people who are driving (you can do it from 16, right?)
Varies from state to state. In New Jersey, which has some of the most densely-trafficked roads and most agressive motorists in the country, I believe that at age 17 one can apply for a limited permit, which allows one to operate a vehicle when accompanied by an experienced driver, and at age 18 apply for a permit which allows unaccompanied driving.
oh! And PC games can be patched. Console games being patched is a relatively recent thing.
Until relatively recently, console games didn't NEED patches. When was the last time you heard of an NES or Genesis game with a critical error that made it unplayable?
That's essentially what Microsoft's strategy was for the original Xbox. I would have to assume from their decision to switch to a non-x86-based platform for the 360 that it didn't work quite as well as they had hoped.
If I buy a console game, I have a one in four shot of it playing on a popular console.
One in FOUR? The console market has never supported more than three viable consoles at a time, whether it was Atari/Intellivision/ColecoVision or SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx or Gamecube/Xbox/PS2. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Also, ONE in four? It's not all that common these days for a game to be exclusive to one console. There are quite a few high-profile exceptions, but for a broad-interest property like Football Game or Driving Simulator, chances are that it will be available for at least two and potentially all contemporary consoles.
It was the highest grossing movie this weekend, right? First place? What were they hoping for? Zeroth place?
Maybe they were hoping for Negative First Place, which is actually what they got: they came in in first place, and for some reason they consider this to be a negative.
He did what he was told, and what he was told was authorized by his bosses and the appropriate people.
I recall similar defenses were raised at Nuremberg, and didn't go over very well.
Blaming the mailclerk for the mail isn't good policy.
Maybe not, but I guarantee you that every day there are dozens of mailclerks, helpdesk technicians, and professionals of all stripes who are fired for things for which they do not actually deserve any of the blame.
What do you want on your CV
* Sacked for gross incompetence
* Left after being used as a scapegoat
They're both equally effective at preventing you from getting hired anywhere else. The new HR director isn't going to give a sympathetic ear to your tale of scapegoatism, he or she is probably going to assume that you actually deserved the blame you got, and your story is nothing more than a save-face gesture.
seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.
Terrible idea. Automatic feedback would not give any indication of the timeliness or friendliness of a party to a transaction. If I, as a buyer, do not submit payment for a won auction until three days after closing, and after pestering the seller to give me free shipping, I do not deserve the same positive rating as a buyer who submits payment one hour after the auction close and does not hassle the seller.
Nintendo seems to have the attitude that they know how to make games and consoles without any real input from the consumer...
Are Sony and Microsoft any better at getting "input from the consumer"? I don't think Joe Playstation who plays mostly GTA and Madden was clamoring for a Blu-Ray drive.
Guess what happens when you base your strategy on what the consumer thinks he wants. You get an Atari Lynx that's so large that it barely fits the definition of "portable"--because some dumbass focus group indicated that they felt a bigger case meant a better value.
Also, I find it hilarious that everyone conveniently forgets that there's a $500 PS3 that will be perfectly fine for 95% of people who want one.
I find it hilarious that the "budget" PS3 model is still at LEAST twice as expensive as Nintendo's next console is expected to be. That's still not cheap, guys. It's still not, for many people, "affordable".
Toyota might not be a great example of the success of JIT production, seeing as how the demand for their Prius hybrids has far outstripped their ability to supply (in some parts of the United States at least), resulting in wait lists of a year or longer, and selling prices far above MSRP.
The XBox360 is being sold for much less money than it costs to make it so I don't see how you can complain about the price.
You don't? Like this: "Three to four hundred dollars is more than I'm willing to pay for a videogame console, regardless of how much it cost them to manufacture it."
Sure, CRT's are cheap and great, but have you ever tried to move a large CRT? You need a crane! or 4 beefy guys from the gym.
I don't find this argument very persuasive. How often does a large CRT need to be moved? Once, when it's brought home, and then move it flush after the backend connections have all been hooked up. The hourly rates for getting 4 beefy guys to come to your home are not that expensive! Er, so I have heard.
