Now, I'm not saying PS2 owners would go for the PS3 if the PS2 new game well were dried up, but I have to think that more of them would do so. The PS2 is a bit unusual, because it is really outselling the PS3. Did the PS1 continue to outsell the PS2 10 months after the PS2 released?
The PSOne didn't actually come out until months after the PS2 came out, so PlayStation sales were pretty flat for a while, but they pulled even for a good long while, and stayed fairly strong for over a year after the PS2 came out. The PS2 didn't gain week-to-week ground until FFX came out. Supporting the previous generation strongly isn't new to the PS2 for Sony though. There was an additional hardware rev, new accessories, and continued new releases on the PS1 for a long time, years, after the PS2 came out.
As for Sony and the PS3 financially, expect Sony to be turning a profit on the hardware by Q408, even with price cuts. Microsoft should be turning a profit already on the 360, and I suspect they would have been if not for the hardware issues and warranty extension.
Don't listen to the guy who thinks unnecessary hand stress is 1000x better. No, really. Putting the most used control down and to the right means you have to bend your thumb outward away from it's natural configuration.
Whether you have to bend your thumb down to get to where the lower control is has to do with the width of the controller, where you grip the controller, and how far apart your elbows are when you hold the controller.
If you're bending your thumbs to reach the analog stick, you're holding the controller wrong, plain and simple.
I really honestly don't give a shit why they didn't put the D-pad there in the first place. The original Playstation controller from pre-DualShock was a total piece of crap. Using their rationale for the design of that particular product to justify the movement of the controls today is just plain broken, and a stupid rhetorical argument anyway.
But my favorite part of first-person shooters are the parts where you fight your way back through areas you were already in to extend the playtime. I especially appreciate it when they strip you of all your weapons first.
Swap the left Analog and Dpad. MS, Nintendo and Sega all did so because it is more comfortable to play 3D games that way.
5. Don't listen to this guy. Leave the D-Pad right where it is. It's 1000x better that way. If you're going to move them, put them in the same place on both sides of the controller. If you're going to move them up, you'll have to make the controller wider, otherwise your thumbs won't be properly aligned with the analog sticks.
Also: Somebody get this guy a copy of super-rub-a-dub, or something so he can realize that the problems he's having with the tilt are because of the game developers, not the controller....
The PS2 is an extreme example(and I seriously doubt the Xbox360 will do as well), but it does show that a console can potentially hang in there to survive against the following generation for a while.
The PS2 isn't really extreme. It's basically always been common industry practice for successful previous generation machines to remain in the market during, and in some cases beyond, the next generation. A successful console's lifespan is about the same length as two console generations. Only the failures are off the shelves the day the next generation is released. Financially, the original XBox was a failure for Microsoft, thus you can't buy them anymore while you can still buy PS2s. Whether or not the 360 will have a longer lifespan than the XBox has mostly to do with whether Microsoft can get manufactuing costs way down over time, and whether or not they make the (stupid) decision to pull the 360 off the shelves for fear of it cutting into their next generation sales.
Anyway, just look back to the NES, Genesis, SNES, Atari 2600/7800, PlayStation/PSOne, any of the Gameboy iterations, and now with the PS2. You'll see that the successful machines have life, including *new* system sales, far longer than the generation they were released into. I would even go so far as to say life into the next generation is the single definition of whether a system was successful or not.
Without the DMCA, it would be harder for me to get pirated content removed, and harder for upload sites and ISPS to verify I am the legit copyright owner. The DMCA simplifies and organises this process. Have some big companies abused the DMCA? you bet they have. Does the fact that in a few cases the law has been abused and stretched to do bad stuff invalidate the whole basis of it? No way. The DMCA is absolutely necessary.
First of all, it should be possible to make it almost as easy for you to issue a takedown, while still preventing much of the fraud. For example, only allowing the takedowns for registered copyrighted material. Then you could do exactly what you do, include a copy of your registration certificate, and be perfectly happy. While at the same time people who are abusing the system will have a much higher barrier to entry.
Unfortunately, big media holdings companies (read: not you) oppose copyright registration and registration renewal because it prevents them from claiming rights over things that have already been created but which they didn't see value in at the time. But isn't the purpose of copyright supposed to be the encouragement of creation? Copyrights should be registered within 3 months of publication for a fee of about $10, and the registration should have to be renewed about every seven years. For each registration, the fee should increase exponentially. There wouldn't have to be limits on the number of times the registration could be renewed.
