Interesting point. I didn't know there was a difference. Thanks for the correction.:)
Here is a product that purports to be a scope w/Tritium.
When you use the term "level", without clarifying that you're talking about a hopper fill-level indicator, you're being deceptive
Actually, I honestly didn't remember what it was precisely. I was just quoting from memory when I mentioned it. I was thinking more like the pipe gauges and the like. Industrial, but more likely to be found in many types of jobs.
Now if you want to talk about Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Coleco cartridges, I probably have over 300. They're a pain in the butt to store, but they're so cheap to get ahold of these days.;)
"While The NPD Group's retail tracking service shows what appears to be a decline in PC game sales, critical developments in the PC games industry, specifically the Internet, is fundamentally changing the PC software industry," Anita Frazier analyst at NPD said in statement. "With the increase in high speed Internet access, not only are users purchasing their games online, they are also willingly paying additional recurring fees over and above the price of the game to subscribe to services that let them play with others online."
Intel's share of the 74.9m GPUs that shipped in Q1 rose from 37.5 per cent in Q4 2005 to 39.1 per cent. ATI took 28.7 per cent of the market, up 2.2 percentage points, while Nvidia's share was up a third of percentage point to 18.7 per cent.
(That leaves 21 million ATI chips, plus 14 million NVidia chips, for a total of over 35 million chips that don't suck.)
Intel claims the X3000 is Shader Model 3 compliant, and meets Microsoft's GUI requirements for Vista Aero Premium. Intel has released production version drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows Vista that enable the Aero style.
(Oops. Maybe the remaining 39 million won't be upgrading to chips that don't suck?)
PC Gaming is dying. If you want to make a truckload of money, just get out of the PC entertainment market and sell to consoles exclusively. If idiotic tripe like Star Wars: Republic Commando and The Guy Game never touched the PC I'd have no beef with you, but by developing for consoles and then porting those horrid, god awful titles to the PC you consistently stifle the development of original IP, and original IP is what has made the PC game market so consistently great over the years.
This could mean the PC gaming market will enjoy more potential customers
(Emphasis mine.)
The PC Gaming market already "enjoys" a rather massive "potential" market. Yet PC sales are quickly falling to the wayside in favor of console gaming. In fact, most PC Games are either being ported to consoles or are ported from consoles. Which means that there is little advantage to being a PC Gamer unless you're into MMOGs.
A better headline would be, "Casual gaming market gets bigger! Game studios still have no idea how to make money off them!":-P
I use XStream which is very nice xml serialization utility library.
I have played with XStream a bit. It's nice, but it has the disadvantage of (at least when I tried it) not being able to correctly serialize a Swing GUI. The Java Bean libraries are tweaked to understand Swing classes, so they correctly serialize the GUI in nearly all cases. (Minus a few of the fine details I was mentioning.) Deserialization is a minor issue in comparison.
he XML-serialization has a few problems though: * Versioning, what if the classes change and what if the data model changes really radically.
I presume you mean the Swing classes? This can't happen with Java. The system stays backward compatible at all times, so it's practically guaranteed that your XML won't change from under you. The only time this is a concern is if you mix in third party components. In that case, you're sort of screwed whether you serialize to XML or not.
* XML data doesn't get refactored when you refactor your classes.
This is true, but it's again not a problem with Swing serialization. Unless Sun decides to reboot the Java platform. the Swing classes will remain compatible.
* The XML becomes easily convoluted and at worst you'll be coding in XML without the help of a friendly IDE.
Again, not a problem with my approach. Since I did up the GUI in Netbeans, I could always modify the GUI and regenerate an XML file. The worst case scenario was that I'd need to tweak a few points in the XML after regen. It was a rather painless process.:)
* XML data might not stay in synch with your codebase.
If you need to add widgets or what-not, then you can always modify the GUI, and regen the XML. The really great part about decoupling with XML, though, is that it becomes really easy to just redo your GUI from scratch. Usually, if a GUI starts to look like a Redneck Christmas Tree, the cost of redoing it is unacceptable. (i.e. All the code is mixed in with the GUI layout.) When the GUI is decoupled, you can create a new GUI in the GUI Builder, and then serialize a new XML file to replace your old one. As long as the hooks into the GUI are the same (I used the "name" property), your code should operate without change.
