FUD? You claim that file transfers don't work on Windows, and you dare to call the same claim against Gaim "FUD"?
Claiming it works one place better than others is FUD when it isn't true. There's no double standard there.
When I've seen UPnP work correctly maybe I'll reconsider. Since I know how it works though, I know that it will only work in a limited number of scenarios, and unless you're a home user who doesn't care about security risks, you're unlikely to fall into one of those categories.
Many comments I've seen in this article hurt the credibility of the Open Source community. OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office. Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, and FreeBSD and Linux are both better than Windows, honestly. And when I tell someone that, I don't want them automatically distrusting me because they saw someone incorrectly claiming that their Windows file transfers don't work, or claiming that a client with missing features is actually better because of it. Or as some have arrogantly claimed, "It's no big deal, you should just use FTP anyway."
Read my comment. See any of those claims from me? No, right? Well then what the hell are you bitching at me for then? All I said was that IM sucks on both platforms, and that to say one was worse than the other is FUD. When we don't have to be stuck with some cripped single company implementation, maybe things will get better. Until there are standards though, everything will continue to suck.
File transfers usually don't work on Windows either. Generally it's because both sides are behind NAT. It has nothing to do with "Advanced clients". When file transfers do work, the only files you recieve that you can't open on Linux are viruses.
The only Windows IM client that is worth consideration is Trillian Pro. And other client either has no good features, or is loaded with ads, or both. The state of IM on Windows sucks just as much as everywhere else... Unless you're on a Mac, but that's another story.
Here's a better idea. Just throw in the towel on your liberalism and go fiscal conservative. Then you start a right-wing extremist hype-fest of a blog so you can cash in this new law and on your newly compromised ethics.
While you're at it you can use your experience from your old set of views to write an ultra-liberal hype-fest of a blog as an alternate literary personality and cash in on both sides.
I'm joking of course.
On a more serious note, there's a simple piece of information that you're missing that solves your moral delemma. Individuals have free speech in this country. Not corporations, not organizations, not campaigns, not parties; individuals. (Well, individuals, and "the press"... But the point stays the same.)
How the "liberals" got caught up in this illiberal crusade is beyond me.
Easy, they're not liberal. Not any more than the "religious right" is conservative. They're politicians. If they were philosophical idealists, they wouldn't have gotten elected and they'd be home figuring out how to get arrested for publicity like the Libratarians. They fight to win, not for what's right, and the Republicans had more money than them, so they jumped on the campaign finance bandwagon.
Subscription is where you pay a fixed fee for a service.
We're talking about keeping an image you created on your screen. It's not like they're providing new images, installing images, or changing even a single bit in any way as they take your fee every month. Not deleting data that you don't own off of a device that you don't own for a fee is extortion.
Or do you think that paying "protection money" to the guy who cleans the trash out of the alley behind your business in order to continue to have windows that are in one piece is "subscription" too?
Sure, you CAN add custom photos and ringtones, which I might do if I had to pay ONCE for, but Verizon charges a monthly fee just for having them on your phone.
That sounds like they charge you a fee to not delete your data. That's called extortion. It should be illegal.
If you're using "voting for Bush" as your guage for intelligence, just keep in mind that there are still a hefty chunk in this country who didn't wake up fucking retarded last November.
Unless you're saying that it's the half that didn't vote for a candidate based on one issue, or a subset of the issues, you should go home and be quiet.
It doesn't matter who you voted for. If you did it "because of the war," "because of our foreign image," "because of abortion rights," or because of any other pet issue, you're the one that that should be taking an IQ test and checking into a padded room with a drool bucket. Especially since the 47% of the people who voted for Kerry voted for a candidate who would have sent us into Iraq if he was president in 2001, and would have kept us there if he was elected in 2004.
When Bush is gone and we have a new face on our foreign policy, the world can look at us differently. When you have a domestic policy plan that will fuck your country's economy with entitlement programs that can never be taken away, the damage lasts until your government is overthrown or bankrupt. It's bad enough that we're stuck with this stupid prescription drug program nightmare. Can you imagine if we had the same thing for all health care?
Bush sucks, but he sucks less than the alternatives from 2004.
