There are better ways than Microsoft Update, and I don't like or trust their garbage proprietary must-use-IE software.
All of these are half-web and half-desktop.
I still don't see it. 1) The blogging front end is a front end. Just like you can have a web front end to an application, that doesn't make it half-web, half-desktop. 2) Acrobat Reader, while it does have a browser plug-in to display the document also is not half-web. PDF documents are good at what they do, which is a platform independent layout engine. However, I don't really see how this qualifies as half-web unless you consider any downloadable file to be "half-web". I also find it usually better for Reader to spawn it's own window to display Acrobat content then to take up one my browser tabs. That way I don't add the extra browser overhead to the acrobat functionality. 3) Microsoft Update requires IE to force people to keep IE installed on their Windows machines. It's all about reinforcing the monopoly.
I think vertical integration is being confused with new applications. If google produces a desktop work processor that has an integrated upload connection to a google file sharing service, that's not a new half-web/half-desktop application. That's google integrating two separate services together. In fact it might be more than two separate services. What uploads the file content? Is there an ftp client embedded in there? A web browser for uploading to myspace? A BitTorrent client? What you have is a ton of seperate functions all bundled together with a slick interface.
Eventually it starts to look like an Open Source project without the re-useable components.
I'm sure we all know that we really want to play Quake inside a browser. No, the Desktop OS will never go away and browsers are not the best tool for every job, any more than screwdrivers have made hammers obsolete. I can't really say any use in a program that's half web based and half desktop based. Except perhaps to use a browser component to access web pages from within the application. Any other information can be handled by a proprietary networking app/server and you get orders of magnitude better performance.
To make a bad analogy it's like saying in the future everyone will drive a van because most furniture will fit in it. It's a waste of resources for those who don't need that extra storage space.
Sorry, you are correct, I misspoke. I didn't mean to write that the only growth sector was health care, I meant the write that economy was entirely stagnant without the healthcare sector. Or in other words, the net growth of the economy over the last 6 years is directly attributable to the health care sector.
Actually, way back when I was setting up a test bed for ISDN routers, I found 2 different routers with the same MAC Address. It really threw us for a loop until I figured out what the problem was.
The only way they get stability is if the economy is good and the citizens are relatively happy.
It's not and they aren't. Hence the reason for relaxing the prohibitions on martial law.
1) The U.S. economy has been lousy since Bush took over, the only growth sector over the last 6 years has been health care. And according to the Canadian economic forcasts, the health care sector may no longer be capable of keeping the rest of the U.S. economy afloat, we're expecting the a recession in the U.S. over the coming year. It's important to us, because when you guys do poorly, we have to find someone else to trade with.
2) The citizens are not relatively happy, in fact, it'd be more accurate to say the citizens are relatively unhappy, they just don't like the opposition much more than the current government. The election could have a huge impact on the States depending on what happens. But make no mistake support for the government is on a slow slide and there's little hope of reversing the trend without major policy changes.
But, as Microsoft has shown time and time again, Microsoft is capable of assimilating a successful business strategy and making their own version viable and profitable.
You lost all credibility with this one line. The Xbox line has never turned a profit, and the 360 is highly unlikely to make a profit this time around either. No other company could afford to lose the billions of dollars that Microsoft is losing on the Xbox.
It remains to be seen how much the price will drag down mainstream sales. I think Sony will come out with a smaller marketshare this time around, but I'm not Microsoft and Nintendo have what it takes to win out. In theory, the graphics will be noticeably worse on the Wii and 360 won't have the children's games. Each of the consoles in this generation has it's down sides, all that's left is to see which one wins in the marketplace.
This isn't just about Lik-Sang. It's about a long string of abuses that Sony has perpetrated. The great-grandparent poster suggested that I was being inconsistent for not boycotting Nintendo for similar (though he does not accept that the situation was different) behavior.
No I said your being inconsistent for condemning Sony doing one thing, and absolutely forgiving Nintendo for the exact same thing. Actually you encourage people to buy products from a company that did the same thing that pushed you over the edge. You use the justification that Sony "shut down Lik-Sang" to encourage people to buy Nintendo instead, except they "shut down Lik-Sang" as well.
Hate Sony all you want but you are a rabid fan boi and you are displaying an unreasonable amount of hatred towards a company that makes electronics, and you are being hypocrital.
