You DO know what happened the last time someone tried to use that song to make fun of a certain fledgling nation, right? Based on the latest Acrobat and Flash/CFM/JRun products, I'm not sure I want Macradobe to be winning this war.;-)
We're the ones who, when walking past the electronics section of a Walmart/Target, are gritting our teeth due to the sensory overload of 50 brand new TV's emitting in the 16khz range.
*shrug* I've found two things to be true of the stores I go to:
1. It's usually noisy enough to distract my attention away from the annoying whine.
2. Most of the stores I go to these days are trying to sell LCD and Plasma screens rather than the old CRTs. Sure, Walmart puts a few CRTs out. But few enough to avoid and ignore.
Of course, since I use my computer screen as a television, I haven't exactly been looking for a new TV either.:-)
I'm 29 and NEW televisions still bother me, high def sets with higher scan rates notwithstanding.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I can't hear the signal anymore. It's just that I've been using an LCD computer monitor as a television for so long that I've practically forgot about the problem. Quite a few people (who are less weird than I) have moved to LCD and Plasma TVs, again requiring me to point to "old" TVs.
I can still hear other frequencies from my computer, but nothing quite as annoying as a television. Though it always seems so amazingly quiet the few times I shut my computer off altogether.;-)
Isn't this just going to make the kids as deaf as the adults?
I seriously doubt it. This just takes advantage of high frequency sounds that you can hear when you're younger, but don't necessarily find yourself completely unable to stand. A perfect example of this sound was the high pitched whine of the old televisions.
Can I get a show of hands for every person here who couldn't stand the bloody noise from the things? Sure, you got used to the sound (since you wanted to watch your favorite show), but it was never the most pleasent. Anyone here ever ask their parents if they could hear the sound? How many of you had your parents answer, "What sound?" (/Me raises hand)
With luck, your hearing will be acute enough at an older age to still hear the whine of those old televisions. However, the majority of people lose the ability to hear the extreme ranges through a natural amount of hearing degradation with age. At least, I've never heard a link between those old televisions and loss of hearing. So I wouldn't be too worried about this guy's invention.
Unless, that is, you happen to be a teenager or an old fogie with exceptional hearing.;-)
No, I got the reference. ("Rock on Dudes and Dudettes!... Those Medieval babes are bodacious!... RUFUS!") I'm just pointing out that it's not quite as "Excellent" as previously thought. (Not that it isn't a cool hack, mind you.):-)
P.S. "Be excellent to each other, and PARTY ON DUDES!";-D
"Most Old" is more like it. His approach is new, but the VR community has had this working for a LONG time. As described in the book "VR Construction Kit" (probably out of print, I'm too lazy to check) positional gloves with finger sensors (e.g. The PowerGlove) were originally invented by a fellow who wanted an air guitar that would work. After a bit of finagling with the electronics, he came up with gloves containing Piezo-electric strips that could detect finger position. Thus the first "air guitar that works" was born.;-)
From what I have heard, their support (as well as their prices) is a lot better in the USA than it is in Europe.
From all your posts, that's my impression as well. Apple has its head screwed on straight here in the states, but it can be difficult to exert proper influence over international offices. (Assuming that a company is paying attention in the first place, which many aren't.) If I were you I'd write to Apple here in the states and let them know that their service needs improving. Knowing Jobs, he'd be threatening to slit someone's throat if the quality of service wasn't fixed in a hurry.;-)
As for prices, well... How do I put this? VAT sucks. Even the worst sales tax here in the States doesn't come close to the overhead included by law into the sale of each item over there. You get a lot of social services in exchange, but... *shrug* to each their own.
Indeed. I took my iBook in to have the logic board replaced under warranty. Not only did they replace the logic board, but they took care of the entire case as well!
The case had been warped from someone falling on top of it when a bus I was riding on came to a rather sudden stop. The screen went way beyond its hinge design, but it held together and continued operating without incident. All I had needed was the logic board changed, but they threw in the case repair at no charge! I didn't even have the Apple Care plan. Now that's service!
P.S. Learn to use the online reservation form on Apple's site before going to a Genius Bar. It saves tons of time and ensures that everyone who's been waiting for a half-hour or so will give you dirty looks when you stride in and grab the next representative.;-)
Just checked newegg and the cheapest drive out there is $44.
Exactly. And I can get a Western Digital 80GB SATA from MWAVE for $55. Someone else pointed out a $41 drive from TigerDirect. The point is that these are retail prices. Even if you assume that only the markup is removed, $51 is still rather high to be paying for a 20GB drive. In quantities of a million units or more, I'd have a hard time believing that the manufacturer wouldn't knock a few more bucks off the price. $40 I might believe. But $51? Considering the number of units we're talking, that's just insane.
My guess would be there are inherent costs involved where manufacture of the drive itself starts to dictate a minimum price.
To throw your own response back at you, "No! Really?"
I understand your point about minimum costs quite well. My only complaint is that $51 is just too darn high for a wholesale price. Especially since we've been arguing over very normal prices for drives. I haven't even pointed out places like PriceWatch, where you can get a 20GB drive for less than $40 easily. (I'll get to why I haven't in a moment.)
OTOH, this thread sounds like someone attempting to apply prices of discount consumer goods from online stores to a the products used in a manufacturing facility. I haven't worked in manufacturing in a while, but when I did I was shocked at how prices on items bought in bulk were not always cheaper than what a 'retail' discount version was.