(As an aside in case you live next door to me, you can have sex with whomever you want and pray to whatever God you believe in at the same time, as long as the sex is consentual and you close the blinds first. I'd have some choice things to say about the stereotypical Bush voter, but I may want to run for office some day, so I'll refrain from putting it in writing.)
Here's a good link for you in the future when you're replying to the "war for oil" conspiracy nuts: Why we went to war.
Remember, the fact that we found no weapons does not mean that the weapons weren't the reason. Unless you want to call President Clinton a Texas oil barron, saying the Iraq war was for oil makes you a conspiracy nut who is to lazy or too blind to see the facts.
For the US to impose bad things on the internet it only takes one country to fall to a fundamentalist theocracy or whatever. For the EU to do it it would take at least 13 countries
Is that how they would set it up, or would it be worse, and any one of the twenty five could wreck things?
A truly international body like the UN (please don't start yelling FUD, the US attempts to discredit the UN would be amusing if they weren't so pathetic)
The WIPO is a UN agency. Do you really think the UN would do a better job when you take that into account? If you do you're nuts. The UN, the WIPO especially, is for sale more than any branch of the US government is in the most obscene works of fiction. It's only FUD when it's not true.
When sombody says C/C++ it can easily be something less evil, like C++ that uses some libraries written in C, or C++ with a C API binding. You know, kindof like when somebody says their app is written in Java/C. Many projects do use multiple languages, and C and C++ are both very popular.
The USA is finding themselves with fewer and fewer allies and there has never been a country so powerful that they have no need of allies.
Count them. Really, go ahead. What's changed in the last decade? Maybe we lost Spain? We've got a different set of puppet dictatorships in South America than we used to? We certainly gained a bunch of new allies when the Soviet Union collapsed...
Pick a presidential administration from the last 45 years and I'll give you a list of things they did that made the rest of the world hate us. It's all the same. Nothing has changed. And it has nothing to do with 'the right,' radical or otherwise.
The problem is that a benevolent tyrant is still a tyrant.
So the EU would be a better overlord of DNS? I don't see how that works.
I dont see the US having any leverage here. If the rest of the world decides to establish an alternate route, then there's fuck all the US can do about it.
That's funny. You really think that would work. All the governments that matter in this discussion are all equally bound to corporate interests. Fragmenting DNS in the way you describe would not serve those interests. If the US doesn't want to hand it over, and this group of countries that feels they know better keeps pushing the issue, businesses are going to get involved to maintain the status quo.
Welcome to the real world, where you don't have enough money to matter in discussions like this.
If it weren't for my girlfriend (who regularly watches more tv than me) [...]
If she watches more TV than you, why do you think she wouldn't understand? Especially if you have Tivo. Hell, you should tell her about this. She'll probably write a letter too.
As a games company there is nothing to suggest they treat their developers no worse than the competition
That may be true, but not making nearly enough consoles (which effectifely caps your developers sales) and seemingly being okay with that is pretty bad.
What I was talking about regarding Microsoft and their developers had nothing do do with documentation or programability, or quality of the platform... It's that if you write a successful application, you're practically guaranteed to have Microsoft come out with their own version that works better because of access to special Microsoft only hooks in the OS. It's dangerous to write innovative software for windows if you like being in business and you're not already a huge company.
That's true for a comparatively small set of specialist software (on the server side, at utilities companies (power/telco/etc), and for things like financial traders) but not for the vast majority of systems, which are traditional (very dull) desktops.
Not only is this a recent occurance, but it's also probably wrong. If you add up all the machines that run banking, insurance, manufacturing, point-of-sale, automotive, or CRM software, you'd have the vast majority of business computers. These are all applications that have no good reason to run on Windows, because they're so specialized that customers would buy them regardless of what platform they run on. People make a big stink about needing Office, but most people just plain don't create documents. The only killer Office app for 90% of workers is Excel, and there are capable spreadsheets on practically every platform.
That's essentially true though, because if they don't write for Windows most there customers will just switch to an alternate product, rather than switch OS on all their systems
That's starting to be true now, but remember that it's only recently that Microsoft has a stranglehold on the business desktop. 10-12 years ago if you saw a Windows box in a business setting it was probably there to run a serial terminal emulation package to hook into the company's UNIX box. This is the developer magic I'm talking about. Microsoft got to where they are because they got all these app developers to port. It's not the other way around.