CRT sets are deeper than comparably-sized LCD or plasma sets, that is true also. But my feeling is, if you have a room that is large enough to accomodate a 60" diagonal screen, you should have the room to accomodate three feet of cabinet depth to go along with it. If you don't, you should be buying a smaller screen.
you just make a car that completely collapses on any impact as a safety feature.
That's not a "planned obsolescence" device, it's a legitimate safety feature.
When your car is involved in a collision, it's going to be subjected to a large amount of kinetic energy. Would you rather that the energy be absorbed by the frame of the car -- resulting in crumpling and irreparable body damage -- or would you rather that the frame transfers that energy on to the passengers, resulting in a more serious kind of irreparable body damage?
Yes, car manufacturers know that people who survive car accidents are more likely to make another car purchase than those who don't. But that's not greed, it's common sense. Rule number zero of business: don't kill your customers*.
I wouldn't be surprised if such pranks did happen, but remember that the end of the 16-bit era was about ten years ago now. Neither company is as proud now as they were then: Nintendo has gone from the undisputed champion of the console market to a distant also-ran, and Sega has gone from the close second to falling out of the hardware market entirely.
Today both Sega and Nintendo are making a lot of money off of Sega-published titles running on Nintendo-produced hardware. Bad blood gets washed under the bridge rather easily when a tidal wave of cash is involved.
Since the firms would be initially shelling out their own money on the projects without a guarantee of reimbursement, you had better believe they would be busting their asses to make sure the products did what they needed to do quickly and efficiently.
I'm no MBA, but I'm pretty sure that firms don't like to invest billions of dollars into projects for which they might end up not getting paid at all.
Under your system, I think you'd find that all the private firms with a lick of sense would pass on the opportunity to compete for the project, and the one single company that does give it a go will do a halfassed job of it because they're guaranteed the money no matter what. In other words, it's a lot like our current government contracting system.
The first mouse I ever used was sold by Microsoft, bundled together with Micrsoft Paintbrush for DOS. It attached to a proprietary ISA bus card, so as to leave the serial port free for a 2400 baud modem. Drawing in 4-color CGA glory seemed like the coolest thing to me at the time.
They were early to market in that instance. In the case of the Zune, they are not.
If that's the case in ten years, I expect Apple to STILL have the market sewn up.
Today, one can buy a COBY brand progressive-scan DVD player at the drug store for thirty bucks, yet people are still eager and willing to go to a real electronics store and spend a couple hundred for a player that has a familiar brand name on it (and most likely much better quality as well).
Branding and name recognition still count for a lot. I think there's a greater risk of Apple losing the "ipod" term to trademark dilution then there is to the MP3 player market being dominated by nameless cheapo shitboxes.
If larger disc capacities are needed 5 years from now, then console manufacturers can plan to build the technology into the consoles that they will release 5 years from now. I'm not willing to pay now for technology that won't be needed until 2011, and it'll be 1/4 of the price by then anyway.
Like many people you aren't considering the fact that the life span for a console is almost 10 years.
Rubbish. The life span for a console is only until a better console is released.
Do you really think everyone will still be buying DVD's in 7 years?
Yes. Without hesitation, yes.
The lifespan of the VHS tape was from the late 1970's to the late 1990's. That's twenty years. Compact discs? Over twenty-five years old now, and still king of the mountain.
The DVD market is only 7 or 8 years old right now. It's still got at least a dozen years of life left in it before something revolutionarily better comes along that compels us to buy everything all over again.
1. Airplane cabins are full of pressurized and highly filtered air. It's (comparatively) safe to work with chlorine gas in a chemistry laboratory because you're working under a hood that takes the poison out of the atmosphere. The same general effect, though not as efficient, would take place inside an airplane cabin. And besides, there's oxygen masks handy.
2. Should every passenger on a plane fall dead of chlorine gas poisoning, it isn't going to "fall out of the sky". It will continue on its autopilot trajectory until it runs out of fuel. The plane that golfer Payne Stewart died on, for example, continued flying for four hours after the passengers were incapacitated. That's too much unpredictability, too much time for the National Guard to shoot the plane down in an unpopulated area.
