The current-generation Xbox sold more than the PlayStation 2 in North America last Christmas. We will become the market leader with our next-generation console.
Ok, two things... What does sales of Xbox have to do with sales of the next generation? That only tells you about how the current generation is stacking up against the competition.
Also, don't you think there's a pretty good chance that Xbox outsold PS2 last christmas because everybody already had a PS2?
I doubt any of this even matters anyway. They're both going to sell boatloads of machines. The real question is which of them will be able to turn the most profit on them. By that metric, even Nintendo, with the lowest market share of the three, totally wiped the floor with Microsoft these last few years.
I keep hearing all this bad stuff about the PSP's battery life, but I got one as a gift this weekend, and I played Hot Shots golf and Lumines for four and a half hours on Monday and there was still some battery life left.
Plus the thing charges in about 40 minutes. What's the problem here?
Ok, you're right, my math was wrong, speciffically when adding up the children born to the families with four... But after thinking about it more, I think this can still be explained statistically.
Forget, for a moment, your one coin being flipped a half million times, and instead think of a half million coins each being flipped either two or three times. No coin is perfect, so there's a good chance that each individual coin probably favors one side or the other to some extent, but since you have a half million of them, if you flip them all once it should work out to be right around 50/50 heads and tails. But what if you flip them all twice, and then flip only the ones that came up heads in the first two flips a third time? It's likely that you've selected a majority of coins that favor heads for your next flip... This analogy fits the 'lots of people having kids' situation better.
Let's say people are inclined to have two children, though they have a preference for one particular sex. The 1000 families have their two children each, and there are (on average) 1000 boys and 1000 girls. Now, since it's probable that some people are very slightly more likely to have boys than girls, or the other way around, if only the people with two boys decide to have a third child and try for a girl, you're more than 50% likely to have boys born as a third child. The fact that these aren't all 'fair coins' combined with the desire for a particular outcome acually does change the probability of later attempts... Interestingly, you end up with more of the less desired sex.
BTW, I think you give people too much credit when you say that probablilty being difficult is why Vegas casinos make money. People don't loose tons of money because they don't understand probability, but because they haven't thought about it in the first place.
He's not talking about changing the odds, he's talking about changing the outcome.
Use your coinflip example. There's a 50% chance you get heads on every flip. That means there is some probability (you're perfectly capable of doing this math yourself) that after a given number of flips you'll have had 75% heads. You can just keep flipping until that's the case, and then stop.
In the parent's example, it would be easy to see why the inclination to stop having children after you've had one of a particular sex would change the distribution of the number of children of each sex in a population even if the odds of having one particular sex of child are the same. If the goal is to have, for the sake of example, a girl, and you're willing to have up to four children to try for a girl, half the population will have a girl, a quarter will have a boy and a girl, an eighth will have two boys and a girl and the remaining eighth will have four boys. Given 1000 familys that gives you 1000 boys and 875 girls, even though it's a 50/50 chance that any given child was one sex or the other.
Eight hours later, you get a call on the phone from your credit card company saying "You used your card in two locations that are 1500 miles away from each other within the same 5 minute period. Did you actually make this $5-$15 purchase?"
that paycheck you get is now worth perhaps half what it used to be a few years ago due to poor economic policy in the US
Actually, when buying japanese goods, the US dollar is worth only 10% less than it was two years ago. When buying from China, where most of the goods imported into the US come from, it's worth exactly the same amount it was two years ago.
The US economy is huge, so effects take a while to propegate. you will notice it first on imported goods, then local goods, then you will hopefully still be able to pay for food. I sure hope you arn't paycheck to paycheck right now with no ability to cut back.
This comment got modded up? Please go home Mr. Troll.
There's also a time honored marketing tradition of making your device seem like it's worth a ton more than it is by saying things like "there's $1000 worth of computing power in there," etc... So that when it hits the market and only costs $350 everybody thinks they're getting a bargain.
If Sony knew it were going to sell for $299, they sure as hell wouldn't let anybody know that this early.
You left some words out of that sentence. It should read:
All I can see happening because of this is teen lushes in Pennsylvania getting wasted on Napa Valley wine without their parents knowing, instead of having to settle for Lancaster County wine.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
I would argue it was *more* limited. The version I used in 2002 on the Itanium platform I was developing on couldn't run *anything* for more than 10 minutes or so... Not to mention that the product was labeled "beta" until 2005.
Run a local Debian package repository, only put updates you want in it, point your system's sources.list at the local repository, and add the following to the crontab for every system you deploy:
I have exactly the opposite perspective. Every successful, novel product I've worked on has had foundations in recent academic papers. Successful design level engineers read the lastet stuff, and put the ideas they get from the papers they read into practice.
Anybody that tells you they can launch a tech product that is both revolutionary and successful without learning from the recent innovation of others is lying, and the people in academia are the ones that share their recent innovations.
