's "just over $600" by some definition I suppose), but! It's open box with "minor cosmetic blemishes".
The chepest new-in-box version of that model from a reputable vendor was from Sears for $850. Still a far cry from $150.
If you're going to play the stereotype game...
If you ask some average Joe which of two TVs is "Better," he's going to point to the bigger one, not the one with the high def picture. If he's got $1000 to spend on a TV, which do you think he'll get? The 27" HD tube, the 36" Trinitron SD model, or the 45" SD rear projection? I bet money that nine times out of ten the answer is "The biggest one that will fit in the available space, HD or otherwise."
Given the uncertain state of copy protection legislation, you'd be stupid to buy an HD set right now anyway. All the early adopters that bought TVs before HDCP now have a 2 year old, $10,000 obsolete piece of junk. If new broadcast flag legislation gets passed, that could happen again.
Looked at the prices of HD and non-HD TVs lately? You're talking the difference between spending $150 for a standard and $1000 (minimum - All those sub $1000 sets have no tuner) for a set in the 27" range.
Non-HD sets are *cheap*. HD sets will be a luxury-only item for years to come.
They didn't "report" anything. They made it up. That's what analysts do.
As long as the PS3 is about the same price as the 360, and the 360 is selling well, you can bet that Microsoft will keep the price as high as they can. Until sales slow down there won't be a price drop. Look how long it took the PS2 and Xbox to drop from $299 to $199, dispite the cube being less expensive. Don't expect the prices of the next gen systems to drop any faster. Also, given how Nintendo managed to have the lowest price for the entirety of the current generation, don't underestimate their ability to do it again.
Linksys is owned by Cisco, and people are starting to realize it. That means in business settings, where there used to be only Cisco wireless gear, there are lots of WRT54Gs sitting around now. I'd find it hard to believe that this change isn't at least slightly motivated by the high-end Cisco side of the business wanting that market share back.
When you say:
they would rather you buy a cheap router from then than an expensive one from their competition
you've got to remember that their competition with the high priced gear, at least when it comes to business sales, is themselves.
It depends on which gaming website you're reading.
That does make sense... How much of that is tax though? Because the taxes don't count as Microsoft revenue.
Also, the attach rate for Xbox (which had the highes in the history of system launches) was only 2.4.
The weak launch title lineup seems to indicate (to me at least) that it will be *lower* this time, not higher. Unless, like I said, they play with the numbers by re-definine what counts as a sale.
You won't be getting a memory card if you got the hard drive.
Also, expect extra controller sales to be lower this time around, since this is the first console to ever ship with online multi-player in a meaningful fashion. Instead of a friend pulling up an extra controller, they're going to be playing you online with the controller that came with their Xbox.
The first Xbox had an attach rate of 2.4 games/accessories per unit, and it was the highest ever. There is no reason to expect that they're going to magically beat that by 25% for premium systems and 50% for the low end budget minded systems this time around. In fact, you can probably safely bet that the low end system will have a corresponding lower attach rate due to the budget consious customers it will attract.
You aren't forced to buy a package though...
This is also the first console that has online multi-player on release day in any meaningful way, so I suspect that accessory controller sales are going to be less common than usual too. Additional players will probably have gotten their controller "free" with their Xbox.
"Potentially"?
Remember how every EB was "sold out" of 360 pre-orders a month ago? They all magically have a seemingly unlimited number available now. The star shaped "Sold Out" post-it notes have come off of the boxes (who picked the box colors for this thing anyway? They're ugly) and have been replaced with "Pre-Order Now!" stickers.
If you pre-ordered more than one in hopes of selling it on eBay for a profit, I'd suggest getting your deposits back now.
So let's say that they sell their 2.75 million Xboxes. For that to be $1.5billion in revenue, they all have to be the $399 version and also have to sell $146 in games and accessories per buyer. Alternatively, the people buying the $299 version have to spend $246 on extras and games on average. They're really counting on an unnaturally high attach rate to get these numbers. Either they're doing something shady to guarantee the numbers come out like that (like counting units shipped to retailers as "sold"), or they're not going to hit $1.5billion on that few consoles.
Because business analysts pull this stuff out of their asses. That and in any company, marketing, business development, engineering, and manufacturing are locked in an eternal struggle in which there always has to be at least one loser.
What is the difference between a company taking risks to establish itself in a new market and it trying to run the existing players into the ground? How can you tell the difference?
It's hard to tell the difference. It takes years in court to tell the difference because you're prosecuting intent rather than reality. If there's some internal Microsoft memo or some other sort of proof that their intent was to distroy the competition in order to take over the market, you'd have a smoking gun. If not, and that was their intent, they might get away with it.
Usually you have to succeed at doing something bad to get in trouble for it though, and Microsoft hasn't succeeded at taking out *any* of the competition yet, so this discussion is pretty pointless.