Anytime you're breaking into a new market, especially one that has as many lock-in features as the video game market, you're going to lose money.
You're completely right, and as such this would be a complete non-story except that this has been going on for six years. At what point does it stop being short-sighted to question repeated 9+ figure (before the decimal) quarterly losses on a product? Could any company other than Microsoft have afforded to maintain "loss leader" status for so long? Could any company have avoided a lawsuit by their competitors over it for this long? The story goes out of the way to make it look like it's the warranty thing that is pushing them into the red, but last I checked $1.1 billion was $700 million dollars less than $1.8 billion... So they would have been eating a $700 million dollar loss even without the warranty thing. That's still a $350 loss per console even after accounting for the "profit" on the high attach rate.
There is exactly one difference. The latter doesn't allow the parent to be in denial about the fact that they're raising a disrespectful little shit instead of a well behaved individual. The sentiment being expressed by the child is exactly the same whether they know which words sound the nastiest or not.
A bank manager can report an outstanding debt to the bank to any of the big three credit agencies which will cause all major financial institutions to freeze access to your accounts until the debt is paid. I have had this happen to me when trying to get a bank manager to admit error after processing the same $30,000 transfer from my account (which only had $35,000 in it) twice. It resulted in a huge fee, and then a $25 fee for all subsequent transactions that day (dozens of transactions, over $1000 in fees for their problem). A call from my lawyer did, in fact, get them to back down, but it was several days before I had access to all of my accounts again. Needless to say, I am no longer a customer of that bank, but it was hardly a "black eye" for them. The manager essentially screwed me to cover for her mistake, and got away with it.
The order gives the Secretary of the Treasury the right to immediately and without notice freeze all assets of anyone suspected of either directly or indirectly attempting to undermine the Iraqi government as well as anyone who has financial dealings, directly or indirectly, with such people.
The manager of your bank has that ability too, and he/she can use it just because you pissed them off.
Either way, this sounds like the same thing we've been doing for years. The president just re-used some decades old executive order but s/(Cuba|PLO|Lybia)/Iraq/g;
2-way cablecards... so I can still access on-demand content from Comcast
It's unbelievable how successful the cable companies were at brainwashing people into believing that 2-way cable cards are required for on-demand content.
Cable cards are supposed to decrypt media streams if you've paid for them. They only need to be one-way to do that, whether you've requested the content dynamically or not. Putting the request functionality into the cable card instead of allowing the cable card compliant device to make the request only serves to allow the company providing you the cable card to restrict how, when, and what you do with on demand content. You don't even need two-way cards for Switched Digital Video if you implement it correctly.
Think of a two-way cable card as a really tiny set top box. It's exactly everything that people who want open access to the content they've payed for should oppose. We should have open standards and specifications for the services which allow the request of online content. The cable card should decrypt incoming content. Period.
The only descriptions of the resolution of this device on their website are "High Quality" and "DVD Quality". This thing almost certainly only outputs 480p video over the network. Better than slingbox, but equally as useless for HD-DVR usage.
You can still pay to have your lifetime service transferred to your new Tivo. All it takes is a little googling for the phone number. You can't buy new lifetime subscriptions, but you can still pay a few hundred dollars and have your lifetime service moved to a different Tivo.
For new subscribers, they only need be competitive with what cable companies charge, and the monthly fee for Tivo is $2-3 less per month than what most cable companies charge for DVR service.
I've seen at least one of the movies on that list which wasn't re-rated in an actual mainstream theatre....
However, I've seen many of those movies released on DVD as "unrated" (really the original cut that got an NC-17 before editing) available for sale in stores like Target, or BestBuy, and they are playable in my DVD player (as are many more explicit titles). Unlike AO video games, NC-17 movies are available to purchase and play, whereas AO video games are essentially banned.
Heh. I should get around to actually playing FFXII.
FFX was good. You're probably right that it wasn't good enough to justify the purchase of a PS2, but I'm not sure that any single game is before the price of the system has dropped to less than half of the initial price. Luckily, by the time FFX came out there were plenty of other good games that together more than justified the cost of the PS2. Perhaps by the end of 2008 when FFXIII comes out the same will be true for the PS3.
FF12 practically just came out. There's always about one and a half to two years between them. I don't know where Zonk got 2009 from (clearly not from the story), but March 2008 seems more likely given the numbers and what's happened in the past. Then probably November '08 for the US and EU.
I was about to reply to this story saying something like:
"They're a big old-media company. There's probably tons of bureaucracy involved in getting anything changed, and they probably don't even realize it's a problem."...but now that you've confirmed my suspicions I guess it would be redundant though.
The story was certainly worded in such a way that they wanted us to think something nefarious was going on, but idiocy is much more likely in these situations.
Ideally, you could put something into the ID3 for a song, or into the playlist to tell the player whether crossfading is acceptable between particular songs... For me though, it's easier to just turn it off than to code that up and then edit all my playlists.