If you're familiar with DHTML/AJAX, it's a bit like coding the HTML separate from the Javascript. Since the Javascript does a document.getElementByID(), you can recreate the HTML with a different look as long as the element ids remain the same.:)
So basically there is a format to use, but you're on your own to create the actual document?
Sort of. In my case, I serialized a running GUI to get the file. I could have hand coded it, but that would have been a pain. Instead, I created it in Netbeans, and ran the class through java.bean.XMLEncoder.
Again, the REAL problem is attaching the actions. (i.e. events, keymappings, etc.) If you think about it, you can't attach an event listener inside an XML file, because the XML file is decoupled from your code. So you need a way to identify the correct component after loading the file, to add the necessary event handlers to. My method was a framework that worked a bit like the HTML DOM APIs. I would request a component by name, and the framework would walk the GUI tree looking for that component.
Can we get something more like GTK or something with a nice cross-platform *standard* GUI toolkit?
The problem isn't the toolkit. It's the lack of a standard serialized form. In the Windows world, the standard format is known as a "resource file". Since all GUI editors target this resource format, there is no compatibility issues across IDEs. Similarly, GTK+ standardizes on GladeXML from the Glade Interface Designer. So there's no question about what format an IDE should support when adding a GUI Designer.
Swing is one of the few GUI technologies that doesn't have a standard serialized format. The XMLEncoder technology took a step toward solving this, but didn't follow through. The result was that we had a format, but no library to actually wire up a deserialized GUI! (e.g. GladeXML is decoded by libglade) This oversight was rather massive, but ended up being ignored as the focus continued to shift toward server-size J2EE development.
Almost every platform has a visual designer that serializes the GUI to resources (some XML, some proprietary binaries) and then attaches it to the controller at runtime.
Anyone who's interested in this issue should look into the java.bean.XMLEncoder and java.bean.XMLDecoder classes. These classes are able to serialize and deserialize complete GUIs. In the past, I've used the Netbeans GUI Builder to develop throw-away GUI frontends, then serialized them to a file rather than using them directly. I then built a framework that used the little-known "Name" property on AWT/Swing components to attach actions.
The results were quite good. Not only was the GUI decoupled from the code, but development was actually accelerated as minor GUI hiccups had no effect on the rest of the codebase. The downside was that the XML occasionally had to be tweaked to perfection as the XMLEncoder class was not 100% perfect in serializing some of the finer details.
A few years ago I spoke with one of the Netbeans developers about making the XMLEncoder format the standard for Netbeans. The idea was met with some resistence, seemingly because there was no actual Java-standard framework to target. The JVM base libraries have the Encoder/Decoder routines, but all the rest of the work must be done by the programmer. (Such as attaching the actions to the components.)
Neither of which promote good MVC separation. In fact they tend to encourage violations unless you are a very disciplined coder.
Train yourself to use Swing Actions. It seems like you're creating hundreds of little objects, but what you're really doing is encapsulating actual actions in the system away from their physcial controls on screen. So if you have a button, a menu item, and a toolbar item that all do the same thing, a single action can control all three widgets. This helps smooth out issues like keyboard shortcuts, which can get quite confusing when coding a Swing application.
...Also, since Apache is not running by default on OS X, it would hit a tiny number of users and most would not care...
...Apple is an Apache contributor and has released security patches in the past...
Precisely!:)
What we're seeing is Apple fixing issues that cannot be successfully exploited on 90%+ of the Mac machines in existence. Worms like Code Red or Blaster wouldn't be able to find enough hosts due to the default security setup of OS X. The only folks who would be vulnerable would be the ones who know enough about internet hosting to enable a service.
While there's no guarantee that these users are significantly more educated, they do at least know that they're running a potentially exploitable service. This is in direct opposition to the situations that made Code Red and Blaster possible. Had IIS Personal Server not enabled itself without the knowledge of most users, it's highly likely that Code Red would have failed to spread. (Especially since a security patch had been available in both cases.)
Is it possible for the Macintosh to have a major security flaw in the Apache Server? If the Macintosh had a major security flaw in Apache, could there be a Code Red style of attack? Would Apple release a patch to address the flaw in Apache, even though it's not their software per se? How many users would actually be vulnerable to this exploit?
If you know the answers to those questions (the real ones, not the projections from Windows users) then you know why Mac users feel invulnerable, even though they're not.