It's only been 10 years since most of these applications ran on thin clients. The users didn't need access to anything but this one application and still don't. It was under protest that most end users moved away from the thin clients (dumb terminals mostly) to full PCs that cost more, and broke more easily. They had to switch though, because their app moved to windows.
It's a lot easier to switch a single application vendor than switch all your desktops, your server infrastructure, your IS/IT staff and all your other software.
No kidding, but it happened in the last decade. Everybody switched their desktops to Windows 9x+. The server side isn't finished yet. Microsoft is just finishing up getting into the server side in a serious way, but slowly they've managed to convince companies to throw away their infrastructure for Windows.
If we were talking about any other company but Microsoft you probably would have a point. Microsoft, however, seems to know the magic word that keeps developers coming back for more every time the folks up in Redmond decide to sick it to them. It's uncanny. If any other company treated third party developers the way Microsoft does (And I'm talking on all platforms here, Whatever version of Windows you can think of counts), they wouldn't have any developers left.
It's funny, because the third party developers are the only thing keeping people on Windows. In the business world, people buy the platform their application runs on. Until recently (the last 12 years or so) that was SCO UNIX, VMS, DOS, OS/2, DG/UX, Digital UNIX, or HP/UX. End users didn't care which. They bought the one their application ran on. Now application vendors are under the false assumption that if they don't write for Windows, nobody will buy their product. At this rate, that may end up being true... even for Xbox.
From the interview, it sounded to me like the disappointment was going to be the lack of games when it comes out. The disappointment in quantites is probably going to be on his end when he sees the initial sales figures.
I know dozens of gamers (including myself), and lots of Xbox owners. I know *one* person planning to buy a 360 on release day. Everybody else is either waiting for some good games to come out, or expecting a price drop when the PS3 comes out, and is planning to wait until then.
If you really want one that badly, I expect you won't have too much trouble walking into a Wal-Mart on the 22nd and picking one up.
If the unwashed slashbot wisdom is true and the consoles are sold as loss leaders to drive game sales [...]
That's a big if. We know they sold the Xbox at a loss, but it would be a stretch to say it was a "loss leader," since they didn't have a chance in hell at making up the loss through games and accessory sales. The pile of cash they burned is mind-boggling. You've got to assume, though, that they're in this to make money in the long run. If the Xbox losses were tolerable to get them into the console market, then presumably they've got to turn a profit this time. That means they can't possibly be allowing a 360 out the door for less than the manufacturing cost minus the profits from the sale of two games. If the parent to your comment is right, maybe they're selling the unit at a profit for now, and won't undercut until the PS3 comes out.
You can build a damned lot of machine for $400 in quantities of 1 million+, especially when it doesn't have to be upgradeable.
As for the conventional wisdom, I'd bet you couldn't find proof that any recent consoles sold at an initial loss, other than the Saturn, the Dreamcast and the Xbox.
even though I really want to play the "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion"
You know it's shipping simultainlously for the PC, and that it has what could arguably be called it's most important feature (The construction kit and the ability to load third party modules created with the kit) on the PC exclusively, right?
Of course if it's like TES3, the other important feature that will be PC only is the ability to patch.
Yeah, but from what I've heard from people I know in retail management, the retail margin on the hardware is really tiny. As little as $5 per unit even. Less at product launch time and during the holidays, when having hardware on hand draws enough customers into the store that the retailer doesn't mind selling a unit at no profit in order to make money on tie-ins. Also, Sony doesn't pay a distributor. They are their own distributor, (SCEA, SCEE, etc, depending on which part of the world you live in.) so they get all of the wholesale price.
Correction, they're replicating what NASA did 45 years ago. Even NASA can't do what they did 30 years ago.
Anyway, consider this: The US spent $300 million to get to sub-orbital flights (That's almost $2 billion in today's dollars). The SpaceShipOne program cost $30 million.
They won't. They're losing money on the system and making it up through the sale of games.
Do you have any proof of this, or are you just speculating? I mean, they're charging $249 for the thing, and there are handheld computers out there that aren't much more expensive that are on a 40%+ profit margin. I would bet they're selling these things exactly at cost.
The only thing I see out there is speculation though. Even the Official Playstation Magazine can only speculate. And Sony isn't going to come out and deny it, because they'd love for you to think you were getting something that was worth more than what you paid for it. Even if the screen and the UMD drive cost $100 each though (they probably don't in quantity), I can't imagine the PSP costs more than $249 to build.