The reality is, as you say, almost all startups will fail. Everyone - not even every smart/talented person - can go into a startup.
Not everybody can go into a startup and come out super rich, but just about anybody can go work for a startup. Sure, that company may fail (where 'fail' is typically defined as being bought by a larger company for less than the value of the initial investment), but you still pull a decent salary while you're there, and have good experience to put on your resume. My first job out of college was working for a startup that failed. I turned down job offers at big companies including EMC and IBM to work there, and even though we went out of business, it was the best career decision I could have made, because I had newer technology and more 'senior' responsibilities on my resume than I could possibly have had working an entry level job at a big company.
The value of startups to recent graduates isn't that they can score big and make you rich, it's that they're dynamic work environments where you'll get experience you don't have the opportunity to have at a larger company where you have to work your way up the political food chain before you get to do any interesting work.
Re:You work to live, you don't live to work.
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 1
And don't fool yourself, working 80 hours a week is NOT twice as productive as working 40 hours a week. Not even close.
The trick here is knowing what matters more in your particular situation... Being productive, or looking productive.
Wacom Cintiq (LCD integrated w/ a graphics tablet)
I can't believe they manage to continue selling these things now that tablet PCs cost less than half as much and actually include, you know, a computer...
Since Apple has just released software that takes advantage of huge amounts of video memory, and they have a big ATI logo on the page describing it, perhaps the release of Tiger has something to do with the announcement of this card... If that's the case, trying to figure out what this has to do with gaming performance misses the point.
When a programmable GPU is present, Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you'll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of operations.
You're talking about sombody who is considering recompiling the tens of millions of lines of code that make up the operating system and all of the applications he runs, a task that will likely take dozens of hours, to obtain imperceptable performance gains that *may* add up to a few minutes of CPU time gain over the next year..
I think people like this are in another league from what you're describing.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
I think that question should be turned around and asked to you.
Altavista, for years, was altavista.digital.com and was the best search engine on the internet. altavista.com pointed to some other company that enjoyed tons of free publicity from people typing in the wrong thing. Later on, digital spun off the search engine (I think it was around the time of the Compaq sale), the new company bought the altavista.com domain name, and slowly turned to crap.
The point is that Microsoft has a long history of adding features to their operating system, and putting all the effort into the feature instead of putting some into the configuration of the feature.
I don't care if the feature is there, or what the default state is, as long as I don't have to go somewhere arcane that I'd never think of without hours of exploring to turn it off... Just like I hated having to figure out that the power settings for my hard drive were in "Display Settings" under screen saver.
If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen. "You shouldn't have to spend a lot of time struggling with things," Allchin said
How long will I have to struggle with it to figure out how to turn that off?
That's what they call the release that comes in the box before you apply the patch, right?
Re:No, I meant fitness for a particular purpose...
on
GameStop buys EB
·
· Score: 1
"We only offer an exchange for the same item, thats the law!"
It's funny that they would tell you that's the law when the law is actually exactly the opposite of that in most places.
Best Buy, at least around here, claims they don't take returns on software because of the chance of spreading computer viruses. They have little signs printed up clip to the front of the shelves.
And there's nothing "broken" about not taking game returns...
Also, I was talking about the publisher taking returns from the store, not the store taking returns from the customer. If you've got to worry about the store pirating the game before returning it, you've got bigger problems...
Exactly, and this is where his analogy falls apart: one or two people write 90% of books; most games now are made by teams ranging from 50 to 100 people, all of which need salaries.
This is boneheaded logic. The same number of people will buy the game if there's tons of copies out there or just a few... Perhaps even more. There's no reason that you shouldn't make a few extra $2 copies of the physical game, since you'd still be charging $50 for them when you sell them. What you describe only explains why games cost $50 instead of $5 like books, not why the bookstore model doesn't fit in the game world.
And there's nothing "broken" about not taking game returns when anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge can buy a game and copy it and return it.
There is something broken about it. Two things in fact. First is that it allows game developers to ship a shitty, unfinished product with the intent to patch it later, instead of putting a high quality product on the shelf. Second, it treats customers as criminals, even if they aren't. It also fosters mental justification for the attitude that a lot of slashdot readers have that it's OK to pirate a game to try it out before buying it, since once you've bought it you're stuck with it even if it's trash.
Slashdot Mirror
The current-generation Xbox sold more than the PlayStation 2 in North America last Christmas. We will become the market leader with our next-generation console.
Ok, two things... What does sales of Xbox have to do with sales of the next generation? That only tells you about how the current generation is stacking up against the competition.
Also, don't you think there's a pretty good chance that Xbox outsold PS2 last christmas because everybody already had a PS2?
I doubt any of this even matters anyway. They're both going to sell boatloads of machines. The real question is which of them will be able to turn the most profit on them. By that metric, even Nintendo, with the lowest market share of the three, totally wiped the floor with Microsoft these last few years.