And... The courts sided with Sony and decided what Lik-Sang was doing was illegal whether or not you or I think it should be legal. Do you have a point?
Also Sony didn't force them out of business, they shut themselves down. They haven't paid anything to Sony, didn't pay any legal fees and Sony didn't get a court order to shut them down. Of course, this exactly what they did when Nintendo sued them as well. So Nintendo also "shut them down" back in the day.
God damn, some of fan bois are hypocrits. If you're gonna decry one company for doing something you should at least have the good sense and the balls to decry any other company that did the exact same thing. If you can be consistent in your judgements, then they mean nothing at all.
Hmm. The issue here probably isn't with the company directly but with the laws that allow them to successfully sue a web site for importing their products, or possibly the laws that govern corporations in the first place. Corporations exist for one reason, and one reason only, to generate profits for their investors. They have a fiduciary duty to maximize their revenues and minimize costs.
This doesn't absolve Sony of their behaviour, feel free to punish them for it. But it does suggest that you at least also target the governments that pass laws that allow this behaviour to continue. As mentioned above that includes the European Union, Britain and the United States. To do otherwise is to attack the symptoms of a disease rather the disease itself.
Sony didn't shut Lik-Sang down, they sued them for breaking the law and won. It was Lik-Sang that broke the law in first place leaving themselves vulnerable and it was the EU that passed the laws that they broke. There's plenty of blame to be spread around. If you believe what Lik-Sang was doing should be legal, then both the EU and Sony share the blame for shutting them down.
I know the difference, but unlike you I don't have time to spend looking up websites and then individually inserting each URL into HTML code just to try to one up some person I don't even know on slashdot.
No, I think you've just already made up your mind that you are correct, and no amount of evidence to contrary will change it. I salute you as a shining example of American ignorance.
If that's true, that's pretty good, though the numbers I've seen don't support your assertions. I'm not really arguing whether the U.S. is doing a good or bad job, just arguing that per capita is the most appropriate way to measure it.
Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans. You then specified that the program you were on was AHCCCS. The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing. And despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still46millionAmericanswithouthealthinsurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance. Oh, and here's a demographic breakdown of the people without insurance.
Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence". Your friends, money-driven nice-people that they may be, are going to be pretty self-selectingly biased. You would only meet nurses and/or doctors who decided to emigrate. Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Every study I've ever seen on the issue has agreed with one fact: The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world. FYI the number is 9.7% in Canada. Thus, your UK doctor friend is simply wrong.
As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.
Are you sure your employer is only playing $80/month for your health care plan? Because according to one of the articles I linked above, the average cost for continuing health care for a family was $700/mo and for an individual it was over $300/mo. That indicates there should be about $206 a month missing from that equation somewhere. There are only a few possible reasons:
1) Your numbers are wrong. 2) Your employer is subsidized by the government. 3) The Health Insurance company dramatically reduces their price for employers (66%) versus individuals.
A) Could be based on government regulation
B) Could be the Insurance Companies routinely charge much more for individuals
I) Because they don't like dealing with individuals (higher cost of customer support)
II) Because individuals may have higher average health care costs than employee groups
Actually that's incorrect, according to this pdf on health care systems the U.S. pays substancially more than Canada and other developed countries for health care. This is backed up by the World Health Organization Rankings. The important part of the study is that the U.S. is not really getting better health care than other countries. Some people in the U.S. get the best money can buy, but a substancially large number including a sizeable population of minorities get substancially substandard health care. So much so that it can cut the average life expectancy of a black male by almost 20 years when compared to a white male. A difference that is not commonly in other countries.
There is biased and "materially biased". Everything has some bias sometimes the bias is more evident than others. The real question is whether the bias has material affected the content. If the bias has caused pertinent facts to be left out, or irrational conclusions to be reached, then it has material bias, and shouldn't be trusted. The Daily Show, at least as far as I can tell, has a political humour bias. They make fun of the government and politicians. However, that bias seldom, if ever, seems to be material. In fact, Daily Show viewers scored higher than regular viewers of ABC, NBC, or CBC's regular news broadcasts for comprehension of the actual issues in the last presidential campaign.
In other words, you'd prefer that everyone else use a method that makes you look better.
Per capita is the best method to use, a country of 1 million can hardly be expected to give as much in absolutely terms as a country of 100 million. However, it would perfectly fair to expect 100 countries of 1 million to give as much as 1 country of 100 million. Hence, why the figures are always compared per capita.