Second, you are defending just one part of a very bad law. The other parts are as bad or worse in terms of either abuse, or in granting copyright holders the ability to deny the public domain what it is legally entitled to, and to prevent societal progress. The reverse engineering clauses are just plain wrong. They deny people the basic human right to learn from the world around them. The criminalization of circumvention is wrong as long as copyright holders are allowed to prevent legal activities with their DRM along with copyright protection.
Your little tirade in your first paragraph is a significant exaggeration, as many of the people who earn a living with the internet, and many of the people who read this site and enjoy the GPL all rely on, and support copyright to some extent. People would be much less upset by the DMCA if it didn't make it difficult to do many of the legal and should-be-legal things that they want to do, like media shifting, streaming, and accessing out-of-print works. Additionally, the single aspect of the DMCA that you are advocating is also not the entire story.
if iSupply didn't know what they were doing, they'd be out of business by now
If only business actually worked that way...
Since there's no accountability in this type of analysis, these guys sell their numbers based on marketing, and old fashioned salesmanship. That, and they probably get the obvious stuff pretty well.
For cutting edge stuff though, they generally overestimate by a lot. And that can get their customers into a lot of trouble. It probably does.
There is a clear admission here that DRM is allowing copyright holders to "protect" themselves from things they should not be allowed to claim as rights in the first place. Thus the exceptions in the anti-circumvention clauses. But aren't the exceptions themselves proof that something is broken? Should we have to "crack" a technological security measure to do something that the government has admitted we have the right to do?
This is a paradox that presents it self frequently with government regulations and mandates. It is often desirable for one reason or another (note: I said desirable, not "right", or even "a good idea"). Unfortunately if you mandate something, generally you should do some regulation to balance out the market changes you've created. Similarly, if you add a regulation, you may have to add a mandate to balance out the market. An example could be something like buying insurance. It's desirable to mandate people purchase insurance. Once the mandate is in place, the prices skyrocket without a regulation to keep prices in check.
The same is true for the DMCA, and copyright regulations. If you prevent people from bypassing technical limitations which protect copyright, you should have a corresponding mandate preventing copyright holders from using the technical limitation to claim other rights that they wouldn't normally have. In other words, people who implement DRM should be mandated to guarantee the public's rights just as it uses the technology to enforce theirs. It isn't enough to simply allow cracking in those cases. They should be forced to do things like have the protections expire when the copyright expires, and provide clear, documented methods for fair-use.
iSuppli is actually generally pretty bad at figuring out what the pieces cost too if any of the parts are even the least bit exotic. It also doesn't include packaging costs (We're probably talking whole percentage points in the costs for packaging), and assembly, which isn't trivially cheap on tiny devices as it may be for larger electronics. Their numbers are even less relevant than you'd think.
I think we have largely the same definition. What you're saying is that NUMA is the opposite of SMP. I think that is a perfectly good definition.
I was being a little more specific though, probably to a fault. To me, SMP implies that you can schedule workloads on the CPUs as equals. If you have two shared-cache multi-core packages in one system, however, the system has some NUMA-like scheduling behaviors.
Or sometimes, two cores, two L1 caches, two L2 caches, one L3 cache.... Either way, the only thing symmetrical about them are the execution units, and not the whole processor.
On Comcast it's easy to tell analog from digital feeds: go to any channel playing a dark/low-contrast scene, or something with lots of fog/rain/grass...
Then look for the compression artifacts. If you see big square blocks, you're on a digital channel.
Find a policy that doesn't pay out on personal injury if you aren't wearing a helmet, and quit bitching about other people's behavior that has no effect on you whatsoever.
Freedom means being free to be a complete idiot, as long as it doesn't impede somebody else's freedom while you're doing it.
You're assuming that Apple did this specifically to lock out linux applications. Remember, the summary says that, not Apple. Perhaps locking out these apps is a side effect, and not the intent.
It's just a hash. A hash of well known data. They can't be foolish enough to believe nobody is going to replicate that.