AFAIK, that has been illegal to sell for many, many years.
Only in the U.S. We still manage to import them every so often, though. Thinkgeek was selling such keychains a year or two ago. And they're not so much illegal as considered a "frivolous use of radioactive materials". Some of the illuminated watches used by police and military glow using the exact same techniques, but aren't considered as "frivolous". So you can purchase them over the counter in the US. (Go figure.)
A level gauge (assuming you mean a bubble level) is just an air bubble in a liquid, which is usually colored ethanol (alcohol).
You'll also note he died of heart failure. Not exactly something that screams POISON!
Except that he was extremely sick for days leading up to that. Radiation Poisoning is not exactly a quick and painless death.
It does kind of make me wonder what the hell is up with the KGB now.
It makes me wonder what the heck they were thinking. It was an incredible risk to assume that the source of his illness would never be found. Polonium in that quantity is nearly impossible to get ahold of, and absolutely screams "spies did it!" They couldn't have left a louder calling card if they had tried.
Of course, the real question is what was so important to risk a public relations nightmare by having him killed? So he was a vocal opponent of the Russian government. And? So is the rest of Russia. Either the person who gave the order was stupid (never to be discounted with Putin) or they were worried that he was going to expose some sort of important secret.
Seems to me you're pretty much stuck with a radioactive substance. And of all radioactive substances, an alpha-particle only emitter is the easiest to conceal from radiological detection.
A lot less sophisticated, but just as effective. And you can even administer it externally.
As for confusing the doctors, it's obvious that a radiological material failed to do that. In fact, most hospitals have rather extensive radiological areas and procedures. So the chances of the symptoms eventually being recognized are fairly high.
If that still doesn't fit the bill, there are dozens of slow acting poisons from medieval times that would confuse the heck out of modern doctors.
Too many people think of radiation as this magical, unstoppable death ray; I call this the OMG RADIATION!!1! attitude.
But it's so much fun when you hold a geiger counter up to them and yell, "OH MY GOD! YOU'RE EMITTING THOUSANDS OF BECQUERELS OF RADIATION!"
Then watch them go nuts for a few minutes before you finally explain to them that the postassium they need in their diet is a smidge radioactive. And God-forbid that our descendents might date our corpses with the Carbon-14 we're carrying around...
Whatever you do, don't take apart a smoke detector. Or a night scope. Or a glow in the dark keychain. Or a level gauge. Or an old pair of dentures. Or a wick from a gas camping lamp.
There are actually quite a few mail-order sites for nuclear materials. The stuff is expensive, but it is available. The only difference is that most sites request proof of licensing for such materials before they'll sell them to you. In that way they separate the valid research, medical, and industrial uses of radiological materials from the hobbyists who happen to have a lot of money.
Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons (most being much more effective) even in our own homes. Heck, mix some radiator fluid into his starbucks mocha and he'd never know the difference! The only thing I can figure is that they were hoping that he'd get cancer and no one would question why. *shrug* Pretty poor plan if you ask me.
When the Playstation came out, there was no 3D competition.
When the Wii came out, there was no motion sensing competition...
Just saying.:-)
The most expensive way to break into any market is through the front door. Had Microsoft tried a back door, they wouldn't have had to spend so many gigabucks.
If that review is any indication, I don't think "Zuned" is going to mean what Microsoft wants it to mean. Rather than hearing, "Dude, I just Zuned you a song" you're going to hear, "Dude, CNN just Zuned Microsoft."
Besides the iPod Shuffle tangent, my favorite part of that video was, "Why don't they get some decent design people to make things look better?" Ouch!
Sony's shipped what, 200,000? So they'd have to nearly quadruple their production IN THE NEXT 4 WEEKS? God, you're funny!
Um, yeah. You might want to check that attitude at the door. Sony is already missing their projections of 2 million consoles (originally down from 4 million) by half. They're down to a broadcast projection of 1 million consoles for 2006. The analysts that you're quoting for that 200,000 number are the same ones who are saying that Sony will miss their latest target by 250,000 units. Also, if their 125,000 - 175,000 units for North America guesstimate is correct (which has yet to be proven either way), Sony already has 205,000 - 255,000 units in customer hands. (The ~80,000 in Japan were verified using sales figures.)