So, the "federal" Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) program is providing universal health coverage to all American students?
You might want to actually learn something about the universal health care in countries to which you've never travelled before you proclaim your system to be so infinitely better. Listening to "conservative" pundits complain about a system that works pretty damn well won't teach you anything real about it.
There are approximately 46 million Americans without health care coverage (16%), why do they not have coverage? Is it because they're lazy or illegal immigrants? Well the National Coalition on Healthcare has this to say:
* Millions of workers don't have the opportunity to get coverage. A third of firms in the U.S. did not offer coverage in 2004 (2).
* Nearly two-fifths (38 percent) of all workers are employed in smaller businesses, where less than two-thirds of firms now offer health benefits to their employees. (4)It is estimated that 266,000 companies dropped their health coverage between 2000-2005 and 90 percent of those firms have less than 25 employees.
* Rapidly rising health insurance premiums is the main reason cited by all small firms for not offering coverage. Health insurance premiums are rising at extraordinary rates. Over the past five years the average annual increase in inflation has been 2.5 percent while health insurance premiums for small firms have escalated an average of 15 percent annually (2).
* Even if employees are offered coverage on the job, they can't always afford their portion of the premium. Employee spending for health insurance coverage (employee's share of family coverage) has increased 143 percent between 2000 and 2005. (5)
* Losing a job, or quitting voluntarily, can mean losing affordable coverage - not only for the worker but also for their entire family. Only seven (7) percent of the unemployed can afford to pay for COBRA health insurance - the continuation of group coverage offered by their former employers. Premiums for this coverage average almost $700 a month for family coverage and $250 for individual coverage, a very high price given the average $1,100 monthly unemployment check (6).
* Coverage is unstable during life's transitions. A person's link to employer-sponsored coverage can also be cut by a change from full-time to part-time work, or self-employment, retirement or divorce (7).
* About 58 percent of uninsured adults report having changed or lost jobs in 2003. "Job lock" keeps others in positions they might have left if not for fear of losing coverage. Job mobility of husbands is 25 percent to 32 percent lower when their wives do not have employment-based health insurance (7).
Funny, I don't see "ignorance of the available opportunities", "illegally resident in the country", or "couldn't be bothered to apply for it" listed there.
You are right, however, I don't really trust Microsoft, and neither do a lot of other people, especially since they were last to market the first time around, and first to market the second time around. It's kind of worrisome, that they may disrupt the market further by releasing a new console before the end of hte decade.
Microsoft has a habit of engaging in, and winning, development warfare. They cut life cycles down over repeated offerings to drive development costs up and reduce the profitability of the competition, eventually causing them to abandon the market when Microsoft has pushed costs well above revenues. Once the competitor(s) have been forced out, Microsoft raises prices and establishes barriers to entry to protect themselves from new competitors.
Of course, in the end the consumer benefits a little at the start of the warfare as prices drop, but often ends up paying more overall to keep up with the increased rate of upgrades, or skipping upgrades to keep the cost down. For example, at one point in the MS Word - WordPerfect battle, Microsoft reduced the upgrade cycle to a little over 6 months. That's a little insane, upgrading your entire office suit twice a year?
That's not the argument that's being made. The argument that's being made is that good things only come in small packages.
And yes, one counterexample does negate the point of the original poster, which can be accurately summed up as "extra disk space will never make a game more fun" and "a different controller will always make games more fun". Neither statement is true, and I have a feeling that the novelty of the Wii controller is just that, novelty. Nintendo has been making different controllers for a long, long time.
Feel free to tone down the argument to "most games won't use the extra space", but remember we're looking a 1 game that definitely does use it, and 0 games that definitely don't right now, which moves the onus onto you to show us some games that definitely won't use the extra space to make the games better.
If you can even show that, we'd then have to look at whether the additional processing power and graphics capability will make the games "more fun". Good luck proving that more is, in fact, less.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, the votes which have been corrected to vote Republican are just making up for reality's well known liberal bias.
Hmm, you're just reminding me why I support the dead or alive bounties on spammers. Let capitalism take care of a problem capitalism created.
Never used them.
Tried one, didn't like it
Isn't web based at all as far as I can tell.
There are better ways than Microsoft Update, and I don't like or trust their garbage proprietary must-use-IE software.