Yes, and this "study" proposes that Sony will lose a large portion of its market lead (but not its entire lead) in this coming generation to... Microsoft's XBox 360.
And would screeners really see that on their scanners? I'd imagine that to the lazy eye, it would just be another object like any other inside a laptop.
Every time I've travelled by air in the past 4 years or so, the TSA screeners have not only sent carry-on (and checked) luggage through the X-ray machine, but also scanned every laptop computer and case with a wand, presumably of a type that detects chemical fingerprints of explosive materials. That vector of attack is already being protected against (though I couldn't say with any certainty how effectively).
Redirecting spending money from copyrighted content to independent artists releasing their work under the Creative Commons license is akin to becoming vegan/veggetarian: It requires willpower, it requires sometimes going for what is best when it's not what you want, and overall it's worth it. It's also doomed to failure in an instant gratification culture.
It also makes the assumption that creative works, like foods, are fungible; that any one is as good as any other. In neither case is this particularly true.
The entire purpose of Copyright, as it was initially envisioned, was to create a thriving public domain to benefit the people as a whole.
I see this repeated often in Slashdot YRO discussions, but have seen little primary or secondary source material affirming this interpretation of copyright envisioners' intent.
The purpose of copyright, intrinsically, is to confirm that creators have a special intellectual property right, that they have some form of possession over the creative works they make that others do not. If anything suggests that copyright was a method towards a thriving public domain, it is only the fact that under most versions of copyright law, those special rights eventually expire.
Remember -- without copyright, EVERYTHING would be in the public domain. Copyright must limit the public domain, not enhance it.
Slashdot Mirror
people who are driving (you can do it from 16, right?)
Varies from state to state. In New Jersey, which has some of the most densely-trafficked roads and most agressive motorists in the country, I believe that at age 17 one can apply for a limited permit, which allows one to operate a vehicle when accompanied by an experienced driver, and at age 18 apply for a permit which allows unaccompanied driving.
2^64+2^64 = 2^65
This equation is the key.
2^64 + 2^64 = 2^65
2^64 * 2^64 = 2^128
oh! And PC games can be patched. Console games being patched is a relatively recent thing.
Until relatively recently, console games didn't NEED patches. When was the last time
you heard of an NES or Genesis game with a critical error that made it unplayable?
why not just sell low-end PCs as consoles?
That's essentially what Microsoft's strategy was for the original Xbox. I would have to assume from their decision to switch to a non-x86-based platform for the 360 that it didn't work quite as well as they had hoped.
If I buy a console game, I have a one in four shot of it playing on a popular console.
One in FOUR? The console market has never supported more than three viable consoles at a time, whether it was Atari/Intellivision/ColecoVision or SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx or Gamecube/Xbox/PS2. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Also, ONE in four? It's not all that common these days for a game to be exclusive to one console. There are quite a few high-profile exceptions, but for a broad-interest property like Football Game or Driving Simulator, chances are that it will be available for at least two and potentially all contemporary consoles.
It was the highest grossing movie this weekend, right? First place? What were they hoping for? Zeroth place?
Maybe they were hoping for Negative First Place, which is actually what they got: they came in in first place, and for some reason they consider this to be a negative.
He did what he was told, and what he was told was authorized by his bosses and the appropriate people.
I recall similar defenses were raised at Nuremberg, and didn't go over very well.
Blaming the mailclerk for the mail isn't good policy.
Maybe not, but I guarantee you that every day there are dozens of mailclerks, helpdesk technicians, and professionals of all stripes who are fired for things for which they do not actually deserve any of the blame.
What do you want on your CV
* Sacked for gross incompetence
* Left after being used as a scapegoat
They're both equally effective at preventing you from getting hired anywhere else. The new HR director isn't going to give a sympathetic ear to your tale of scapegoatism, he or she is probably going to assume that you actually deserved the blame you got, and your story is nothing more than a save-face gesture.
seems in cases where the purchaser uses paypal to complete the transaction that ebay should automatically positive feedback/reputation points as they have successfully confirmed that the buyers has fulfilled their part of the transaction.