This is true. Sometimes consumer goods are "loss leaders". Sometimes a company is attempting to liquidate stock on old items. There are a few different reasons why retail goods might be cheaper. That's why I avoided pointing out PriceWatch until just now, because their goods may very well be underpriced. But when you look across a large number of major retailers and consistently come up with lower results than the supposed wholesale cost, then something fishy is going on.
I may be completely wrong in my thinking here, so if you are familar with the intimate workings of a large computer manufacturing business' purchasing department, please correct me.
Not a large company, no. However, I have gotten direct quotes from various manufacturers for electronic parts for a to-be-commericialized item I've been working on. One thing I've learned in doing this is that the lower the cost of a part, the more you have to work to find it. Sure, it's easy to pay Digikey $80 a unit for that 300MHz PowerPC core. But a better core can be had for far less if you're willing to work a little harder to get it.
The same has held true for the electromechanical parts I've needed. Digikey tells me that an ejectable smartcard reader is going to cost $10-$15 a unit (no enclosure!), but I later find that I can get the part for $2.50 from elsewhere. Things get even better when I can get the precise part I actually need (I didn't actually need the ejector, a half-insert reader was fine by me) as opposed to the 3,000,000 feature part they're trying to sell me.:-)
He's referring to bulk prices, though. So a $60 hard drive in the store can be had for $20 in bulk. If Microsoft is really paying $51 for a quality 20GB hard drive, then they need their heads checked.
Same thing with the DVD ROM drives. Microsoft is paying for the drives in bulk with no special enclosures (because they're using their own), no burning features, no packaging, no driver disks, and no manuals. They should be able to get quality components for $10 easy. $5 if they're cheap.
This entire "analysis" smacks of someone attempting to apply retail prices to bulk hardware.
Re:I think I buy into this "ajax" thing
on
Ajax in Action
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I too initially thought "What's the big deal, it's just JavaScript". But I'm now actually reading the "Ajax in Action" book, and it looks like there is something to it. Anyhow, the book explains it better, I recommend it.
You make it sound so new and mysterious.
AJAX is simple. We now have a cross-browser method for making server requests in an asynchronous fashion. Combined with the fact that the demise of Netscape 4 means that we can finally code for the DOM, and you've got a recipe for success. It's not anything magical or mysterious. In fact, you could do it with hidden IFrames long before AJAX even became a buzzword. The key is that it's useful and semi-standard. Which means that we can finally deploy all those cool web apps we've wanted to deploy for years but couldn't.
You can't really price the hardware itself so saying MS is loosing money on each console is not really correct. It depends on how you measure things and over what period.
This was kind of the point I was getting back to. I simply can't believe that Microsoft is actually *loosing* money on these $399 consoles. Not if they're doing their accounting in a straightforward manner. They could always charge back nicities like the LIVE service to the box itself, but that gets into "creative accounting" territory.:-)
I'm not sure what your response about manufacturing means, respectfully, but the 360 has one thousand seven hundred separate components being made all over the world. It's an orginazation and inventory nightmare.
It's also fairly common for something as complex as a game console. The key is that all of those components are shipped in bulk, meaning that they're on the factory room floor for automatic assembly. Most of the parts probably come packed in something like a tape-and-reel system which makes it very easy to automatically place (and solder) the parts on the board.
And when I say "haggling with developers," I mean things like partial funding, partial resource supplying (free dev kits, free Macs, free dev tools, free phone support)
Funding would be an investment, not a charge to the console. Free dev kits are an expense, but you can count that sort of thing in the dozens. (Console manufacturers don't have that many developers they're willing to haggle with.) Plus, the dev kits and the phone support should really be charged back against the Royalties Microsoft is expecting, not the XBOX hardware.
or outright buying of the property, like MS did with Rare
Again, this is an investment, not a charge against the XBOX.
The 360 is no more a PC than the GameCube or PS2. It has a custom PowerPC CPU, a custom GPU
These are really not all that different from a Mac, though the instruction set and cores have been massively expanded for the XBOX.
a unified memory architecture that is very unlike what you find in a PC.
You haven't seen enough PCs. My first PCjr had an SMA. Many of the modern laptops I used to send out into the field also had an SMA for video. ($#@%#@ Neologic crap) SMA is nothing new. It's actually considered worse than separate memory, but in this case it works.
There is also no PC-style BIOS, no PCI/PCIe, no parallel ATA, no legacy I/O - the list goes on.
True enough. All of which should drop the price of the MOBO.
Just for fun: ZipZoomFly currently lists a Athlon XP 3200+ at $259 (OEM).
This is really dangerous territory here, because retail prices are not the same as manufacturing costs. In manufacturing costs, you make a deal with the parts provider. He's usually hoping to sell you a few tens of thousand to a few hundred thousand units. If you tell him that you need to purchase millions of units, he's going to cut you the best deal he can so that you don't get the part from someone else.
Now from a recent article, we know that Intel's actual costs are ~$40 a chip. This gives us a more reasonable starting point. We can probably tack on another $10 since IBM isn't Intel. That gives us a guessitmation base cost of $50 for IBM. Now if IBM wants to convince Microsoft of using their chips instead of Intel's, they're going to want to provide as good of a price as possible. Let's say that they go for $90 a chip. (That's actually high given our previous assumptions, but it gives us more wiggle room for error. Especially since the XBOX uses a tri-core.)
Now let's say that ATI has similar costs and offers a similar chip. We're at about $180 for the both of them. Or $5 north of my original guesstimate.