I still don't see it.
1) The blogging front end is a front end. Just like you can have a web front end to an application, that doesn't make it half-web, half-desktop.
2) Acrobat Reader, while it does have a browser plug-in to display the document also is not half-web. PDF documents are good at what they do, which is a platform independent layout engine. However, I don't really see how this qualifies as half-web unless you consider any downloadable file to be "half-web". I also find it usually better for Reader to spawn it's own window to display Acrobat content then to take up one my browser tabs. That way I don't add the extra browser overhead to the acrobat functionality.
3) Microsoft Update requires IE to force people to keep IE installed on their Windows machines. It's all about reinforcing the monopoly.
I think vertical integration is being confused with new applications. If google produces a desktop work processor that has an integrated upload connection to a google file sharing service, that's not a new half-web/half-desktop application. That's google integrating two separate services together. In fact it might be more than two separate services. What uploads the file content? Is there an ftp client embedded in there? A web browser for uploading to myspace? A BitTorrent client? What you have is a ton of seperate functions all bundled together with a slick interface.
Eventually it starts to look like an Open Source project without the re-useable components.
1995 called, they want their Netscape back.
I'm sure we all know that we really want to play Quake inside a browser. No, the Desktop OS will never go away and browsers are not the best tool for every job, any more than screwdrivers have made hammers obsolete. I can't really say any use in a program that's half web based and half desktop based. Except perhaps to use a browser component to access web pages from within the application. Any other information can be handled by a proprietary networking app/server and you get orders of magnitude better performance.
To make a bad analogy it's like saying in the future everyone will drive a van because most furniture will fit in it. It's a waste of resources for those who don't need that extra storage space.
After reading the article, I'm left uninpressed.
It's the New American Dictionary, it's stupider by definition.
Sorry, you are correct, I misspoke. I didn't mean to write that the only growth sector was health care, I meant the write that economy was entirely stagnant without the healthcare sector. Or in other words, the net growth of the economy over the last 6 years is directly attributable to the health care sector.
It should be obvious then, that with the end of the housing bubble, comes the likely hood of a major recession.
Actually, way back when I was setting up a test bed for ISDN routers, I found 2 different routers with the same MAC Address. It really threw us for a loop until I figured out what the problem was.
The only way they get stability is if the economy is good and the citizens are relatively happy.
It's not and they aren't. Hence the reason for relaxing the prohibitions on martial law.
1) The U.S. economy has been lousy since Bush took over, the only growth sector over the last 6 years has been health care. And according to the Canadian economic forcasts, the health care sector may no longer be capable of keeping the rest of the U.S. economy afloat, we're expecting the a recession in the U.S. over the coming year. It's important to us, because when you guys do poorly, we have to find someone else to trade with.
2) The citizens are not relatively happy, in fact, it'd be more accurate to say the citizens are relatively unhappy, they just don't like the opposition much more than the current government. The election could have a huge impact on the States depending on what happens. But make no mistake support for the government is on a slow slide and there's little hope of reversing the trend without major policy changes.
But, as Microsoft has shown time and time again, Microsoft is capable of assimilating a successful business strategy and making their own version viable and profitable.
You lost all credibility with this one line. The Xbox line has never turned a profit, and the 360 is highly unlikely to make a profit this time around either. No other company could afford to lose the billions of dollars that Microsoft is losing on the Xbox.
The two most commonly cited reasons are:
1) It's too expensive
and
2) Sony suxxorz!
It remains to be seen how much the price will drag down mainstream sales. I think Sony will come out with a smaller marketshare this time around, but I'm not Microsoft and Nintendo have what it takes to win out. In theory, the graphics will be noticeably worse on the Wii and 360 won't have the children's games. Each of the consoles in this generation has it's down sides, all that's left is to see which one wins in the marketplace.
This isn't just about Lik-Sang. It's about a long string of abuses that Sony has perpetrated. The great-grandparent poster suggested that I was being inconsistent for not boycotting Nintendo for similar (though he does not accept that the situation was different) behavior.
No I said your being inconsistent for condemning Sony doing one thing, and absolutely forgiving Nintendo for the exact same thing. Actually you encourage people to buy products from a company that did the same thing that pushed you over the edge. You use the justification that Sony "shut down Lik-Sang" to encourage people to buy Nintendo instead, except they "shut down Lik-Sang" as well.
