So what you're saying is that the Treo is competitive with the iPhone, except that it has fewer features (about $250 worth of fewer features if you look at the price of an iPod) and a clunkier interface. But it makes up for those issues because it costs less.
Congratulations, you've stated the obvious.:-P
BTW, a brand new Treo is ~$250-$300 with a service plan. $250 (Treo) + $250 (iPod) = $500 (iPhone). Using the low-end of variable eBay prices on used goods is far more disingenuous than my not stating the blatantly obvious tie-in with iTunes.
Yes, I see what you're saying. The market will soon abandon its Wiis and Playstations to go and play web games on their iPhone.
[...]
On second thought, I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you. The iPhone is in a completely different market from the video game market. You can't simply take data from one market and presume it will hold true in another! Unless you can show some sort of correlation between the behavior of the markets, the only result of such a comparison would be a huge potential for financial disaster.
Economies of scale work for items with fixed inputs
In the early 1990's, Rare spent millions of dollars on acquiring SGI equipment and Alias software capable of doing the models necessary for Donkey Kong Country. If the game has sold poorly, Rare would have gone bankrupt.
Today, the same work can be done on a commodity PC with free or inexpensive modeling and rendering software.
Believe it or not, there actually are a lot of fixed inputs relating to development of a new game. These inputs allow more output from the same team. Furthermore, even the team itself is an input that lowers its cost with scale. Now that video games are big business, it's becoming cheaper to obtain talented artists and programmers at lower costs. That trend continues as centers for higher education are being setup to provide focused degrees for the industry.
Code can and is reused during different developments. In addition, models, textures, and sound effects can be reused. Nintendo successfully proved this during the GameCube generation by reusing assets between the Mario games and the Metriod games. Sega also appears to have reused assets between Sonic games.
Basically, if it were true that economics of scale did not affect game development, then it would still take a small team of developers a year and a half to recreate Pacman. Yet the truth is that your average college student can replicate the feat with a weekend of coding.
I believe you mean "expandable storage". The miniSD slot is exactly what the Casio has, and is exactly what the market is rejecting! You technophile may appreciate the ability to swap 2GB SD cards, but to your average user it's a single 2GB expansion. (They're not going to spend $$$ getting multiple SD cards, assuming they spend the money to get the first one.) Which means that the 4-8 GB hard drive options are much more appealing.
Full alphabetical keyboard - On-screen
This is 6 of 1, half-dozen of another. While a physical keyboard may seem superior, the market is saying that they're about the same. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal went on record saying that the two methods are more or less equivalent.
Choice of Opera or Apple browser - Safari
The WebKit browser that Nokia provides is severely lacking in usability. Opera Mini is better, but neither one compares to the Safari on the iPhone. Especially in the area of usability. The "Zoom on Element" feature alone greatly boosts the usability of the browser. This is still a definite win for the iPhone.
Support for standard, instant E-Mail notification - No
This is a bit misleading. The Nokia phones have a Flash development platform for creating phone applications. That's not the same as being able to surf Flash movies on the web. Neither phone can do that. The iPhone handles YouTube by directly streaming H.264 versions of the movies. Its Quicktime decoders take care of the rest.
I don't even understand what this one means: On-Screen Conferencing options - Play on-hold games with the phone
The iPhone has on-screen menus to conference in other callers. Just press a button. Most other phones require you to pull the PBX-style tricks of putting one caller on hold so you can dial up another caller, then transfer them together to create a conference. It's a pain, and completely non-intuitive.
The most striking problem with your analysis is that you're saying, "This geek feature doesn't work, that's why I don't like the iPhone." Which makes my point perfectly. You are not Apple's customer! You are a geek who knows how to make your smart-phone work for you. The majority of consumers are not. However, nearly all of them can make an iPhone work for them. Which is why the iPhone is trouncing the competition.
Lastly, the Nokia E61i is not a "European Phone". It's available here in the states.
Might I recommend moving beyond Economics 101 into the more daring regions of inflation vs. economics of scale? Thanks to the economics of scale, the price per unit falls dramatically even as inflation drives the price upward. The result is that there exists a "sweet-spot" where the price may remain stable. It's only through the introduction of radical new developments that prices go upward.
Basic Market Fact: The market for video games is larger than at any previous point in history. Every generation has seen a distinct rise in the number of overall units sold. (i.e. There's more pie for the competitors to divide.)
The Wii prices have remained stable because Nintendo is riding the economics of scale to combat inflationary costs. The XBox 360 and PS3 are so costly because they bucked these economics and embraced the cost of the disruptive HDTV technology. HDTV is at the edge of technology. It's what the CD-ROM was in the days of the 3DO. It's a high-technology item that still has limited scale to back it. Prices of the sets and microchips to support them are dropping, but not fast enough for the consoles to exist in a competitive region of scale vs. inflation.
Thus it's a gamble: Will the consumer pay more for cutting edge video-game technology?
The traditional market response has always been a negative. The 3DO priced itself out of a market, the Jaguar priced itself out of a market, the Saturn priced itself out of a market, the Turbo-Grafx priced itself out of a market, etc. The closest example of this trend being disrupted was the original Playstation. It was introduced to the market at $299, a full $100 more than the market was used to for new consoles. However, its price fell quickly and newer models dropped the unit cost by that much more. The majority of consoles were sold at a much lower price. The trend repeated with the PS2.
In fact, history shows that the inferior technology often wins out. Atari 2600 v. Intellivision, NES v. Master System, SNES/Genesis v. 3DO/Jaguar, Playstation v. N64, PS2 v. GameCube/XBox, etc.
All this adds up to bad news for overly expensive consoles. They are gambling on superior technology, but the market tends to not put much value there.