It's the first thing I turn off in all of those players.
I'm not so impatient that I can't cope with the gap between songs, but I hate - hate - when an album who's songs were meant to flow from one to the next is ruined by stupid cross fading. I suppose it wouldn't be a problem for people who like to listen to the "string of singles" types of playlists, but if you like to listen to whole albums, cross fading is evil.
I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but wouldn't there be another, equally valid conclusion from that quote? That quote says that eating HFCS instead of sugar correlates with either increased appetite the next day, or with decreased appetite suppression.
Most people shouldn't have to consciously stop themselves from eating more. The average human body does a pretty good job knowing when it's time to stop. It's only when processed foods interfere with those signals that we have to pay as much attention to how much we eat.
Regardless of all that though, HFCS tastes terrible compared to cane sugar.
Our executive branch can sign all the treaties they'd like, but they aren't the law of the land until Congress ratifies them, or passes equivalent legislation.
When this whole mess started and they presented us with two formats, one being signifgantly cheaper to manufacture than the other, why EVERYONE didn't immediatly back the cheaper one I do not understand.
They cost exactly the same amount to manufacture. The manufacturing savings went out the window the moment HD-DVD adopted the blue laser. BluRay disks are slightly more expensive to manufactuer, and that's it.
There are differences is licensing costs though.
The consumer has zero say in who wins the format war. None. The media distributors are a cartel, and they'll pick the winner. BluRay is winning because more studios are releasing for it, which is probably due to the stronger DRM. Consumers are an afterthought, especially since 80% of everybody will buy the winner regardless of which one it is.
Except that rendering detailed scenes at 1080 lines of resolution (higher even) is something that the predecessors to the GPUs in this generation of consoles has been doing, and doing well, on PCs for almost 10 years. Both the 360 and the PS3 have the power to do both "high" (I don't consider 1080p to be "high resolution"... Look at some of the DualLink monitors out there!) resolution, and "good looking". Plus, as long as you don't make the additional visual complexity a necessity to complete the game, you can render it at full resolution, and the user's display will remove extra detail for you for free. So the concept really isn't a joke at all.
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Call me when they make "Einhander 2".
And to think the summary got me all excited.
You're completely right, and as such this would be a complete non-story except that this has been going on for six years. At what point does it stop being short-sighted to question repeated 9+ figure (before the decimal) quarterly losses on a product? Could any company other than Microsoft have afforded to maintain "loss leader" status for so long? Could any company have avoided a lawsuit by their competitors over it for this long? The story goes out of the way to make it look like it's the warranty thing that is pushing them into the red, but last I checked $1.1 billion was $700 million dollars less than $1.8 billion... So they would have been eating a $700 million dollar loss even without the warranty thing. That's still a $350 loss per console even after accounting for the "profit" on the high attach rate.
There is exactly one difference. The latter doesn't allow the parent to be in denial about the fact that they're raising a disrespectful little shit instead of a well behaved individual. The sentiment being expressed by the child is exactly the same whether they know which words sound the nastiest or not.
A bank manager can report an outstanding debt to the bank to any of the big three credit agencies which will cause all major financial institutions to freeze access to your accounts until the debt is paid. I have had this happen to me when trying to get a bank manager to admit error after processing the same $30,000 transfer from my account (which only had $35,000 in it) twice. It resulted in a huge fee, and then a $25 fee for all subsequent transactions that day (dozens of transactions, over $1000 in fees for their problem). A call from my lawyer did, in fact, get them to back down, but it was several days before I had access to all of my accounts again. Needless to say, I am no longer a customer of that bank, but it was hardly a "black eye" for them. The manager essentially screwed me to cover for her mistake, and got away with it.
You better put on your asbestos clothing, 'cause that "No competition" comment is about to get you roasted by all the Dreamcast fanboys out there.
Anyway, I think the two biggest problems really are #1 the lack of HDTVs, and #2 the lack of franchise titles.
The manager of your bank has that ability too, and he/she can use it just because you pissed them off.
Either way, this sounds like the same thing we've been doing for years. The president just re-used some decades old executive order but s/(Cuba|PLO|Lybia)/Iraq/g;
It's more likely the guy is a troll and you took the bait.
It's unbelievable how successful the cable companies were at brainwashing people into believing that 2-way cable cards are required for on-demand content.
Cable cards are supposed to decrypt media streams if you've paid for them. They only need to be one-way to do that, whether you've requested the content dynamically or not. Putting the request functionality into the cable card instead of allowing the cable card compliant device to make the request only serves to allow the company providing you the cable card to restrict how, when, and what you do with on demand content. You don't even need two-way cards for Switched Digital Video if you implement it correctly.
Think of a two-way cable card as a really tiny set top box. It's exactly everything that people who want open access to the content they've payed for should oppose. We should have open standards and specifications for the services which allow the request of online content. The cable card should decrypt incoming content. Period.