Hate Sony all you want but you are a rabid fan boi and you are displaying an unreasonable amount of hatred towards a company that makes electronics, and you are being hypocrital.
And... The courts sided with Sony and decided what Lik-Sang was doing was illegal whether or not you or I think it should be legal. Do you have a point?
Also Sony didn't force them out of business, they shut themselves down. They haven't paid anything to Sony, didn't pay any legal fees and Sony didn't get a court order to shut them down. Of course, this exactly what they did when Nintendo sued them as well. So Nintendo also "shut them down" back in the day.
God damn, some of fan bois are hypocrits. If you're gonna decry one company for doing something you should at least have the good sense and the balls to decry any other company that did the exact same thing. If you can be consistent in your judgements, then they mean nothing at all.
Since Lik-Sang has been previously "shutdown" by Nintendo and sued by Microsoft, will you be boycotting all three consoles this year?
Hmm. The issue here probably isn't with the company directly but with the laws that allow them to successfully sue a web site for importing their products, or possibly the laws that govern corporations in the first place. Corporations exist for one reason, and one reason only, to generate profits for their investors. They have a fiduciary duty to maximize their revenues and minimize costs.
This doesn't absolve Sony of their behaviour, feel free to punish them for it. But it does suggest that you at least also target the governments that pass laws that allow this behaviour to continue. As mentioned above that includes the European Union, Britain and the United States. To do otherwise is to attack the symptoms of a disease rather the disease itself.
Sony didn't shut Lik-Sang down, they sued them for breaking the law and won. It was Lik-Sang that broke the law in first place leaving themselves vulnerable and it was the EU that passed the laws that they broke. There's plenty of blame to be spread around. If you believe what Lik-Sang was doing should be legal, then both the EU and Sony share the blame for shutting them down.
I know the difference, but unlike you I don't have time to spend looking up websites and then individually inserting each URL into HTML code just to try to one up some person I don't even know on slashdot.
No, I think you've just already made up your mind that you are correct, and no amount of evidence to contrary will change it. I salute you as a shining example of American ignorance.
If that's true, that's pretty good, though the numbers I've seen don't support your assertions. I'm not really arguing whether the U.S. is doing a good or bad job, just arguing that per capita is the most appropriate way to measure it.
Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans. You then specified that the program you were on was AHCCCS. The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing. And despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance. Oh, and here's a demographic breakdown of the people without insurance.
Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence". Your friends, money-driven nice-people that they may be, are going to be pretty self-selectingly biased. You would only meet nurses and/or doctors who decided to emigrate. Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Every study I've ever seen on the issue has agreed with one fact: The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world. FYI the number is 9.7% in Canada. Thus, your UK doctor friend is simply wrong.
As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.
Are you sure your employer is only playing $80/month for your health care plan? Because according to one of the articles I linked above, the average cost for continuing health care for a family was $700/mo and for an individual it was over $300/mo. That indicates there should be about $206 a month missing from that equation somewhere. There are only a few possible reasons:
1) Your numbers are wrong.
2) Your employer is subsidized by the government.
3) The Health Insurance company dramatically reduces their price for employers (66%) versus individuals.
A) Could be based on government regulation
B) Could be the Insurance Companies routinely charge much more for individuals
I) Because they don't like dealing with individuals (higher cost of customer support)
II) Because individuals may have higher average health care costs than employee groups
Actually that's incorrect, according to this pdf on health care systems the U.S. pays substancially more than Canada and other developed countries for health care. This is backed up by the World Health Organization Rankings. The important part of the study is that the U.S. is not really getting better health care than other countries. Some people in the U.S. get the best money can buy, but a substancially large number including a sizeable population of minorities get substancially substandard health care. So much so that it can cut the average life expectancy of a black male by almost 20 years when compared to a white male. A difference that is not commonly in other countries.
There is biased and "materially biased". Everything has some bias sometimes the bias is more evident than others. The real question is whether the bias has material affected the content. If the bias has caused pertinent facts to be left out, or irrational conclusions to be reached, then it has material bias, and shouldn't be trusted. The Daily Show, at least as far as I can tell, has a political humour bias. They make fun of the government and politicians. However, that bias seldom, if ever, seems to be material. In fact, Daily Show viewers scored higher than regular viewers of ABC, NBC, or CBC's regular news broadcasts for comprehension of the actual issues in the last presidential campaign.