I keep hearing all this bad stuff about the PSP's battery life, but I got one as a gift this weekend, and I played Hot Shots golf and Lumines for four and a half hours on Monday and there was still some battery life left.
Plus the thing charges in about 40 minutes. What's the problem here?
Ok, you're right, my math was wrong, speciffically when adding up the children born to the families with four... But after thinking about it more, I think this can still be explained statistically.
Forget, for a moment, your one coin being flipped a half million times, and instead think of a half million coins each being flipped either two or three times. No coin is perfect, so there's a good chance that each individual coin probably favors one side or the other to some extent, but since you have a half million of them, if you flip them all once it should work out to be right around 50/50 heads and tails. But what if you flip them all twice, and then flip only the ones that came up heads in the first two flips a third time? It's likely that you've selected a majority of coins that favor heads for your next flip... This analogy fits the 'lots of people having kids' situation better.
Let's say people are inclined to have two children, though they have a preference for one particular sex. The 1000 families have their two children each, and there are (on average) 1000 boys and 1000 girls. Now, since it's probable that some people are very slightly more likely to have boys than girls, or the other way around, if only the people with two boys decide to have a third child and try for a girl, you're more than 50% likely to have boys born as a third child. The fact that these aren't all 'fair coins' combined with the desire for a particular outcome acually does change the probability of later attempts... Interestingly, you end up with more of the less desired sex.
BTW, I think you give people too much credit when you say that probablilty being difficult is why Vegas casinos make money. People don't loose tons of money because they don't understand probability, but because they haven't thought about it in the first place.
He's not talking about changing the odds, he's talking about changing the outcome.
Use your coinflip example. There's a 50% chance you get heads on every flip. That means there is some probability (you're perfectly capable of doing this math yourself) that after a given number of flips you'll have had 75% heads. You can just keep flipping until that's the case, and then stop.
In the parent's example, it would be easy to see why the inclination to stop having children after you've had one of a particular sex would change the distribution of the number of children of each sex in a population even if the odds of having one particular sex of child are the same. If the goal is to have, for the sake of example, a girl, and you're willing to have up to four children to try for a girl, half the population will have a girl, a quarter will have a boy and a girl, an eighth will have two boys and a girl and the remaining eighth will have four boys. Given 1000 familys that gives you 1000 boys and 875 girls, even though it's a 50/50 chance that any given child was one sex or the other.
Eight hours later, you get a call on the phone from your credit card company saying "You used your card in two locations that are 1500 miles away from each other within the same 5 minute period. Did you actually make this $5-$15 purchase?"
that paycheck you get is now worth perhaps half what it used to be a few years ago due to poor economic policy in the US
Actually, when buying japanese goods, the US dollar is worth only 10% less than it was two years ago. When buying from China, where most of the goods imported into the US come from, it's worth exactly the same amount it was two years ago.
The US economy is huge, so effects take a while to propegate. you will notice it first on imported goods, then local goods, then you will hopefully still be able to pay for food. I sure hope you arn't paycheck to paycheck right now with no ability to cut back.
This comment got modded up? Please go home Mr. Troll.
There's also a time honored marketing tradition of making your device seem like it's worth a ton more than it is by saying things like "there's $1000 worth of computing power in there," etc... So that when it hits the market and only costs $350 everybody thinks they're getting a bargain.
If Sony knew it were going to sell for $299, they sure as hell wouldn't let anybody know that this early.
You left some words out of that sentence. It should read:
All I can see happening because of this is teen lushes in Pennsylvania getting wasted on Napa Valley wine without their parents knowing, instead of having to settle for Lancaster County wine.
Contrast this with 64-bit support in Windows. Microsoft released its first 64-bit version of Windows in q1 2002 (see PC World announcement from 2001). But few actually remember because it ran only on Itanium, on hardware which virtually no one except elite vendors could purchase. That version of Windows was quite limited, but even then not as limited as Apple's latest Tiger. Even in 2002, 64-bit Windows apps could run in full GUI mode and could utilize all system libraries except for multimedia decoding and DirectX libraries.
I would argue it was *more* limited. The version I used in 2002 on the Itanium platform I was developing on couldn't run *anything* for more than 10 minutes or so... Not to mention that the product was labeled "beta" until 2005.
Run a local Debian package repository, only put updates you want in it, point your system's sources.list at the local repository, and add the following to the crontab for every system you deploy:
/usr/bin/apt-get update; /usr/bin/apt-get upgrade -yq
0 3 * * *
I have exactly the opposite perspective. Every successful, novel product I've worked on has had foundations in recent academic papers. Successful design level engineers read the lastet stuff, and put the ideas they get from the papers they read into practice.