Terrible idea. Automatic feedback would not give any indication of the timeliness or friendliness of a party to a transaction. If I, as a buyer, do not submit payment for a won auction until three days after closing, and after pestering the seller to give me free shipping, I do not deserve the same positive rating as a buyer who submits payment one hour after the auction close and does not hassle the seller.
Nintendo seems to have the attitude that they know how to make games and consoles without any real input from the consumer...
Are Sony and Microsoft any better at getting "input from the consumer"? I don't think Joe Playstation who plays mostly GTA and Madden was clamoring for a Blu-Ray drive.
Guess what happens when you base your strategy on what the consumer thinks he wants. You get an Atari Lynx that's so large that it barely fits the definition of "portable"--because some dumbass focus group indicated that they felt a bigger case meant a better value.
Also, I find it hilarious that everyone conveniently forgets that there's a $500 PS3 that will be perfectly fine for 95% of people who want one.
I find it hilarious that the "budget" PS3 model is still at LEAST twice as expensive as Nintendo's next console is expected to be. That's still not cheap, guys. It's still not, for many people, "affordable".
Toyota might not be a great example of the success of JIT production, seeing as how the demand for their Prius hybrids has far outstripped their ability to supply (in some parts of the United States at least), resulting in wait lists of a year or longer, and selling prices far above MSRP.
The XBox360 is being sold for much less money than it costs to make it so I don't see how you can complain about the price.
You don't? Like this: "Three to four hundred dollars is more than I'm willing to pay for a videogame console, regardless of how much it cost them to manufacture it."
if I owned Sony i'd just scrap the whole project right now and begin working on PS4.
Hey, it worked so well when Atari scrapped the Panther project to focus on Jaguar, and when Sega abandoned 32X to focus on Saturn...
Sure, CRT's are cheap and great, but have you ever tried to move a large CRT? You need a crane! or 4 beefy guys from the gym.
I don't find this argument very persuasive. How often does a large CRT need to be moved? Once, when it's brought home, and then move it flush after the backend connections have all been hooked up. The hourly rates for getting 4 beefy guys to come to your home are not that expensive! Er, so I have heard.
CRT sets are deeper than comparably-sized LCD or plasma sets, that is true also. But my feeling is, if you have a room that is large enough to accomodate a 60" diagonal screen, you should have the room to accomodate three feet of cabinet depth to go along with it. If you don't, you should be buying a smaller screen.
you just make a car that completely collapses on any impact as a safety feature.
That's not a "planned obsolescence" device, it's a legitimate safety feature.
When your car is involved in a collision, it's going to be subjected to a large amount of kinetic energy. Would you rather that the energy be absorbed by the frame of the car -- resulting in crumpling and irreparable body damage -- or would you rather that the frame transfers that energy on to the passengers, resulting in a more serious kind of irreparable body damage?
Yes, car manufacturers know that people who survive car accidents are more likely to make another car purchase than those who don't. But that's not greed, it's common sense. Rule number zero of business: don't kill your customers*.
(* rule does not apply to tobacco companies)
I wouldn't be surprised if such pranks did happen, but remember that the end of the 16-bit era was about ten years ago now. Neither company is as proud now as they were then: Nintendo has gone from the undisputed champion of the console market to a distant also-ran, and Sega has gone from the close second to falling out of the hardware market entirely.
Today both Sega and Nintendo are making a lot of money off of Sega-published titles running on Nintendo-produced hardware. Bad blood gets washed under the bridge rather easily when a tidal wave of cash is involved.
Since the firms would be initially shelling out their own money on the projects without a guarantee of reimbursement, you had better believe they would be busting their asses to make sure the products did what they needed to do quickly and efficiently.
I'm no MBA, but I'm pretty sure that firms don't like to invest billions of dollars into projects for which they might end up not getting paid at all.