Let's say, for fun, that a three-core 3.2ghz power PC costs the same as a one-core 3.2ghz (equivalent) Athlon XP. Which of course it doesn't.
It doesn't, but it's also a bad assumption that it costs significantly more. One of the reasons for multicore designs is that they can simply etch more silicon to produce a more powerful chip than having to package more CPUs and PINs. i.e. Silicon wires don't cost anything. Pins do. Sure, their yeild won't be as high due to the larger silicon wafers, but don't count on the chips being that much bigger. According to this info on the PS3 cell (which actually has more cores than the XBOX) is 221mm^2 in size. According to this page, the Pentium IV is 146mm^2. That increase is pretty impressive when you realize that the Cell chip has 8 sub-processors in addition to the main processor. The Pentium D, btw, has a die size of 206mm^2, and it only has *two* cores.
So in the end, the chips probably don't cost as much as you think they do.
8 x 512Mb Samsung 1.2GHz GDDR3 chips ($50-70). If Microsoft is getting these for less than 6 bucks a pop, they're getting them for a STEAL.
Now that's the most insightful thing I've heard in this thread. Ok, so we've added a $50 component to our list because Microsoft wants the best memory performance possible. NOW we're starting to get into the range of what the 360 costs.
20GB SATA hard drive - no less than $40.
I don't buy that. Retail SATA drives go for about $55 for an 80GIG drive. (Which, as you said, the size itself doesn't matter. The materials cost is the big thing.) I wish that Digikey sold the drives in bulk (make it easier to get proper price comparisons), but I can say that PriceWatch has 40GB SATAs for $41. Sure, you have to add the fancy enclosure, but that doesn't cost anything in bulk. I could probably get EMachineShop to do me up a few thousand for around $0.50-$1.00 a piece. (Plastic cases don't cost much. Something fancy like a Magnesium case would, but generally not plastic cases.)
Custom motherboard including ICs, assembly and testing - $40-50, minimum.
Minimum? No, definitely not mimimum. $40-$50 would get you a very nice motherboard at wholesale cost. The boards themselves don't cost that much to manufacture. It's the onboard ICs. Pretty much all of those ICs have a cost ranging from a fraction of a penny to less than a dollar. (Not including the CPU and Memory, of course.)
Add in the costs of non-trivial things like the case, the powersupply, the heatsinks and fans, the controller, the remote control, final assembly, and of course, distribution
Fans, remote controls, and the case don't cost anything. The powersupply and heatsink are reasonable points, but I was including those in the original estimate of "other stuff".
Let's try a happy medium here:
$30 - Mobo $ 2 - Heatsink $ 5 - Power Supply $10 - DVD Drive $ 4 - Case $ 1 - Remote $ 5 - Controller $15 - Hard Drive $10 - Wireless $10 - Cabling --- $82
Anything I'm forgetting in the list above for "other" stuff?
Now let's pull some figures out of thin air. We know that Intel manufactures their Pentium IVs for $40 a piece. We'll be conservative here and give higher figures for CPU and GPU costs. We'll also take you $50 cost for the GDDR3 RAM.
$50 - GDDR RAM (Memory is unified, so this is the only memory cost) $90 - CPU $90 - GPU --- $230
Now those components do put us over the top. (Even if I don't actually buy those costs.) Still, our total is $312. Microsoft should still be able to sell their XBOX 360 at $399 without a direct loss per unit. They might not actually *make* money when all is said and done, but that's a different thing altogether. Plus, there's probably still room to reduce individual component costs in the future.
Which should actually lower the manufacturing price (though not as much as one might think) due to the lack of the hard drive, wireless controller, and headset.
CPU/GPU/Case/mobo/DVD/RAM = probably close to $300 at least
Based on what? With $399 I could build you a reasonably nice PC (without monitor) from off the shelf components at consumer prices. Microsoft has the advantage of bulk, and the fact that most of the components are off the shelf.
A few of the components are specialized here (CPU and GPU) thus why I singled them out. But we're talking silicon. The manufacturing isn't the expensive part. It's the R&D that you're paying for. That's why your costs drop as you order more units. Any electronics manufacturer will jump at the chance to make up their R&D costs through sustainable bulk rather than individual markups. That's why I actually think that $150 is a bit high for the combined cost of the CPU and GPU.
+manufacturing costs (facilities, labor, shipping to assembly centers)
Manufacturing costs are in my guessimations. (i.e. total component costs) Packaging costs and shipping add to it, but only a few dollars per unit.
+advertising
It seems extreme to me for Microsoft to be advertising so much that they lose on each system. Especially when they *should* have a reasonable margin to work with.
+development
Honestly? I'm a bit shocked to think that this console would really have cost Microsoft that much in R&D. Microsoft farmed the most difficult work out to IBM and ATI, leaving Microsoft only to absorb the costs in chip prices. The rest of the work was probably farmed out as well, leaving Microsoft with primarily software development costs. And even that shouldn't be that high, given that the software is a natural extension of their existing DirectX platform. (Unless they're trying to charge back the ENTIRE DirectX development cost. Still, that's just creative accounting.)
The more I think about this, the more I wonder if Microsoft actually *is* losing money on the 360. Everyone knows they were losing on the original XBOX, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're losing here.