In other words, you'd prefer that everyone else use a method that makes you look better.
Per capita is the best method to use, a country of 1 million can hardly be expected to give as much in absolutely terms as a country of 100 million. However, it would perfectly fair to expect 100 countries of 1 million to give as much as 1 country of 100 million. Hence, why the figures are always compared per capita.
So, the "federal" Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) program is providing universal health coverage to all American students?
You might want to actually learn something about the universal health care in countries to which you've never travelled before you proclaim your system to be so infinitely better. Listening to "conservative" pundits complain about a system that works pretty damn well won't teach you anything real about it.
There are approximately 46 million Americans without health care coverage (16%), why do they not have coverage? Is it because they're lazy or illegal immigrants? Well the National Coalition on Healthcare has this to say:
* Millions of workers don't have the opportunity to get coverage. A third of firms in the U.S. did not offer coverage in 2004 (2).
* Nearly two-fifths (38 percent) of all workers are employed in smaller businesses, where less than two-thirds of firms now offer health benefits to their employees. (4)It is estimated that 266,000 companies dropped their health coverage between 2000-2005 and 90 percent of those firms have less than 25 employees.
* Rapidly rising health insurance premiums is the main reason cited by all small firms for not offering coverage. Health insurance premiums are rising at extraordinary rates. Over the past five years the average annual increase in inflation has been 2.5 percent while health insurance premiums for small firms have escalated an average of 15 percent annually (2).
* Even if employees are offered coverage on the job, they can't always afford their portion of the premium. Employee spending for health insurance coverage (employee's share of family coverage) has increased 143 percent between 2000 and 2005. (5)
* Losing a job, or quitting voluntarily, can mean losing affordable coverage - not only for the worker but also for their entire family. Only seven (7) percent of the unemployed can afford to pay for COBRA health insurance - the continuation of group coverage offered by their former employers. Premiums for this coverage average almost $700 a month for family coverage and $250 for individual coverage, a very high price given the average $1,100 monthly unemployment check (6).
* Coverage is unstable during life's transitions. A person's link to employer-sponsored coverage can also be cut by a change from full-time to part-time work, or self-employment, retirement or divorce (7).
* About 58 percent of uninsured adults report having changed or lost jobs in 2003. "Job lock" keeps others in positions they might have left if not for fear of losing coverage. Job mobility of husbands is 25 percent to 32 percent lower when their wives do not have employment-based health insurance (7).
Funny, I don't see "ignorance of the available opportunities", "illegally resident in the country", or "couldn't be bothered to apply for it" listed there.
You are right, however, I don't really trust Microsoft, and neither do a lot of other people, especially since they were last to market the first time around, and first to market the second time around. It's kind of worrisome, that they may disrupt the market further by releasing a new console before the end of hte decade.
Microsoft has a habit of engaging in, and winning, development warfare. They cut life cycles down over repeated offerings to drive development costs up and reduce the profitability of the competition, eventually causing them to abandon the market when Microsoft has pushed costs well above revenues. Once the competitor(s) have been forced out, Microsoft raises prices and establishes barriers to entry to protect themselves from new competitors.
Of course, in the end the consumer benefits a little at the start of the warfare as prices drop, but often ends up paying more overall to keep up with the increased rate of upgrades, or skipping upgrades to keep the cost down. For example, at one point in the MS Word - WordPerfect battle, Microsoft reduced the upgrade cycle to a little over 6 months. That's a little insane, upgrading your entire office suit twice a year?
That's not the argument that's being made. The argument that's being made is that good things only come in small packages.
And yes, one counterexample does negate the point of the original poster, which can be accurately summed up as "extra disk space will never make a game more fun" and "a different controller will always make games more fun". Neither statement is true, and I have a feeling that the novelty of the Wii controller is just that, novelty. Nintendo has been making different controllers for a long, long time.
Feel free to tone down the argument to "most games won't use the extra space", but remember we're looking a 1 game that definitely does use it, and 0 games that definitely don't right now, which moves the onus onto you to show us some games that definitely won't use the extra space to make the games better.
If you can even show that, we'd then have to look at whether the additional processing power and graphics capability will make the games "more fun". Good luck proving that more is, in fact, less.
I fail to see how Sony has forgotten about gameplay at all.
Oh, I'm sorry, did I interrupt your pointless Sony bashing?