My guess? They want to guarantee that the database is well formed to prevent attempts at buffer overflow exploits being used to bypass the firmware restrictions. The encryption is probably intended to prevent other music vendors from using their software to "patch" the iPod to play DRMd music from their own sites.
Try to consider what they have to gain from making these changes. There's nothing to gain from the goal of blocking out linux users. Thus their intention is probably something else. That is even more likely when you consider that there are other plausible explanations.
Given that, why would they pull the DMCA out to stop something they don't care about?
First off, you only have one block in flight, because you don't erase the old block off the original location until it's successfully written to the new location. It doesn't have to be cached anywhere during this process for integrity purposes.
Second of all, it improves duty cycle because you are moving static data to a more worn area in order to bring a less used block into service. Data that lives on a block with a low write count (relative to the other cells on the device) is unlikely to be written frequently (history shows it hasn't been). Since there is a low expectation that data will be written, you can move it with a reasonable expectation that while it increases wear very slightly, in the long term it will balance out the wear of the cells. It's called "load leveling" because it distributes the wear, not because it reduces the wear. The idea is that you want all the cells to wear out at about the same time, rather than burning through a few very quickly.
So that block needs to be copied to one of the original choice of 5 places. Unless I choose to keep the dirty data in memory, and hope that I don't run out of storage / lose the power then I can indeed level over all 10 blocks in the disk. But is it reasonable to assume that I can cache the dirty values this way to level over the whole disk rather than just the free space?
When you move a block, you don't have to "cache" the data. You wouldn't erase the data from the original location until it was successfully written to the new location. You also wouldn't report the incoming block as successfully written until the entire process had been completed, thus the only thing you could potentially lose in the case of a power loss would be the in-flight operation.... Which you should have already considered potentially vulnerable to power loss anyway.
The short answer is "yes". You can reasonably assume that you can level over the entire pool of blocks in this fashion while maintaining the integrity of the previously committed data. Existing load leveling algorithms already do this.
Intel's a great example, considering they just re-priced their Xeon line so that the quad-core chips cost what the dual core chips of the same clock speed had cost the day before. How many end users that purchased quad core processors the day before do you think saw a refund of any of the several hundred dollar difference? What about the people who bought the dual core chips the day before? Is intel going to send them a free core?
If a product is worth the price to you when you pay for it, then you should be comfortable with price changes after you made the purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
The PSOne didn't actually come out until months after the PS2 came out, so PlayStation sales were pretty flat for a while, but they pulled even for a good long while, and stayed fairly strong for over a year after the PS2 came out. The PS2 didn't gain week-to-week ground until FFX came out. Supporting the previous generation strongly isn't new to the PS2 for Sony though. There was an additional hardware rev, new accessories, and continued new releases on the PS1 for a long time, years, after the PS2 came out.
As for Sony and the PS3 financially, expect Sony to be turning a profit on the hardware by Q408, even with price cuts. Microsoft should be turning a profit already on the 360, and I suspect they would have been if not for the hardware issues and warranty extension.
Whether you have to bend your thumb down to get to where the lower control is has to do with the width of the controller, where you grip the controller, and how far apart your elbows are when you hold the controller.
If you're bending your thumbs to reach the analog stick, you're holding the controller wrong, plain and simple.
I really honestly don't give a shit why they didn't put the D-pad there in the first place. The original Playstation controller from pre-DualShock was a total piece of crap. Using their rationale for the design of that particular product to justify the movement of the controls today is just plain broken, and a stupid rhetorical argument anyway.
But my favorite part of first-person shooters are the parts where you fight your way back through areas you were already in to extend the playtime. I especially appreciate it when they strip you of all your weapons first.
BTW, Doom 3 is my favorite game ever.
Madden.
;-)
And somebody pass him the funnel.
5. Don't listen to this guy. Leave the D-Pad right where it is. It's 1000x better that way. If you're going to move them, put them in the same place on both sides of the controller. If you're going to move them up, you'll have to make the controller wider, otherwise your thumbs won't be properly aligned with the analog sticks.
Also: Somebody get this guy a copy of super-rub-a-dub, or something so he can realize that the problems he's having with the tilt are because of the game developers, not the controller....