Yeah, they'll make a killing since they didn't spend a penny on advertising,
One would expect that the remaining $124-$199 wouldn't be entirely eaten up by such things. $50 a unit for advertising would be extreme, and should still leave them with a margin.
manufacturing,
Um. Welcome to the Redundancy Department of Redundancy.
research and development,
I said "anything less than a loss", not "a profit". I can understand if they're charging back the profits to R&D based on expected sales. That's not the same thing as selling the console at a loss, though.
haggling with develope[r]s,
Dude, that's weak. You need to be a little more specific than "haggling with developers".
distribution...
Again, this shouldn't cost enough to place the console at a loss. They're shipping dozens to hundreds of these things to each store. The economies of scale are on their side.
Even at full price, [the XBOX 360 is] still sold at a loss.
<critical>Maybe Microsoft could make some money off the machine if they knew how to actually design hardware rather than slapping a new case on a PC.</critical>
Seriously, at $399 a unit, I'm absolutely shocked that Microsoft is still losing money on the thing. The CPU and the GPU are the two expensive components. In bulk, I'd have a hard time believing that they cost more than $150-$175 together. The rest of the hardware is relatively inexpensive stuff, costing maybe $50-$100 at most. That leaves me with a total of $200-$275 for manufacturing, making me wonder where the inefficiency is. Is Microsoft really that BAD at hardware design that they can't sell a $399 integrated PC at anything less than a loss?
Whatever? Whatever?!? I don't think you realize the peril you place yourself in! Now the wrath of the First Church of Buster shall verily rain down upon you! Repent! Repent before you are smitten!;-)
If you think Java is true OOP you have never seen a true OOP language.
So your argument is that Java doesn't actually honor encapsulation at runtime?
The argument of "Java not being true OOP" has been done to death and is just silly. Java makes several compromises that prevent it from being "fully" OOP (e.g. the use of primitives), but it still meets all the concepts of a true OOP design. (Objects, Abstraction, Encapsultion, Inheritence, and Polymorphism.)
In some ways Java is much more of a "true" OOP language than many other examples due to the fact that the concepts surrounding the objects are abstracted at all levels, including runtime. Many other languages only use the information at compile time, losing much of it at runtime.
This aspect of Java is both its strength and its weakness. On one hand it makes a level of pluggable APIs possible that are extremely difficult to do in other languages. Or more precisely, it makes class reflection possible, and all other features stem from that. On the other hand, it creates a mismatch between its need to auto-manage a heap, and the OS's need to swap things out on page boundaries. The garbage collector is quite fast these days, but having to churn through the memory heap is just a nightmare for Virtual Memory.
And if you think OOP needs to have 4K+ objects to work you are ever further off course.
Excuse me, but HUH? In an OS designed to handle an OO system like Java, the paging would happen on the object boundaries. The processor would never need to be involved.
You really need to get off this personal vendetta of yours. You might find that there are some very interesting discussions to be had.:-)
I'm sorry, what are most Standards Committees again? Someone had better tell the "World Wide Web Consortium" that they're no longer allowed to dictate standards. And we'd better revoke all those Internic RFCs. Ooo, not to mention Unicode. Disbanding that Consortium is gonna hurt.
But none of those are the almighty ISO, are they? So, we had better change the following paragraph on Wikipedia, before someone gets the (correct) idea that ISO acts as a Consortium in practice:
While the ISO defines itself as a non-governmental organization, its ability to set standards which often become law through treaties or national standards makes it more powerful than most NGOs, and in practice it acts as a consortium with strong links to governments. Participants include one standards body from each member country and major corporations.
As for your calling Mono a "minimalist" implementation, that's bullshit. With the exception of the Windows/MS specific libraries
Oh, so it's not minimalist, it just doesn't implement important APIs.
Did I mention that ALL of the Java APIs are part of the standard? Every one. Nothing left to chance. All of them. Swing, Collections, JSF, Servlets, J2EE, AWT, RMI, CORBA, XML, etc, etc, etc. All of them. Period, end of story. There are no "except"s in the Java standardization.
They own the ".NET" trademark of course, but to build a "CLR implementation" and call it whatever you want is perfectly safe, forever.
Whoo hoo! Sound the trumpets! I can build something that's only partly compatible with the most popular implementation, and never be able to call it.Net! Wow! That's freedom man!
Give it up. Microsoft duped you, and duped many others. They're leading your around by the nose while they get to define the real standard. As I said, at least the JCP can be entered by anyone who wants to make a difference.
Can you find a Java standard anywhere? A JVM standard?
Yes indeedy, do. Mr. PsychicX, I would like to introduce you to the Java Community Process, a full up standards committee encompassing pretty much all the major technology companies in the industry. Java and its extensions all go through this process before being considered final.
Whether you as a developer want to acknowledge the JCP or not is irrelevant. It has been acknowledged by pretty much everyone who does matter, making it a true force in the industry.
Even if you don't like MS, you've gotta admit that from a freedom point of view,.NET beats the crap out of Java.
I admit no such thing. Microsoft has released only the core of the system into the standards committee, and has made no real promise not to enforce patents that would allow them to crush an actual implementation of the.Net system. (As opposed to a "feel good", minimalist implementation that's mostly incompatible with Microsoft's version.)
Under the JCP, ALL APIs in the Java library, ALL bytecode requirements, and ALL Language requirements are published for anyone to implement. The only real power Sun weilds over anyone's head is the ability to deny the use of the "Java" name if they can't live up to the specs.
Sorry dude, but you've been seriously duped.
I think it's pretty damn obvious which runtime system I'm a fan of.
Yes, you're a fan of Microsoft. aka "The Bad Guys". Simply because you fell for a "feel-good" trick of theirs. Nice going.