Anybody that tells you they can launch a tech product that is both revolutionary and successful without learning from the recent innovation of others is lying, and the people in academia are the ones that share their recent innovations.
The reality is, as you say, almost all startups will fail. Everyone - not even every smart/talented person - can go into a startup.
Not everybody can go into a startup and come out super rich, but just about anybody can go work for a startup. Sure, that company may fail (where 'fail' is typically defined as being bought by a larger company for less than the value of the initial investment), but you still pull a decent salary while you're there, and have good experience to put on your resume. My first job out of college was working for a startup that failed. I turned down job offers at big companies including EMC and IBM to work there, and even though we went out of business, it was the best career decision I could have made, because I had newer technology and more 'senior' responsibilities on my resume than I could possibly have had working an entry level job at a big company.
The value of startups to recent graduates isn't that they can score big and make you rich, it's that they're dynamic work environments where you'll get experience you don't have the opportunity to have at a larger company where you have to work your way up the political food chain before you get to do any interesting work.
And don't fool yourself, working 80 hours a week is NOT twice as productive as working 40 hours a week. Not even close.
The trick here is knowing what matters more in your particular situation... Being productive, or looking productive.
Wacom Cintiq (LCD integrated w/ a graphics tablet)
I can't believe they manage to continue selling these things now that tablet PCs cost less than half as much and actually include, you know, a computer...
Since Apple has just released software that takes advantage of huge amounts of video memory, and they have a big ATI logo on the page describing it, perhaps the release of Tiger has something to do with the announcement of this card... If that's the case, trying to figure out what this has to do with gaming performance misses the point.
From the "Core Image" page:
When a programmable GPU is present, Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you'll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of operations.
You're talking about sombody who is considering recompiling the tens of millions of lines of code that make up the operating system and all of the applications he runs, a task that will likely take dozens of hours, to obtain imperceptable performance gains that *may* add up to a few minutes of CPU time gain over the next year..
I think people like this are in another league from what you're describing.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
I think that question should be turned around and asked to you.
Altavista, for years, was altavista.digital.com and was the best search engine on the internet. altavista.com pointed to some other company that enjoyed tons of free publicity from people typing in the wrong thing. Later on, digital spun off the search engine (I think it was around the time of the Compaq sale), the new company bought the altavista.com domain name, and slowly turned to crap.
"Logging on to Steam as ...".
[...]
Every time I browse a web page, I'm telling everyone I use Firefox/1.0.3 on x64 Linux.
When you send your agent string, it's not tied to any personally identifiable data. When you log into steam, it is.
Aggregate data doesn't invade your privacy. Given those two cases, the line seems pretty easy to draw.
I saw an ad for it on TV on Monday.
I wonder why they think we need FCC pics to see what it looks like..
Defaults to on, defaults to off... Who cares?
The point is that Microsoft has a long history of adding features to their operating system, and putting all the effort into the feature instead of putting some into the configuration of the feature.
I don't care if the feature is there, or what the default state is, as long as I don't have to go somewhere arcane that I'd never think of without hours of exploring to turn it off... Just like I hated having to figure out that the power settings for my hard drive were in "Display Settings" under screen saver.
If you put in a DVD, the volume will automatically adjust and the video will just start playing full screen. "You shouldn't have to spend a lot of time struggling with things," Allchin said
How long will I have to struggle with it to figure out how to turn that off?
That's what they call the release that comes in the box before you apply the patch, right?
"We only offer an exchange for the same item, thats the law!"
It's funny that they would tell you that's the law when the law is actually exactly the opposite of that in most places.
Best Buy, at least around here, claims they don't take returns on software because of the chance of spreading computer viruses. They have little signs printed up clip to the front of the shelves.
And there's nothing "broken" about not taking game returns...
Also, I was talking about the publisher taking returns from the store, not the store taking returns from the customer. If you've got to worry about the store pirating the game before returning it, you've got bigger problems...
Exactly, and this is where his analogy falls apart: one or two people write 90% of books; most games now are made by teams ranging from 50 to 100 people, all of which need salaries.
This is boneheaded logic. The same number of people will buy the game if there's tons of copies out there or just a few... Perhaps even more. There's no reason that you shouldn't make a few extra $2 copies of the physical game, since you'd still be charging $50 for them when you sell them. What you describe only explains why games cost $50 instead of $5 like books, not why the bookstore model doesn't fit in the game world.
And there's nothing "broken" about not taking game returns when anyone with a moderate amount of knowledge can buy a game and copy it and return it.
There is something broken about it. Two things in fact. First is that it allows game developers to ship a shitty, unfinished product with the intent to patch it later, instead of putting a high quality product on the shelf. Second, it treats customers as criminals, even if they aren't. It also fosters mental justification for the attitude that a lot of slashdot readers have that it's OK to pirate a game to try it out before buying it, since once you've bought it you're stuck with it even if it's trash.