Under your system, I think you'd find that all the private firms with a lick of sense would pass on the opportunity to compete for the project, and the one single company that does give it a go will do a halfassed job of it because they're guaranteed the money no matter what. In other words, it's a lot like our current government contracting system.
they've done ok with mice
The first mouse I ever used was sold by Microsoft, bundled together with Micrsoft Paintbrush for DOS. It attached to a proprietary ISA bus card, so as to leave the serial port free for a 2400 baud modem. Drawing in 4-color CGA glory seemed like the coolest thing to me at the time.
They were early to market in that instance. In the case of the Zune, they are not.
If that's the case in ten years, I expect Apple to STILL have the market sewn up.
Today, one can buy a COBY brand progressive-scan DVD player at the drug store for thirty bucks, yet people are still eager and willing to go to a real electronics store and spend a couple hundred for a player that has a familiar brand name on it (and most likely much better quality as well).
Branding and name recognition still count for a lot. I think there's a greater risk of Apple losing the "ipod" term to trademark dilution then there is to the MP3 player market being dominated by nameless cheapo shitboxes.
what about 5 years from now.
If larger disc capacities are needed 5 years from now, then console manufacturers can plan to build the technology into the consoles that they will release 5 years from now. I'm not willing to pay now for technology that won't be needed until 2011, and it'll be 1/4 of the price by then anyway.
Like many people you aren't considering the fact that the life span for a console is almost 10 years.
Rubbish. The life span for a console is only until a better console is released.
Do you really think everyone will still be buying DVD's in 7 years?
Yes. Without hesitation, yes.
The lifespan of the VHS tape was from the late 1970's to the late 1990's. That's twenty years. Compact discs? Over twenty-five years old now, and still king of the mountain.
The DVD market is only 7 or 8 years old right now. It's still got at least a dozen years of life left in it before something revolutionarily better comes along that compels us to buy everything all over again.
A couple problems with that scenario:
1. Airplane cabins are full of pressurized and highly filtered air. It's (comparatively) safe to work with chlorine gas in a chemistry laboratory because you're working under a hood that takes the poison out of the atmosphere. The same general effect, though not as efficient, would take place inside an airplane cabin. And besides, there's oxygen masks handy.
2. Should every passenger on a plane fall dead of chlorine gas poisoning, it isn't going to "fall out of the sky". It will continue on its autopilot trajectory until it runs out of fuel. The plane that golfer Payne Stewart died on, for example, continued flying for four hours after the passengers were incapacitated. That's too much unpredictability, too much time for the National Guard to shoot the plane down in an unpopulated area.
wasn't the PS3 from Microsoft's compeditor?
Yes, and this "study" proposes that Sony will lose a large portion of its market lead (but not its entire lead) in this coming generation to... Microsoft's XBox 360.
Things that make you go hmmm.
And would screeners really see that on their scanners? I'd imagine that to the lazy eye, it would just be another object like any other inside a laptop.
Every time I've travelled by air in the past 4 years or so, the TSA screeners have not only sent carry-on (and checked) luggage through the X-ray machine, but also scanned every laptop computer and case with a wand, presumably of a type that detects chemical fingerprints of explosive materials. That vector of attack is already being protected against (though I couldn't say with any certainty how effectively).
Redirecting spending money from copyrighted content to independent artists releasing their work under the Creative Commons license is akin to becoming vegan/veggetarian: It requires willpower, it requires sometimes going for what is best when it's not what you want, and overall it's worth it. It's also doomed to failure in an instant gratification culture.
It also makes the assumption that creative works, like foods, are fungible; that any one is as good as any other. In neither case is this particularly true.
The entire purpose of Copyright, as it was initially envisioned, was to create a thriving public domain to benefit the people as a whole.
I see this repeated often in Slashdot YRO discussions, but have seen little primary or secondary source material affirming this interpretation of copyright envisioners' intent.
The purpose of copyright, intrinsically, is to confirm that creators have a special intellectual property right, that they have some form of possession over the creative works they make that others do not. If anything suggests that copyright was a method towards a thriving public domain, it is only the fact that under most versions of copyright law, those special rights eventually expire.
Remember -- without copyright, EVERYTHING would be in the public domain. Copyright must limit the public domain, not enhance it.