Slashdot Mirror
You DO know what happened the last time someone tried to use that song to make fun of a certain fledgling nation, right? Based on the latest Acrobat and Flash/CFM/JRun products, I'm not sure I want Macradobe to be winning this war. ;-)
While we're at it, why don't we just sell the internet to Microsoft and be done with it?
Too late
We're the ones who, when walking past the electronics section of a Walmart/Target, are gritting our teeth due to the sensory overload of 50 brand new TV's emitting in the 16khz range.
:-)
*shrug* I've found two things to be true of the stores I go to:
1. It's usually noisy enough to distract my attention away from the annoying whine.
2. Most of the stores I go to these days are trying to sell LCD and Plasma screens rather than the old CRTs. Sure, Walmart puts a few CRTs out. But few enough to avoid and ignore.
Of course, since I use my computer screen as a television, I haven't exactly been looking for a new TV either.
I'm 29 and NEW televisions still bother me, high def sets with higher scan rates notwithstanding.
;-)
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I can't hear the signal anymore. It's just that I've been using an LCD computer monitor as a television for so long that I've practically forgot about the problem. Quite a few people (who are less weird than I) have moved to LCD and Plasma TVs, again requiring me to point to "old" TVs.
I can still hear other frequencies from my computer, but nothing quite as annoying as a television. Though it always seems so amazingly quiet the few times I shut my computer off altogether.
Isn't this just going to make the kids as deaf as the adults?
;-)
I seriously doubt it. This just takes advantage of high frequency sounds that you can hear when you're younger, but don't necessarily find yourself completely unable to stand. A perfect example of this sound was the high pitched whine of the old televisions.
Can I get a show of hands for every person here who couldn't stand the bloody noise from the things? Sure, you got used to the sound (since you wanted to watch your favorite show), but it was never the most pleasent. Anyone here ever ask their parents if they could hear the sound? How many of you had your parents answer, "What sound?" (/Me raises hand)
With luck, your hearing will be acute enough at an older age to still hear the whine of those old televisions. However, the majority of people lose the ability to hear the extreme ranges through a natural amount of hearing degradation with age. At least, I've never heard a link between those old televisions and loss of hearing. So I wouldn't be too worried about this guy's invention.
Unless, that is, you happen to be a teenager or an old fogie with exceptional hearing.
No, I got the reference. ("Rock on Dudes and Dudettes! ... Those Medieval babes are bodacious! ... RUFUS!") I'm just pointing out that it's not quite as "Excellent" as previously thought. (Not that it isn't a cool hack, mind you.) :-)
;-D
P.S. "Be excellent to each other, and PARTY ON DUDES!"
Most excellent!
;-)
"Most Old" is more like it. His approach is new, but the VR community has had this working for a LONG time. As described in the book "VR Construction Kit" (probably out of print, I'm too lazy to check) positional gloves with finger sensors (e.g. The PowerGlove) were originally invented by a fellow who wanted an air guitar that would work. After a bit of finagling with the electronics, he came up with gloves containing Piezo-electric strips that could detect finger position. Thus the first "air guitar that works" was born.
From what I have heard, their support (as well as their prices) is a lot better in the USA than it is in Europe.
;-)
From all your posts, that's my impression as well. Apple has its head screwed on straight here in the states, but it can be difficult to exert proper influence over international offices. (Assuming that a company is paying attention in the first place, which many aren't.) If I were you I'd write to Apple here in the states and let them know that their service needs improving. Knowing Jobs, he'd be threatening to slit someone's throat if the quality of service wasn't fixed in a hurry.
As for prices, well... How do I put this? VAT sucks. Even the worst sales tax here in the States doesn't come close to the overhead included by law into the sale of each item over there. You get a lot of social services in exchange, but... *shrug* to each their own.
Indeed. I took my iBook in to have the logic board replaced under warranty. Not only did they replace the logic board, but they took care of the entire case as well!
;-)
The case had been warped from someone falling on top of it when a bus I was riding on came to a rather sudden stop. The screen went way beyond its hinge design, but it held together and continued operating without incident. All I had needed was the logic board changed, but they threw in the case repair at no charge! I didn't even have the Apple Care plan. Now that's service!
P.S. Learn to use the online reservation form on Apple's site before going to a Genius Bar. It saves tons of time and ensures that everyone who's been waiting for a half-hour or so will give you dirty looks when you stride in and grab the next representative.
Just checked newegg and the cheapest drive out there is $44.
:-)
Exactly. And I can get a Western Digital 80GB SATA from MWAVE for $55. Someone else pointed out a $41 drive from TigerDirect. The point is that these are retail prices. Even if you assume that only the markup is removed, $51 is still rather high to be paying for a 20GB drive. In quantities of a million units or more, I'd have a hard time believing that the manufacturer wouldn't knock a few more bucks off the price. $40 I might believe. But $51? Considering the number of units we're talking, that's just insane.
My guess would be there are inherent costs involved where manufacture of the drive itself starts to dictate a minimum price.
To throw your own response back at you, "No! Really?"
I understand your point about minimum costs quite well. My only complaint is that $51 is just too darn high for a wholesale price. Especially since we've been arguing over very normal prices for drives. I haven't even pointed out places like PriceWatch, where you can get a 20GB drive for less than $40 easily. (I'll get to why I haven't in a moment.)
OTOH, this thread sounds like someone attempting to apply prices of discount consumer goods from online stores to a the products used in a manufacturing facility. I haven't worked in manufacturing in a while, but when I did I was shocked at how prices on items bought in bulk were not always cheaper than what a 'retail' discount version was.