The only descriptions of the resolution of this device on their website are "High Quality" and "DVD Quality". This thing almost certainly only outputs 480p video over the network. Better than slingbox, but equally as useless for HD-DVR usage.
You can still pay to have your lifetime service transferred to your new Tivo. All it takes is a little googling for the phone number. You can't buy new lifetime subscriptions, but you can still pay a few hundred dollars and have your lifetime service moved to a different Tivo.
For new subscribers, they only need be competitive with what cable companies charge, and the monthly fee for Tivo is $2-3 less per month than what most cable companies charge for DVR service.
I've seen at least one of the movies on that list which wasn't re-rated in an actual mainstream theatre....
However, I've seen many of those movies released on DVD as "unrated" (really the original cut that got an NC-17 before editing) available for sale in stores like Target, or BestBuy, and they are playable in my DVD player (as are many more explicit titles). Unlike AO video games, NC-17 movies are available to purchase and play, whereas AO video games are essentially banned.
Heh. I should get around to actually playing FFXII.
FFX was good. You're probably right that it wasn't good enough to justify the purchase of a PS2, but I'm not sure that any single game is before the price of the system has dropped to less than half of the initial price. Luckily, by the time FFX came out there were plenty of other good games that together more than justified the cost of the PS2. Perhaps by the end of 2008 when FFXIII comes out the same will be true for the PS3.
FFXII was the second single-player Final Fantasy game for the PS2. Wouldn't you have to wait for FFIV if you were going to continue your pattern?
FF12 practically just came out. There's always about one and a half to two years between them. I don't know where Zonk got 2009 from (clearly not from the story), but March 2008 seems more likely given the numbers and what's happened in the past. Then probably November '08 for the US and EU.
I was about to reply to this story saying something like:
...but now that you've confirmed my suspicions I guess it would be redundant though.
"They're a big old-media company. There's probably tons of bureaucracy involved in getting anything changed, and they probably don't even realize it's a problem."
The story was certainly worded in such a way that they wanted us to think something nefarious was going on, but idiocy is much more likely in these situations.
The discoverers got an article written about their paper, and it was linked to by Slashdot.
(Was that too subtle? I half expect "Offtopic" and "Troll" mods instead of the "Funny" I was going for.)
Ideally, you could put something into the ID3 for a song, or into the playlist to tell the player whether crossfading is acceptable between particular songs... For me though, it's easier to just turn it off than to code that up and then edit all my playlists.
It's the first thing I turn off in all of those players.
I'm not so impatient that I can't cope with the gap between songs, but I hate - hate - when an album who's songs were meant to flow from one to the next is ruined by stupid cross fading. I suppose it wouldn't be a problem for people who like to listen to the "string of singles" types of playlists, but if you like to listen to whole albums, cross fading is evil.
They're building it across the street from him?
And he used to have an ocean view?
And he owns an energy company who lost a competing bid for the permit?
I'm not saying that the conclusion is wrong, but wouldn't there be another, equally valid conclusion from that quote? That quote says that eating HFCS instead of sugar correlates with either increased appetite the next day, or with decreased appetite suppression.
Most people shouldn't have to consciously stop themselves from eating more. The average human body does a pretty good job knowing when it's time to stop. It's only when processed foods interfere with those signals that we have to pay as much attention to how much we eat.
Regardless of all that though, HFCS tastes terrible compared to cane sugar.
Our executive branch can sign all the treaties they'd like, but they aren't the law of the land until Congress ratifies them, or passes equivalent legislation.
They cost exactly the same amount to manufacture. The manufacturing savings went out the window the moment HD-DVD adopted the blue laser. BluRay disks are slightly more expensive to manufactuer, and that's it.
There are differences is licensing costs though.
The consumer has zero say in who wins the format war. None. The media distributors are a cartel, and they'll pick the winner. BluRay is winning because more studios are releasing for it, which is probably due to the stronger DRM. Consumers are an afterthought, especially since 80% of everybody will buy the winner regardless of which one it is.
Double?
LCDs are "progressive scan" (they don't scan at all).
But they don't cost twice as much as plasma, they cost the same... So where do you get "double" from?
I was basing my size estimates on two things. The band (which I assume is average sized), and the bluetooth headset next to it.
Except that rendering detailed scenes at 1080 lines of resolution (higher even) is something that the predecessors to the GPUs in this generation of consoles has been doing, and doing well, on PCs for almost 10 years. Both the 360 and the PS3 have the power to do both "high" (I don't consider 1080p to be "high resolution"... Look at some of the DualLink monitors out there!) resolution, and "good looking". Plus, as long as you don't make the additional visual complexity a necessity to complete the game, you can render it at full resolution, and the user's display will remove extra detail for you for free. So the concept really isn't a joke at all.