Sony has had a crappy launch from day one, and will most likely continue to have a crappy launch. (Depsite their best efforts to airlift in new consoles.) Trying to convince others that Sony is an even more dire situation than even the worst case estimates only serves to brand you as a Nintendo or Microsoft fanboy. Which isn't a very good position to argue from.
If you're boycotting Sony, please do me a favor and don't advertise it. Otherwise, with friends like you, who needs enemies?:-/
Nintendo has managed to get major numbers out there (4million estimated before Christmas).
Nintendo's current estimates are 2 million consoles before year's end. The 4 million number was bandied about pre-launch along with Sony's 2 million number. Sony is currently targetting 1 million units by year's end.
If both companies make their targets, there will be a 2:1 split between the competitors. The analysts, however, believe that Nintendo will only manage to ship between 1.5 and 2 million consoles (up to a 500,000 unit shortfall) and that Sony will only be able to ship 750,000.
So you say that no one should cite a site spouting statistics based on unverified info and then turn right around and give a statistic based on unverified info?
A fair enough point. I guess I should have segued into that one a bit better. Feel free to strike the second paragraph above and replace it with:
"Once the PS3 figures are availble, it will be interesting to see what percentage of the PS3s were sold on eBay. If the current analyst guessimations prove to be accurate, as much as 10% of the PS3s on the market could be on eBay."
You also neglected to note that 30,000 of 600,000 Wii's is about 5% as well, which according to you is significant.
Also a fair point. It's actually closer to 4.5%, but it is a significant number overall. I think the big difference is that the Wii isn't experiencing the same supply problems that the PS3 is. So 4.5% of the units on eBay still means that a lot more people in absolute terms have Wiis in hand to play. (Over 573,000 units.) So the significance of the number is far dimished in comparison to the anemic supply of the PS3.
Good Lord. You people waste your mod points on marking a positive comment on the new "Wii" topic icon "Troll" and "Offtopic" while several troll posts (especially the "Information on the PS3") go unmodded? Geez people, get some priorities.
Before anyone mentions nexgenwars.com, I think you should all read this forum thread about how the numbers are calculated. To anyone who has even an inkling of statistics and probablity, his methods should stand out as highly flawed. Until we have a good sales history and ample supply with which to predict the sales of these consoles, it would be best to stick to the official figures released by the respective companies and retail tracking organizations. (The latter of which is not yet available.)
Gamasutra is also reporting sales figures via Ebay for the two consoles. 15,000 PS3s were sold, while the Wii cracked 27,000 via the popular online auction site.
It's worth noting that 15,000 PS3 units could be as much as 10% of the North American supply. Given that we don't know the actual figures shipped, it's just as possible that 15,000 is 5% of the supply. Either way, it's a significant percentage of the PS3 consoles.
Let's say you have two different brands of HDTVs. One has a profit margin of $300, while the other has a margin of $600. Furthermore, let's say you have 4 DVDs with profit margins of $2.00, $3.00, $4.00, and $0.50. How do we compare the profits of one type of item over the other?
Well, we could use averages:
1 $300 HDTV 1 $600 HDTV ----------- $450/unit average
Obviously, the HDTVs win. But that's not a very good way to actually compare your business units. A much better way is weighted averages. If we weight the averages of the products against the total sales, we find that the HDTVs are only pulling in a profit of about 30 cents for every sale made while the DVDs are pulling in $1.00 for every sale made. So which one is more valuable to be selling? The big clunky HDTVs that take up shelf space but sell poorly overall, or the DVDs which make up most of the revenue and take very little shelf space?
Of course, actual business practices would state that the HDTV is a method of selling more DVDs. So the sales of the HDTVs in the same store would be justified. But it does show how naive math can get you in serious trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point. I didn't know there was a difference. Thanks for the correction.
Here is a product that purports to be a scope w/Tritium.
Actually, I honestly didn't remember what it was precisely. I was just quoting from memory when I mentioned it. I was thinking more like the pipe gauges and the like. Industrial, but more likely to be found in many types of jobs.
That's because C64 games are free these days. Just grab a floppy drive, a few dozen double-density floppies, and have at it.