The functional prototype requirement should be restored. If it's not something you can hold in your hand you should have to provide a demonstration. If it's an abstract concept that can't be demonstrated, you shouldn't be able to get a patent.
Let's make these IP warehouses at least put on a good dog and pony show.
Generally the only stations that don't get rebroadcast are the ones that aren't broadcast over the air... Like public access. There aren't many people who care enough about those stations to pay the $20-$30 a month difference in price between sattelite and cable.
Saying it's only major market stations over DirecTV is just plain false. I live in the Boston market, and not only do I get the Boston CBS, FOX, NBC, ABC, PBS, and UPN stations, but I get the southern New Hampshire and Rhode Island versions too. Over cable (I have both right now... Doesn't make sense to me that internet + CATV would be cheaper than just internet, but whatever) I only get the Boston locals plus my local access channel. Generally, if there's any chance you could get it with an antenna, you can get it over sattelite.
Plus, they must have known what channels they were going to get before they signed up. If it didn't have the channels they wanted, why did they?
So, my cable provider is getting about $120 a month to provide me with internet, audio and video content. The RIAA affiliated companies gets $0.
Not entirely true... I bet they get royalties from your cable company from the music-only "radio" channels and from the music-video channels.
Remember, one of the biggest issues with satellite is that their customers _demand_ the free broadcast channels as well as the satellite programming.
That issue is so 1980s. All the sattelite companies rebroadcast the local brodcast channels now.
In summary, the RIAA is done. They will lawyer their way until they die, but they are like a person trapped in the middle of the ocean that is drinking salt water "to stay alive". There inevitable death will only be sooner rather than later. RIP.
I think for the most part you're right, but congress may step in and legislate them a pile of revenue still.
Slashdot Mirror
FUD? You claim that file transfers don't work on Windows, and you dare to call the same claim against Gaim "FUD"?
Claiming it works one place better than others is FUD when it isn't true. There's no double standard there.
When I've seen UPnP work correctly maybe I'll reconsider. Since I know how it works though, I know that it will only work in a limited number of scenarios, and unless you're a home user who doesn't care about security risks, you're unlikely to fall into one of those categories.
Many comments I've seen in this article hurt the credibility of the Open Source community. OpenOffice is better than Microsoft Office. Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, and FreeBSD and Linux are both better than Windows, honestly. And when I tell someone that, I don't want them automatically distrusting me because they saw someone incorrectly claiming that their Windows file transfers don't work, or claiming that a client with missing features is actually better because of it. Or as some have arrogantly claimed, "It's no big deal, you should just use FTP anyway."
Read my comment. See any of those claims from me? No, right? Well then what the hell are you bitching at me for then? All I said was that IM sucks on both platforms, and that to say one was worse than the other is FUD. When we don't have to be stuck with some cripped single company implementation, maybe things will get better. Until there are standards though, everything will continue to suck.
(As an aside, Firefox *is* better than IE)
File transfers usually don't work on Windows either. Generally it's because both sides are behind NAT. It has nothing to do with "Advanced clients". When file transfers do work, the only files you recieve that you can't open on Linux are viruses.
The only Windows IM client that is worth consideration is Trillian Pro. And other client either has no good features, or is loaded with ads, or both. The state of IM on Windows sucks just as much as everywhere else... Unless you're on a Mac, but that's another story.
Here's a better idea. Just throw in the towel on your liberalism and go fiscal conservative. Then you start a right-wing extremist hype-fest of a blog so you can cash in this new law and on your newly compromised ethics.
While you're at it you can use your experience from your old set of views to write an ultra-liberal hype-fest of a blog as an alternate literary personality and cash in on both sides.
I'm joking of course.
On a more serious note, there's a simple piece of information that you're missing that solves your moral delemma. Individuals have free speech in this country. Not corporations, not organizations, not campaigns, not parties; individuals. (Well, individuals, and "the press"... But the point stays the same.)
How the "liberals" got caught up in this illiberal crusade is beyond me.