The PS2 isn't really extreme. It's basically always been common industry practice for successful previous generation machines to remain in the market during, and in some cases beyond, the next generation. A successful console's lifespan is about the same length as two console generations. Only the failures are off the shelves the day the next generation is released. Financially, the original XBox was a failure for Microsoft, thus you can't buy them anymore while you can still buy PS2s. Whether or not the 360 will have a longer lifespan than the XBox has mostly to do with whether Microsoft can get manufactuing costs way down over time, and whether or not they make the (stupid) decision to pull the 360 off the shelves for fear of it cutting into their next generation sales.
Anyway, just look back to the NES, Genesis, SNES, Atari 2600/7800, PlayStation/PSOne, any of the Gameboy iterations, and now with the PS2. You'll see that the successful machines have life, including *new* system sales, far longer than the generation they were released into. I would even go so far as to say life into the next generation is the single definition of whether a system was successful or not.
First of all, it should be possible to make it almost as easy for you to issue a takedown, while still preventing much of the fraud. For example, only allowing the takedowns for registered copyrighted material. Then you could do exactly what you do, include a copy of your registration certificate, and be perfectly happy. While at the same time people who are abusing the system will have a much higher barrier to entry.
Unfortunately, big media holdings companies (read: not you) oppose copyright registration and registration renewal because it prevents them from claiming rights over things that have already been created but which they didn't see value in at the time. But isn't the purpose of copyright supposed to be the encouragement of creation? Copyrights should be registered within 3 months of publication for a fee of about $10, and the registration should have to be renewed about every seven years. For each registration, the fee should increase exponentially. There wouldn't have to be limits on the number of times the registration could be renewed.
Second, you are defending just one part of a very bad law. The other parts are as bad or worse in terms of either abuse, or in granting copyright holders the ability to deny the public domain what it is legally entitled to, and to prevent societal progress. The reverse engineering clauses are just plain wrong. They deny people the basic human right to learn from the world around them. The criminalization of circumvention is wrong as long as copyright holders are allowed to prevent legal activities with their DRM along with copyright protection.
Your little tirade in your first paragraph is a significant exaggeration, as many of the people who earn a living with the internet, and many of the people who read this site and enjoy the GPL all rely on, and support copyright to some extent. People would be much less upset by the DMCA if it didn't make it difficult to do many of the legal and should-be-legal things that they want to do, like media shifting, streaming, and accessing out-of-print works. Additionally, the single aspect of the DMCA that you are advocating is also not the entire story.
If only business actually worked that way...
Since there's no accountability in this type of analysis, these guys sell their numbers based on marketing, and old fashioned salesmanship. That, and they probably get the obvious stuff pretty well.
For cutting edge stuff though, they generally overestimate by a lot. And that can get their customers into a lot of trouble. It probably does.
You're sort-of right.
There is a clear admission here that DRM is allowing copyright holders to "protect" themselves from things they should not be allowed to claim as rights in the first place. Thus the exceptions in the anti-circumvention clauses. But aren't the exceptions themselves proof that something is broken? Should we have to "crack" a technological security measure to do something that the government has admitted we have the right to do?
This is a paradox that presents it self frequently with government regulations and mandates. It is often desirable for one reason or another (note: I said desirable, not "right", or even "a good idea"). Unfortunately if you mandate something, generally you should do some regulation to balance out the market changes you've created. Similarly, if you add a regulation, you may have to add a mandate to balance out the market. An example could be something like buying insurance. It's desirable to mandate people purchase insurance. Once the mandate is in place, the prices skyrocket without a regulation to keep prices in check.
The same is true for the DMCA, and copyright regulations. If you prevent people from bypassing technical limitations which protect copyright, you should have a corresponding mandate preventing copyright holders from using the technical limitation to claim other rights that they wouldn't normally have. In other words, people who implement DRM should be mandated to guarantee the public's rights just as it uses the technology to enforce theirs. It isn't enough to simply allow cracking in those cases. They should be forced to do things like have the protections expire when the copyright expires, and provide clear, documented methods for fair-use.
iSuppli is actually generally pretty bad at figuring out what the pieces cost too if any of the parts are even the least bit exotic. It also doesn't include packaging costs (We're probably talking whole percentage points in the costs for packaging), and assembly, which isn't trivially cheap on tiny devices as it may be for larger electronics. Their numbers are even less relevant than you'd think.