This is true. Sometimes consumer goods are "loss leaders". Sometimes a company is attempting to liquidate stock on old items. There are a few different reasons why retail goods might be cheaper. That's why I avoided pointing out PriceWatch until just now, because their goods may very well be underpriced. But when you look across a large number of major retailers and consistently come up with lower results than the supposed wholesale cost, then something fishy is going on.
I may be completely wrong in my thinking here, so if you are familar with the intimate workings of a large computer manufacturing business' purchasing department, please correct me.
Not a large company, no. However, I have gotten direct quotes from various manufacturers for electronic parts for a to-be-commericialized item I've been working on. One thing I've learned in doing this is that the lower the cost of a part, the more you have to work to find it. Sure, it's easy to pay Digikey $80 a unit for that 300MHz PowerPC core. But a better core can be had for far less if you're willing to work a little harder to get it.
The same has held true for the electromechanical parts I've needed. Digikey tells me that an ejectable smartcard reader is going to cost $10-$15 a unit (no enclosure!), but I later find that I can get the part for $2.50 from elsewhere. Things get even better when I can get the precise part I actually need (I didn't actually need the ejector, a half-insert reader was fine by me) as opposed to the 3,000,000 feature part they're trying to sell me.
He's referring to bulk prices, though. So a $60 hard drive in the store can be had for $20 in bulk. If Microsoft is really paying $51 for a quality 20GB hard drive, then they need their heads checked.
Same thing with the DVD ROM drives. Microsoft is paying for the drives in bulk with no special enclosures (because they're using their own), no burning features, no packaging, no driver disks, and no manuals. They should be able to get quality components for $10 easy. $5 if they're cheap.
This entire "analysis" smacks of someone attempting to apply retail prices to bulk hardware.
I too initially thought "What's the big deal, it's just JavaScript". But I'm now actually reading the "Ajax in Action" book, and it looks like there is something to it. Anyhow, the book explains it better, I recommend it.
You make it sound so new and mysterious.
AJAX is simple. We now have a cross-browser method for making server requests in an asynchronous fashion. Combined with the fact that the demise of Netscape 4 means that we can finally code for the DOM, and you've got a recipe for success. It's not anything magical or mysterious. In fact, you could do it with hidden IFrames long before AJAX even became a buzzword. The key is that it's useful and semi-standard. Which means that we can finally deploy all those cool web apps we've wanted to deploy for years but couldn't.
You're preaching to the choir. In particular:
:-)
You can't really price the hardware itself so saying MS is loosing money on each console is not really correct. It depends on how you measure things and over what period.
This was kind of the point I was getting back to. I simply can't believe that Microsoft is actually *loosing* money on these $399 consoles. Not if they're doing their accounting in a straightforward manner. They could always charge back nicities like the LIVE service to the box itself, but that gets into "creative accounting" territory.
I'm not sure what your response about manufacturing means, respectfully, but the 360 has one thousand seven hundred separate components being made all over the world. It's an orginazation and inventory nightmare.
It's also fairly common for something as complex as a game console. The key is that all of those components are shipped in bulk, meaning that they're on the factory room floor for automatic assembly. Most of the parts probably come packed in something like a tape-and-reel system which makes it very easy to automatically place (and solder) the parts on the board.
And when I say "haggling with developers," I mean things like partial funding, partial resource supplying (free dev kits, free Macs, free dev tools, free phone support)
Funding would be an investment, not a charge to the console. Free dev kits are an expense, but you can count that sort of thing in the dozens. (Console manufacturers don't have that many developers they're willing to haggle with.) Plus, the dev kits and the phone support should really be charged back against the Royalties Microsoft is expecting, not the XBOX hardware.
or outright buying of the property, like MS did with Rare
Again, this is an investment, not a charge against the XBOX.
The 360 is no more a PC than the GameCube or PS2. It has a custom PowerPC CPU, a custom GPU
These are really not all that different from a Mac, though the instruction set and cores have been massively expanded for the XBOX.
a unified memory architecture that is very unlike what you find in a PC.
You haven't seen enough PCs. My first PCjr had an SMA. Many of the modern laptops I used to send out into the field also had an SMA for video. ($#@%#@ Neologic crap) SMA is nothing new. It's actually considered worse than separate memory, but in this case it works.
There is also no PC-style BIOS, no PCI/PCIe, no parallel ATA, no legacy I/O - the list goes on.
True enough. All of which should drop the price of the MOBO.
Just for fun: ZipZoomFly currently lists a Athlon XP 3200+ at $259 (OEM).
This is really dangerous territory here, because retail prices are not the same as manufacturing costs. In manufacturing costs, you make a deal with the parts provider. He's usually hoping to sell you a few tens of thousand to a few hundred thousand units. If you tell him that you need to purchase millions of units, he's going to cut you the best deal he can so that you don't get the part from someone else.
Now from a recent article, we know that Intel's actual costs are ~$40 a chip. This gives us a more reasonable starting point. We can probably tack on another $10 since IBM isn't Intel. That gives us a guessitmation base cost of $50 for IBM. Now if IBM wants to convince Microsoft of using their chips instead of Intel's, they're going to want to provide as good of a price as possible. Let's say that they go for $90 a chip. (That's actually high given our previous assumptions, but it gives us more wiggle room for error. Especially since the XBOX uses a tri-core.)