Easy, they're not liberal. Not any more than the "religious right" is conservative. They're politicians. If they were philosophical idealists, they wouldn't have gotten elected and they'd be home figuring out how to get arrested for publicity like the Libratarians. They fight to win, not for what's right, and the Republicans had more money than them, so they jumped on the campaign finance bandwagon.
Subscription is where you pay a fixed fee for a service.
We're talking about keeping an image you created on your screen. It's not like they're providing new images, installing images, or changing even a single bit in any way as they take your fee every month. Not deleting data that you don't own off of a device that you don't own for a fee is extortion.
Or do you think that paying "protection money" to the guy who cleans the trash out of the alley behind your business in order to continue to have windows that are in one piece is "subscription" too?
Sure, you CAN add custom photos and ringtones, which I might do if I had to pay ONCE for, but Verizon charges a monthly fee just for having them on your phone.
That sounds like they charge you a fee to not delete your data. That's called extortion. It should be illegal.
If you're using "voting for Bush" as your guage for intelligence, just keep in mind that there are still a hefty chunk in this country who didn't wake up fucking retarded last November.
Unless you're saying that it's the half that didn't vote for a candidate based on one issue, or a subset of the issues, you should go home and be quiet.
It doesn't matter who you voted for. If you did it "because of the war," "because of our foreign image," "because of abortion rights," or because of any other pet issue, you're the one that that should be taking an IQ test and checking into a padded room with a drool bucket. Especially since the 47% of the people who voted for Kerry voted for a candidate who would have sent us into Iraq if he was president in 2001, and would have kept us there if he was elected in 2004.
When Bush is gone and we have a new face on our foreign policy, the world can look at us differently. When you have a domestic policy plan that will fuck your country's economy with entitlement programs that can never be taken away, the damage lasts until your government is overthrown or bankrupt. It's bad enough that we're stuck with this stupid prescription drug program nightmare. Can you imagine if we had the same thing for all health care?
Bush sucks, but he sucks less than the alternatives from 2004.
(As an aside in case you live next door to me, you can have sex with whomever you want and pray to whatever God you believe in at the same time, as long as the sex is consentual and you close the blinds first. I'd have some choice things to say about the stereotypical Bush voter, but I may want to run for office some day, so I'll refrain from putting it in writing.)
Here's a good link for you in the future when you're replying to the "war for oil" conspiracy nuts: Why we went to war.
Remember, the fact that we found no weapons does not mean that the weapons weren't the reason. Unless you want to call President Clinton a Texas oil barron, saying the Iraq war was for oil makes you a conspiracy nut who is to lazy or too blind to see the facts.
For the US to impose bad things on the internet it only takes one country to fall to a fundamentalist theocracy or whatever. For the EU to do it it would take at least 13 countries
Is that how they would set it up, or would it be worse, and any one of the twenty five could wreck things?
A truly international body like the UN (please don't start yelling FUD, the US attempts to discredit the UN would be amusing if they weren't so pathetic)
The WIPO is a UN agency. Do you really think the UN would do a better job when you take that into account? If you do you're nuts. The UN, the WIPO especially, is for sale more than any branch of the US government is in the most obscene works of fiction. It's only FUD when it's not true.
When sombody says C/C++ it can easily be something less evil, like C++ that uses some libraries written in C, or C++ with a C API binding. You know, kindof like when somebody says their app is written in Java/C. Many projects do use multiple languages, and C and C++ are both very popular.
The USA is finding themselves with fewer and fewer allies and there has never been a country so powerful that they have no need of allies.
Count them. Really, go ahead. What's changed in the last decade? Maybe we lost Spain? We've got a different set of puppet dictatorships in South America than we used to? We certainly gained a bunch of new allies when the Soviet Union collapsed...
Pick a presidential administration from the last 45 years and I'll give you a list of things they did that made the rest of the world hate us. It's all the same. Nothing has changed. And it has nothing to do with 'the right,' radical or otherwise.
When was that? Before you were born for sure.
The only difference between now, and say, 7 years ago, is that more of the world is willing to speak up over how much they dispise the US.
Don't worry though. All those other countries (for the most part anyway) all hate each other too. It's worse than a Friday night football rivalry.
The problem is that a benevolent tyrant is still a tyrant.
So the EU would be a better overlord of DNS? I don't see how that works.
I dont see the US having any leverage here. If the rest of the world decides to establish an alternate route, then there's fuck all the US can do about it.