What amazes me is that it's about the same number of people as attend Burning Man, but Burning Man gets about 1,000,000x more press.
Even if you get 50,000 geeks together for a party, it still isn't as "popular" as nudity.
I think we have largely the same definition. What you're saying is that NUMA is the opposite of SMP. I think that is a perfectly good definition.
I was being a little more specific though, probably to a fault. To me, SMP implies that you can schedule workloads on the CPUs as equals. If you have two shared-cache multi-core packages in one system, however, the system has some NUMA-like scheduling behaviors.
"Almost" SMP.
Two cores, one cache.
Or sometimes, two cores, two L1 caches, two L2 caches, one L3 cache.... Either way, the only thing symmetrical about them are the execution units, and not the whole processor.
Makes you wonder about the other 9....
On Comcast it's easy to tell analog from digital feeds: go to any channel playing a dark/low-contrast scene, or something with lots of fog/rain/grass...
Then look for the compression artifacts. If you see big square blocks, you're on a digital channel.
Really, I'm sure that this was added simply as a means of legal recourse against other companies that try to patch their DRM into the iPod.
Find a policy that doesn't pay out on personal injury if you aren't wearing a helmet, and quit bitching about other people's behavior that has no effect on you whatsoever.
Freedom means being free to be a complete idiot, as long as it doesn't impede somebody else's freedom while you're doing it.
You're assuming that Apple did this specifically to lock out linux applications. Remember, the summary says that, not Apple. Perhaps locking out these apps is a side effect, and not the intent.
It's just a hash. A hash of well known data. They can't be foolish enough to believe nobody is going to replicate that.
My guess? They want to guarantee that the database is well formed to prevent attempts at buffer overflow exploits being used to bypass the firmware restrictions. The encryption is probably intended to prevent other music vendors from using their software to "patch" the iPod to play DRMd music from their own sites.
Try to consider what they have to gain from making these changes. There's nothing to gain from the goal of blocking out linux users. Thus their intention is probably something else. That is even more likely when you consider that there are other plausible explanations.
Given that, why would they pull the DMCA out to stop something they don't care about?
How many times have you had your hair and flesh lit on fire, approximately?
No, it doesn't. It costs the same as the dual-core Xeon used to cost the day before the price cut.
First off, you only have one block in flight, because you don't erase the old block off the original location until it's successfully written to the new location. It doesn't have to be cached anywhere during this process for integrity purposes.
Second of all, it improves duty cycle because you are moving static data to a more worn area in order to bring a less used block into service. Data that lives on a block with a low write count (relative to the other cells on the device) is unlikely to be written frequently (history shows it hasn't been). Since there is a low expectation that data will be written, you can move it with a reasonable expectation that while it increases wear very slightly, in the long term it will balance out the wear of the cells. It's called "load leveling" because it distributes the wear, not because it reduces the wear. The idea is that you want all the cells to wear out at about the same time, rather than burning through a few very quickly.
When you move a block, you don't have to "cache" the data. You wouldn't erase the data from the original location until it was successfully written to the new location. You also wouldn't report the incoming block as successfully written until the entire process had been completed, thus the only thing you could potentially lose in the case of a power loss would be the in-flight operation.... Which you should have already considered potentially vulnerable to power loss anyway.
The short answer is "yes". You can reasonably assume that you can level over the entire pool of blocks in this fashion while maintaining the integrity of the previously committed data. Existing load leveling algorithms already do this.
Intel's a great example, considering they just re-priced their Xeon line so that the quad-core chips cost what the dual core chips of the same clock speed had cost the day before. How many end users that purchased quad core processors the day before do you think saw a refund of any of the several hundred dollar difference? What about the people who bought the dual core chips the day before? Is intel going to send them a free core?
If a product is worth the price to you when you pay for it, then you should be comfortable with price changes after you made the purchase.
Really, I can understand being upset, but anybody who thinks/says that has the wrong person in mind when they're thinking of who sucks.
You're assuming that the entire capacity of the chip would be exposed to the end user, and none would be reserved for dynamic load leveling.
You're also assuming that unchanged data would never be moved by the load leveling algorithm.
I don't think either are valid assumptions, and you're just plain wrong.