Now let's say that ATI has similar costs and offers a similar chip. We're at about $180 for the both of them. Or $5 north of my original guesstimate.
Let's say, for fun, that a three-core 3.2ghz power PC costs the same as a one-core 3.2ghz (equivalent) Athlon XP. Which of course it doesn't.
It doesn't, but it's also a bad assumption that it costs significantly more. One of the reasons for multicore designs is that they can simply etch more silicon to produce a more powerful chip than having to package more CPUs and PINs. i.e. Silicon wires don't cost anything. Pins do. Sure, their yeild won't be as high due to the larger silicon wafers, but don't count on the chips being that much bigger. According to this info on the PS3 cell (which actually has more cores than the XBOX) is 221mm^2 in size. According to this page, the Pentium IV is 146mm^2. That increase is pretty impressive when you realize that the Cell chip has 8 sub-processors in addition to the main processor. The Pentium D, btw, has a die size of 206mm^2, and it only has *two* cores.
So in the end, the chips probably don't cost as much as you think they do.
Now that's the most insightful thing I've heard in this thread. Ok, so we've added a $50 component to our list because Microsoft wants the best memory performance possible. NOW we're starting to get into the range of what the 360 costs.
20GB SATA hard drive - no less than $40.
I don't buy that. Retail SATA drives go for about $55 for an 80GIG drive. (Which, as you said, the size itself doesn't matter. The materials cost is the big thing.) I wish that Digikey sold the drives in bulk (make it easier to get proper price comparisons), but I can say that PriceWatch has 40GB SATAs for $41. Sure, you have to add the fancy enclosure, but that doesn't cost anything in bulk. I could probably get EMachineShop to do me up a few thousand for around $0.50-$1.00 a piece. (Plastic cases don't cost much. Something fancy like a Magnesium case would, but generally not plastic cases.)
Custom motherboard including ICs, assembly and testing - $40-50, minimum.
Minimum? No, definitely not mimimum. $40-$50 would get you a very nice motherboard at wholesale cost. The boards themselves don't cost that much to manufacture. It's the onboard ICs. Pretty much all of those ICs have a cost ranging from a fraction of a penny to less than a dollar. (Not including the CPU and Memory, of course.)
Add in the costs of non-trivial things like the case, the powersupply, the heatsinks and fans, the controller, the remote control, final assembly, and of course, distribution
Fans, remote controls, and the case don't cost anything. The powersupply and heatsink are reasonable points, but I was including those in the original estimate of "other stuff".
Let's try a happy medium here:Anything I'm forgetting in the list above for "other" stuff?
Now let's pull some figures out of thin air. We know that Intel manufactures their Pentium IVs for $40 a piece. We'll be conservative here and give higher figures for CPU and GPU costs. We'll also take you $50 cost for the GDDR3 RAM.Now those components do put us over the top. (Even if I don't actually buy those costs.) Still, our total is $312. Microsoft should still be able to sell their XBOX 360 at $399 without a direct loss per unit. They might not actually *make* money when all is said and done, but that's a different thing altogether. Plus, there's probably still room to reduce individual component costs in the future.
Core unit: $299
Which should actually lower the manufacturing price (though not as much as one might think) due to the lack of the hard drive, wireless controller, and headset.
CPU/GPU/Case/mobo/DVD/RAM = probably close to $300 at least
Based on what? With $399 I could build you a reasonably nice PC (without monitor) from off the shelf components at consumer prices. Microsoft has the advantage of bulk, and the fact that most of the components are off the shelf.
A few of the components are specialized here (CPU and GPU) thus why I singled them out. But we're talking silicon. The manufacturing isn't the expensive part. It's the R&D that you're paying for. That's why your costs drop as you order more units. Any electronics manufacturer will jump at the chance to make up their R&D costs through sustainable bulk rather than individual markups. That's why I actually think that $150 is a bit high for the combined cost of the CPU and GPU.
+manufacturing costs (facilities, labor, shipping to assembly centers)
Manufacturing costs are in my guessimations. (i.e. total component costs) Packaging costs and shipping add to it, but only a few dollars per unit.
+advertising
It seems extreme to me for Microsoft to be advertising so much that they lose on each system. Especially when they *should* have a reasonable margin to work with.
+development
Honestly? I'm a bit shocked to think that this console would really have cost Microsoft that much in R&D. Microsoft farmed the most difficult work out to IBM and ATI, leaving Microsoft only to absorb the costs in chip prices. The rest of the work was probably farmed out as well, leaving Microsoft with primarily software development costs. And even that shouldn't be that high, given that the software is a natural extension of their existing DirectX platform. (Unless they're trying to charge back the ENTIRE DirectX development cost. Still, that's just creative accounting.)
The more I think about this, the more I wonder if Microsoft actually *is* losing money on the 360. Everyone knows they were losing on the original XBOX, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're losing here.
Yeah, they'll make a killing since they didn't spend a penny on advertising,
One would expect that the remaining $124-$199 wouldn't be entirely eaten up by such things. $50 a unit for advertising would be extreme, and should still leave them with a margin.
manufacturing,
Um. Welcome to the Redundancy Department of Redundancy.
research and development,
I said "anything less than a loss", not "a profit". I can understand if they're charging back the profits to R&D based on expected sales. That's not the same thing as selling the console at a loss, though.
haggling with develope[r]s,
Dude, that's weak. You need to be a little more specific than "haggling with developers".
distribution...
Again, this shouldn't cost enough to place the console at a loss. They're shipping dozens to hundreds of these things to each store. The economies of scale are on their side.