That's funny. You really think that would work. All the governments that matter in this discussion are all equally bound to corporate interests. Fragmenting DNS in the way you describe would not serve those interests. If the US doesn't want to hand it over, and this group of countries that feels they know better keeps pushing the issue, businesses are going to get involved to maintain the status quo.
Welcome to the real world, where you don't have enough money to matter in discussions like this.
Explain to me what is in my comment that warranted a 'Troll' moderation?
Morrowind was one of my favorite games ever, but it's no secret that both the PC and Xbox versions crashed frequently.
If it weren't for my girlfriend (who regularly watches more tv than me) [...]
If she watches more TV than you, why do you think she wouldn't understand? Especially if you have Tivo. Hell, you should tell her about this. She'll probably write a letter too.
As a games company there is nothing to suggest they treat their developers no worse than the competition
That may be true, but not making nearly enough consoles (which effectifely caps your developers sales) and seemingly being okay with that is pretty bad.
What I was talking about regarding Microsoft and their developers had nothing do do with documentation or programability, or quality of the platform... It's that if you write a successful application, you're practically guaranteed to have Microsoft come out with their own version that works better because of access to special Microsoft only hooks in the OS. It's dangerous to write innovative software for windows if you like being in business and you're not already a huge company.
That's true for a comparatively small set of specialist software (on the server side, at utilities companies (power/telco/etc), and for things like financial traders) but not for the vast majority of systems, which are traditional (very dull) desktops.
Not only is this a recent occurance, but it's also probably wrong. If you add up all the machines that run banking, insurance, manufacturing, point-of-sale, automotive, or CRM software, you'd have the vast majority of business computers. These are all applications that have no good reason to run on Windows, because they're so specialized that customers would buy them regardless of what platform they run on. People make a big stink about needing Office, but most people just plain don't create documents. The only killer Office app for 90% of workers is Excel, and there are capable spreadsheets on practically every platform.
That's essentially true though, because if they don't write for Windows most there customers will just switch to an alternate product, rather than switch OS on all their systems
That's starting to be true now, but remember that it's only recently that Microsoft has a stranglehold on the business desktop. 10-12 years ago if you saw a Windows box in a business setting it was probably there to run a serial terminal emulation package to hook into the company's UNIX box. This is the developer magic I'm talking about. Microsoft got to where they are because they got all these app developers to port. It's not the other way around.
It's only been 10 years since most of these applications ran on thin clients. The users didn't need access to anything but this one application and still don't. It was under protest that most end users moved away from the thin clients (dumb terminals mostly) to full PCs that cost more, and broke more easily. They had to switch though, because their app moved to windows.
It's a lot easier to switch a single application vendor than switch all your desktops, your server infrastructure, your IS/IT staff and all your other software.
No kidding, but it happened in the last decade. Everybody switched their desktops to Windows 9x+. The server side isn't finished yet. Microsoft is just finishing up getting into the server side in a serious way, but slowly they've managed to convince companies to throw away their infrastructure for Windows.
If we were talking about any other company but Microsoft you probably would have a point. Microsoft, however, seems to know the magic word that keeps developers coming back for more every time the folks up in Redmond decide to sick it to them. It's uncanny. If any other company treated third party developers the way Microsoft does (And I'm talking on all platforms here, Whatever version of Windows you can think of counts), they wouldn't have any developers left.
It's funny, because the third party developers are the only thing keeping people on Windows. In the business world, people buy the platform their application runs on. Until recently (the last 12 years or so) that was SCO UNIX, VMS, DOS, OS/2, DG/UX, Digital UNIX, or HP/UX. End users didn't care which. They bought the one their application ran on. Now application vendors are under the false assumption that if they don't write for Windows, nobody will buy their product. At this rate, that may end up being true... even for Xbox.
From the interview, it sounded to me like the disappointment was going to be the lack of games when it comes out. The disappointment in quantites is probably going to be on his end when he sees the initial sales figures.
I know dozens of gamers (including myself), and lots of Xbox owners. I know *one* person planning to buy a 360 on release day. Everybody else is either waiting for some good games to come out, or expecting a price drop when the PS3 comes out, and is planning to wait until then.
If you really want one that badly, I expect you won't have too much trouble walking into a Wal-Mart on the 22nd and picking one up.