Now if you want to talk about Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Coleco cartridges, I probably have over 300. They're a pain in the butt to store, but they're so cheap to get ahold of these days.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/19/q1_06_gpu
(That leaves 21 million ATI chips, plus 14 million NVidia chips, for a total of over 35 million chips that don't suck.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_X3000
(Oops. Maybe the remaining 39 million won't be upgrading to chips that don't suck?)
http://www.gamershell.com/articles/884.html
(Emphasis mine.)
The PC Gaming market already "enjoys" a rather massive "potential" market. Yet PC sales are quickly falling to the wayside in favor of console gaming. In fact, most PC Games are either being ported to consoles or are ported from consoles. Which means that there is little advantage to being a PC Gamer unless you're into MMOGs.
A better headline would be, "Casual gaming market gets bigger! Game studios still have no idea how to make money off them!"
I have played with XStream a bit. It's nice, but it has the disadvantage of (at least when I tried it) not being able to correctly serialize a Swing GUI. The Java Bean libraries are tweaked to understand Swing classes, so they correctly serialize the GUI in nearly all cases. (Minus a few of the fine details I was mentioning.) Deserialization is a minor issue in comparison.
I presume you mean the Swing classes? This can't happen with Java. The system stays backward compatible at all times, so it's practically guaranteed that your XML won't change from under you. The only time this is a concern is if you mix in third party components. In that case, you're sort of screwed whether you serialize to XML or not.
This is true, but it's again not a problem with Swing serialization. Unless Sun decides to reboot the Java platform. the Swing classes will remain compatible.
Again, not a problem with my approach. Since I did up the GUI in Netbeans, I could always modify the GUI and regenerate an XML file. The worst case scenario was that I'd need to tweak a few points in the XML after regen. It was a rather painless process.
If you need to add widgets or what-not, then you can always modify the GUI, and regen the XML. The really great part about decoupling with XML, though, is that it becomes really easy to just redo your GUI from scratch. Usually, if a GUI starts to look like a Redneck Christmas Tree, the cost of redoing it is unacceptable. (i.e. All the code is mixed in with the GUI layout.) When the GUI is decoupled, you can create a new GUI in the GUI Builder, and then serialize a new XML file to replace your old one. As long as the hooks into the GUI are the same (I used the "name" property), your code should operate without change.
If you're familiar with DHTML/AJAX, it's a bit like coding the HTML separate from the Javascript. Since the Javascript does a document.getElementByID(), you can recreate the HTML with a different look as long as the element ids remain the same.
Sort of. In my case, I serialized a running GUI to get the file. I could have hand coded it, but that would have been a pain. Instead, I created it in Netbeans, and ran the class through java.bean.XMLEncoder.
Again, the REAL problem is attaching the actions. (i.e. events, keymappings, etc.) If you think about it, you can't attach an event listener inside an XML file, because the XML file is decoupled from your code. So you need a way to identify the correct component after loading the file, to add the necessary event handlers to. My method was a framework that worked a bit like the HTML DOM APIs. I would request a component by name, and the framework would walk the GUI tree looking for that component.
Thus I was able to do something like this:
The problem isn't the toolkit. It's the lack of a standard serialized form. In the Windows world, the standard format is known as a "resource file". Since all GUI editors target this resource format, there is no compatibility issues across IDEs. Similarly, GTK+ standardizes on GladeXML from the Glade Interface Designer. So there's no question about what format an IDE should support when adding a GUI Designer.
Swing is one of the few GUI technologies that doesn't have a standard serialized format. The XMLEncoder technology took a step toward solving this, but didn't follow through. The result was that we had a format, but no library to actually wire up a deserialized GUI! (e.g. GladeXML is decoded by libglade) This oversight was rather massive, but ended up being ignored as the focus continued to shift toward server-size J2EE development.
Anyone who's interested in this issue should look into the java.bean.XMLEncoder and java.bean.XMLDecoder classes. These classes are able to serialize and deserialize complete GUIs. In the past, I've used the Netbeans GUI Builder to develop throw-away GUI frontends, then serialized them to a file rather than using them directly. I then built a framework that used the little-known "Name" property on AWT/Swing components to attach actions.
The results were quite good. Not only was the GUI decoupled from the code, but development was actually accelerated as minor GUI hiccups had no effect on the rest of the codebase. The downside was that the XML occasionally had to be tweaked to perfection as the XMLEncoder class was not 100% perfect in serializing some of the finer details.