Even at full price, [the XBOX 360 is] still sold at a loss.
<critical>Maybe Microsoft could make some money off the machine if they knew how to actually design hardware rather than slapping a new case on a PC.</critical>
Seriously, at $399 a unit, I'm absolutely shocked that Microsoft is still losing money on the thing. The CPU and the GPU are the two expensive components. In bulk, I'd have a hard time believing that they cost more than $150-$175 together. The rest of the hardware is relatively inexpensive stuff, costing maybe $50-$100 at most. That leaves me with a total of $200-$275 for manufacturing, making me wonder where the inefficiency is. Is Microsoft really that BAD at hardware design that they can't sell a $399 integrated PC at anything less than a loss?
Whatever? Whatever?!? I don't think you realize the peril you place yourself in! Now the wrath of the First Church of Buster shall verily rain down upon you! Repent! Repent before you are smitten! ;-)
They aren't the ones risking their lives! It's the poor dummy Mortimer!
Wait. Who the hell is Mortimer? I demand Buster back! We have the technology, we can rebuild him!
If you think Java is true OOP you have never seen a true OOP language.
:-)
So your argument is that Java doesn't actually honor encapsulation at runtime?
The argument of "Java not being true OOP" has been done to death and is just silly. Java makes several compromises that prevent it from being "fully" OOP (e.g. the use of primitives), but it still meets all the concepts of a true OOP design. (Objects, Abstraction, Encapsultion, Inheritence, and Polymorphism.)
In some ways Java is much more of a "true" OOP language than many other examples due to the fact that the concepts surrounding the objects are abstracted at all levels, including runtime. Many other languages only use the information at compile time, losing much of it at runtime.
This aspect of Java is both its strength and its weakness. On one hand it makes a level of pluggable APIs possible that are extremely difficult to do in other languages. Or more precisely, it makes class reflection possible, and all other features stem from that. On the other hand, it creates a mismatch between its need to auto-manage a heap, and the OS's need to swap things out on page boundaries. The garbage collector is quite fast these days, but having to churn through the memory heap is just a nightmare for Virtual Memory.
And if you think OOP needs to have 4K+ objects to work you are ever further off course.
Excuse me, but HUH? In an OS designed to handle an OO system like Java, the paging would happen on the object boundaries. The processor would never need to be involved.
You really need to get off this personal vendetta of yours. You might find that there are some very interesting discussions to be had.
JCP isn't a standard. It's merely a consortium.
.Net! Wow! That's freedom man!
I'm sorry, what are most Standards Committees again? Someone had better tell the "World Wide Web Consortium" that they're no longer allowed to dictate standards. And we'd better revoke all those Internic RFCs. Ooo, not to mention Unicode. Disbanding that Consortium is gonna hurt.
But none of those are the almighty ISO, are they? So, we had better change the following paragraph on Wikipedia, before someone gets the (correct) idea that ISO acts as a Consortium in practice:
While the ISO defines itself as a non-governmental organization, its ability to set standards which often become law through treaties or national standards makes it more powerful than most NGOs, and in practice it acts as a consortium with strong links to governments. Participants include one standards body from each member country and major corporations.
As for your calling Mono a "minimalist" implementation, that's bullshit. With the exception of the Windows/MS specific libraries
Oh, so it's not minimalist, it just doesn't implement important APIs.
Did I mention that ALL of the Java APIs are part of the standard? Every one. Nothing left to chance. All of them. Swing, Collections, JSF, Servlets, J2EE, AWT, RMI, CORBA, XML, etc, etc, etc. All of them. Period, end of story. There are no "except"s in the Java standardization.
They own the ".NET" trademark of course, but to build a "CLR implementation" and call it whatever you want is perfectly safe, forever.
Whoo hoo! Sound the trumpets! I can build something that's only partly compatible with the most popular implementation, and never be able to call it
Give it up. Microsoft duped you, and duped many others. They're leading your around by the nose while they get to define the real standard. As I said, at least the JCP can be entered by anyone who wants to make a difference.
Can you find a Java standard anywhere? A JVM standard?
.NET beats the crap out of Java.
.Net system. (As opposed to a "feel good", minimalist implementation that's mostly incompatible with Microsoft's version.)
Yes indeedy, do. Mr. PsychicX, I would like to introduce you to the Java Community Process, a full up standards committee encompassing pretty much all the major technology companies in the industry. Java and its extensions all go through this process before being considered final.
Whether you as a developer want to acknowledge the JCP or not is irrelevant. It has been acknowledged by pretty much everyone who does matter, making it a true force in the industry.
Even if you don't like MS, you've gotta admit that from a freedom point of view,
I admit no such thing. Microsoft has released only the core of the system into the standards committee, and has made no real promise not to enforce patents that would allow them to crush an actual implementation of the
Under the JCP, ALL APIs in the Java library, ALL bytecode requirements, and ALL Language requirements are published for anyone to implement. The only real power Sun weilds over anyone's head is the ability to deny the use of the "Java" name if they can't live up to the specs.
Sorry dude, but you've been seriously duped.
I think it's pretty damn obvious which runtime system I'm a fan of.
Yes, you're a fan of Microsoft. aka "The Bad Guys". Simply because you fell for a "feel-good" trick of theirs. Nice going.
P.S. Here's the spec for 1.4, the spec for 1.5, and the working group for 1.6. You can join the committee and have your say in the design of 1.6, if you'd like. Now that's a real standard!