If the unwashed slashbot wisdom is true and the consoles are sold as loss leaders to drive game sales [...]
That's a big if. We know they sold the Xbox at a loss, but it would be a stretch to say it was a "loss leader," since they didn't have a chance in hell at making up the loss through games and accessory sales. The pile of cash they burned is mind-boggling. You've got to assume, though, that they're in this to make money in the long run. If the Xbox losses were tolerable to get them into the console market, then presumably they've got to turn a profit this time. That means they can't possibly be allowing a 360 out the door for less than the manufacturing cost minus the profits from the sale of two games. If the parent to your comment is right, maybe they're selling the unit at a profit for now, and won't undercut until the PS3 comes out.
You can build a damned lot of machine for $400 in quantities of 1 million+, especially when it doesn't have to be upgradeable.
As for the conventional wisdom, I'd bet you couldn't find proof that any recent consoles sold at an initial loss, other than the Saturn, the Dreamcast and the Xbox.
even though I really want to play the "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion"
You know it's shipping simultainlously for the PC, and that it has what could arguably be called it's most important feature (The construction kit and the ability to load third party modules created with the kit) on the PC exclusively, right?
Of course if it's like TES3, the other important feature that will be PC only is the ability to patch.
Yeah, but from what I've heard from people I know in retail management, the retail margin on the hardware is really tiny. As little as $5 per unit even. Less at product launch time and during the holidays, when having hardware on hand draws enough customers into the store that the retailer doesn't mind selling a unit at no profit in order to make money on tie-ins. Also, Sony doesn't pay a distributor. They are their own distributor, (SCEA, SCEE, etc, depending on which part of the world you live in.) so they get all of the wholesale price.
Correction, they're replicating what NASA did 45 years ago. Even NASA can't do what they did 30 years ago.
Anyway, consider this: The US spent $300 million to get to sub-orbital flights (That's almost $2 billion in today's dollars). The SpaceShipOne program cost $30 million.
They won't. They're losing money on the system and making it up through the sale of games.
Do you have any proof of this, or are you just speculating? I mean, they're charging $249 for the thing, and there are handheld computers out there that aren't much more expensive that are on a 40%+ profit margin. I would bet they're selling these things exactly at cost.
The only thing I see out there is speculation though. Even the Official Playstation Magazine can only speculate. And Sony isn't going to come out and deny it, because they'd love for you to think you were getting something that was worth more than what you paid for it. Even if the screen and the UMD drive cost $100 each though (they probably don't in quantity), I can't imagine the PSP costs more than $249 to build.
The functional prototype requirement should be restored. If it's not something you can hold in your hand you should have to provide a demonstration. If it's an abstract concept that can't be demonstrated, you shouldn't be able to get a patent.
Let's make these IP warehouses at least put on a good dog and pony show.
Generally the only stations that don't get rebroadcast are the ones that aren't broadcast over the air... Like public access. There aren't many people who care enough about those stations to pay the $20-$30 a month difference in price between sattelite and cable.
Saying it's only major market stations over DirecTV is just plain false. I live in the Boston market, and not only do I get the Boston CBS, FOX, NBC, ABC, PBS, and UPN stations, but I get the southern New Hampshire and Rhode Island versions too. Over cable (I have both right now... Doesn't make sense to me that internet + CATV would be cheaper than just internet, but whatever) I only get the Boston locals plus my local access channel. Generally, if there's any chance you could get it with an antenna, you can get it over sattelite.
Plus, they must have known what channels they were going to get before they signed up. If it didn't have the channels they wanted, why did they?
So, my cable provider is getting about $120 a month to provide me with internet, audio and video content. The RIAA affiliated companies gets $0.
Not entirely true... I bet they get royalties from your cable company from the music-only "radio" channels and from the music-video channels.
Remember, one of the biggest issues with satellite is that their customers _demand_ the free broadcast channels as well as the satellite programming.
That issue is so 1980s. All the sattelite companies rebroadcast the local brodcast channels now.
In summary, the RIAA is done. They will lawyer their way until they die, but they are like a person trapped in the middle of the ocean that is drinking salt water "to stay alive". There inevitable death will only be sooner rather than later. RIP.
I think for the most part you're right, but congress may step in and legislate them a pile of revenue still.