A few years ago I spoke with one of the Netbeans developers about making the XMLEncoder format the standard for Netbeans. The idea was met with some resistence, seemingly because there was no actual Java-standard framework to target. The JVM base libraries have the Encoder/Decoder routines, but all the rest of the work must be done by the programmer. (Such as attaching the actions to the components.)
Train yourself to use Swing Actions. It seems like you're creating hundreds of little objects, but what you're really doing is encapsulating actual actions in the system away from their physcial controls on screen. So if you have a button, a menu item, and a toolbar item that all do the same thing, a single action can control all three widgets. This helps smooth out issues like keyboard shortcuts, which can get quite confusing when coding a Swing application.
Precisely!
What we're seeing is Apple fixing issues that cannot be successfully exploited on 90%+ of the Mac machines in existence. Worms like Code Red or Blaster wouldn't be able to find enough hosts due to the default security setup of OS X. The only folks who would be vulnerable would be the ones who know enough about internet hosting to enable a service.
While there's no guarantee that these users are significantly more educated, they do at least know that they're running a potentially exploitable service. This is in direct opposition to the situations that made Code Red and Blaster possible. Had IIS Personal Server not enabled itself without the knowledge of most users, it's highly likely that Code Red would have failed to spread. (Especially since a security patch had been available in both cases.)
Here's something to ponder for a moment:
Is it possible for the Macintosh to have a major security flaw in the Apache Server?
If the Macintosh had a major security flaw in Apache, could there be a Code Red style of attack?
Would Apple release a patch to address the flaw in Apache, even though it's not their software per se?
How many users would actually be vulnerable to this exploit?
If you know the answers to those questions (the real ones, not the projections from Windows users) then you know why Mac users feel invulnerable, even though they're not.
Right, then. GET HIM!
You might want to tell Ameriglo that.
Sure about that?
Only in the U.S. We still manage to import them every so often, though. Thinkgeek was selling such keychains a year or two ago. And they're not so much illegal as considered a "frivolous use of radioactive materials". Some of the illuminated watches used by police and military glow using the exact same techniques, but aren't considered as "frivolous". So you can purchase them over the counter in the US. (Go figure.)
Level Gauges
Except that he was extremely sick for days leading up to that. Radiation Poisoning is not exactly a quick and painless death.
It makes me wonder what the heck they were thinking. It was an incredible risk to assume that the source of his illness would never be found. Polonium in that quantity is nearly impossible to get ahold of, and absolutely screams "spies did it!" They couldn't have left a louder calling card if they had tried.
Of course, the real question is what was so important to risk a public relations nightmare by having him killed? So he was a vocal opponent of the Russian government. And? So is the rest of Russia. Either the person who gave the order was stupid (never to be discounted with Putin) or they were worried that he was going to expose some sort of important secret.
Mercury Poisoning
A lot less sophisticated, but just as effective. And you can even administer it externally.
As for confusing the doctors, it's obvious that a radiological material failed to do that. In fact, most hospitals have rather extensive radiological areas and procedures. So the chances of the symptoms eventually being recognized are fairly high.
If that still doesn't fit the bill, there are dozens of slow acting poisons from medieval times that would confuse the heck out of modern doctors.
But it's so much fun when you hold a geiger counter up to them and yell, "OH MY GOD! YOU'RE EMITTING THOUSANDS OF BECQUERELS OF RADIATION!"
Then watch them go nuts for a few minutes before you finally explain to them that the postassium they need in their diet is a smidge radioactive. And God-forbid that our descendents might date our corpses with the Carbon-14 we're carrying around...
Whatever you do, don't take apart a smoke detector. Or a night scope. Or a glow in the dark keychain. Or a level gauge. Or an old pair of dentures. Or a wick from a gas camping lamp.
There are actually quite a few mail-order sites for nuclear materials. The stuff is expensive, but it is available. The only difference is that most sites request proof of licensing for such materials before they'll sell them to you. In that way they separate the valid research, medical, and industrial uses of radiological materials from the hobbyists who happen to have a lot of money.
Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons (most being much more effective) even in our own homes. Heck, mix some radiator fluid into his starbucks mocha and he'd never know the difference! The only thing I can figure is that they were hoping that he'd get cancer and no one would question why. *shrug* Pretty poor plan if you ask me.
When the Wii came out, there was no motion sensing competition...
Just saying.
The most expensive way to break into any market is through the front door. Had Microsoft tried a back door, they wouldn't have had to spend so many gigabucks.
If that review is any indication, I don't think "Zuned" is going to mean what Microsoft wants it to mean. Rather than hearing, "Dude, I just Zuned you a song" you're going to hear, "Dude, CNN just Zuned Microsoft."
Besides the iPod Shuffle tangent, my favorite part of that video was, "Why don't they get some decent design people to make things look better?" Ouch!
Um, yeah. You might want to check that attitude at the door. Sony is already missing their projections of 2 million consoles (originally down from 4 million) by half. They're down to a broadcast projection of 1 million consoles for 2006. The analysts that you're quoting for that 200,000 number are the same ones who are saying that Sony will miss their latest target by 250,000 units. Also, if their 125,000 - 175,000 units for North America guesstimate is correct (which has yet to be proven either way), Sony already has 205,000 - 255,000 units in customer hands. (The ~80,000 in Japan were verified using sales figures.)
Sony has had a crappy launch from day one, and will most likely continue to have a crappy launch. (Depsite their best efforts to airlift in new consoles.) Trying to convince others that Sony is an even more dire situation than even the worst case estimates only serves to brand you as a Nintendo or Microsoft fanboy. Which isn't a very good position to argue from.
If you're boycotting Sony, please do me a favor and don't advertise it. Otherwise, with friends like you, who needs enemies?
Nintendo's current estimates are 2 million consoles before year's end. The 4 million number was bandied about pre-launch along with Sony's 2 million number. Sony is currently targetting 1 million units by year's end.
If both companies make their targets, there will be a 2:1 split between the competitors. The analysts, however, believe that Nintendo will only manage to ship between 1.5 and 2 million consoles (up to a 500,000 unit shortfall) and that Sony will only be able to ship 750,000.
Wii will see how it turns out.
A fair enough point. I guess I should have segued into that one a bit better. Feel free to strike the second paragraph above and replace it with:
"Once the PS3 figures are availble, it will be interesting to see what percentage of the PS3s were sold on eBay. If the current analyst guessimations prove to be accurate, as much as 10% of the PS3s on the market could be on eBay."
Also a fair point. It's actually closer to 4.5%, but it is a significant number overall. I think the big difference is that the Wii isn't experiencing the same supply problems that the PS3 is. So 4.5% of the units on eBay still means that a lot more people in absolute terms have Wiis in hand to play. (Over 573,000 units.) So the significance of the number is far dimished in comparison to the anemic supply of the PS3.
Good Lord. You people waste your mod points on marking a positive comment on the new "Wii" topic icon "Troll" and "Offtopic" while several troll posts (especially the "Information on the PS3") go unmodded? Geez people, get some priorities.
FYI: Wii Topic and Wii Icon.
Posted at +2 this time, because I'm not feeling quite as polite.
BTW, I love the new Wii topic icon. ;-)
It's worth noting that 15,000 PS3 units could be as much as 10% of the North American supply. Given that we don't know the actual figures shipped, it's just as possible that 15,000 is 5% of the supply. Either way, it's a significant percentage of the PS3 consoles.
Let's say you have two different brands of HDTVs. One has a profit margin of $300, while the other has a margin of $600. Furthermore, let's say you have 4 DVDs with profit margins of $2.00, $3.00, $4.00, and $0.50. How do we compare the profits of one type of item over the other?
Well, we could use averages:
1 $300 HDTV
1 $600 HDTV
-----------
$450/unit average
600 $2.00 DVDs
600 $3.00 DVDs
800 $4.00 DVDs
1000 $0.50 DVDs
---------------
$2.23/unit average
Obviously, the HDTVs win. But that's not a very good way to actually compare your business units. A much better way is weighted averages. If we weight the averages of the products against the total sales, we find that the HDTVs are only pulling in a profit of about 30 cents for every sale made while the DVDs are pulling in $1.00 for every sale made. So which one is more valuable to be selling? The big clunky HDTVs that take up shelf space but sell poorly overall, or the DVDs which make up most of the revenue and take very little shelf space?
Of course, actual business practices would state that the HDTV is a method of selling more DVDs. So the sales of the HDTVs in the same store would be justified. But it does show how naive math can get you in serious trouble.