Not if Nintendo has anything to say about it. They went down this $60/game road once before with the Nintendo 64, and it cost them dearly. In the Gamecube generation, Nintendo set out to reverse the trend. They looked into methods of reducing costs (anyone notice how much Nintendo reused models, scenery, textures, and sound effects between games?) and bringing the average game purchase down to something closer to $20-$30. Blockbuster games still started at $50, but came down quickly.
Now with the Wii, Nintendo is continuing that trend. They intentionally kept the console away from HD to realize the cost benefits of SD development. Their console is still the cheapest on the market, and their games have been keeping their prices in line with what consumers have come to expect. Many of the older titles are already dropping in price. If and when the supply problem is resolved, I fully expect that Nintendo and Co. will look into dropping the price on games to make a lion's share of profits by moving larger quantities.
IMHO, the article merely demonstrates that it is possible to sell $60 games. The question that has gone unanswered yet is, "Is it possible to profit from $60 games?" Will the profits of these high-ticket games exceed the profits of the more homely Nintendo and Ps2 titles? Or is it being driven by the hype surrounding new consoles?
Which raises the question: What happened during the last generation of console launches? The Ps2 and Gamecube both sold very well out of the gate before their sales diverged. If we went back in time and looked at the launch, would we find a similar, but temporary, trend? According to the article, the average is being pulled upward by the introduction of a large number of $50 games by Nintendo and Co. Thus I have a feeling that the same trend would be present if the numbers were crunched back during the last generational launch.
All together, I fear that the Next Generation data simply adds up to another case of "How to lie with numbers". Since there are no real baselines established, the numbers make it appear that we consumers are going to be in for the most expensive games ever. Unfortunately, they have not given any historical context upon which to base that conclusion, so their numbers are nothing more than interesting data points about the current market. They don't tell the whole story.
This is possibly the most insightful comment in this entire thread. Everyone is so busy considering why American telcos "suck" that they're not stopping to actually carry through on the comparison made. For those of you in the dark, this is a Casio W41CA:
An impressive phone? Certainly. It's on the order of something like the Motorola Q phone, but with a better form factor. At the end of the day, though, the Casio is still just a phone. The iPhone, however, is a complete hand computer and digital assistant that hits a sweet spot in the market's needs. The iPhone may appear to have a similar feature list, until you actually get down to the nitty gritty of it:
iPhone - Casio 128MB - 70MB 4-8 GB Hard Drive - 2GB SD Slot Visual Voicemail - ??? Auto-Landscape Mode - Manual Swivel Phone Numbers from Webpages - No Integration with Movie/Music Service - No Easy "Pinch" and "Spin" Navigation - Phone Keypad Auto-Threading of SMS Conversations - Standard SMS Mailbox On-Screen Conferencing options - Play on-hold games with the phone Safari Browser with "Zoom on Element" Features - Opera Mini with imprecise Zooming Rich email client - ??? Smooth Integration with Google Maps, Youtube, and Mac Widgets - Some functionality through Opera. No Flash
Basically, it comes down to usability. The iPhone is a modest step from a pure technology and feature-set perspective, but it's a quantum leap from a usability perspective. While the iPhone's design does not meet everyone's needs, it meets the largest cross-section of users on the market. i.e. The people who are not technophiles and have little to no idea how to use all the bizarre and excessive features of a smart-phone. For the most part, people just want a phone. The iPhone gives them a phone + a comprehensive feature set that easily performs other daily tasks that people do (e.g. check whether, look up maps, etc.) and handily replaces several other devices that they might carry around.
Folks around here tend to laugh at Taco's initial assessment of the iPod. ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.") Yet they turn around and make the exact same mistake with the iPhone. It's an interesting trend to behold.
One strong EMP pulse or major solar flare event and all our electronics can be fried
CDROMs are solid-state media and aren't affected by EMP or solar flares. The exact lifetime of a pressed CD is still, as of yet, unknown, but there's a good chance that the electronic data would make it long enough for archeologists to recover the data.
Using terms suggesting that someone would be convicted or held liable for a "GPL violation" suggests that a court must uphold the GPL as valid for such a lawsuit to be successful.
The court must "test" the GPL if the defendant claims that he accepted the terms. At that point the judge will attempt to decide whether the defendant did indeed keep up his half of the bargain, potentially restricting the power of the GPL agreement where local laws say otherwise.
This makes people believe (erroneously) that the GPL is a questionable document that needs to be tested in court.
The GPL is a fairly air-tight design, but there's nothing erroneous about its need for court testing. A judge can (and will!) strike various parts of the agreement if he finds them to be in conflict with either the law or the intent of the agreement. As a result, it's difficult to legally "prove" that a given type of agreement will hold up in court unless either that same agreement or a similar agreement is tested. The GPL has had sufficient legal testing to show that it will hold up in court.
If I'm not mistaken, your confusion stems from section 5 of the GPL, which explicitly provides for the fact that no proof of an agreement takes place. According to the GPL, you don't have to accept it to use the software. It falls back on standard copyright law in that case. Thus when an infringer is identified, he faces a double-edged sword. Does he claim that he did not accept the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for copyright infringement? Or does he claim that he did indeed accept the terms of the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for (I'll phrase this carefully just to annoy the "contract vs. license" folks out there:P) "breach of the terms and conditions of the contract"?
The GPL is an interesting experiment in using a legal loophole as the foundation for a distribution agreement. This case provides further evidence that the concept works as well in practice as it does in legal theory.
I know what you mean, but I think you mean to say "often" rather than "usually". It's becoming more and more common for content providers to use Bittorrent as their distribution method of choice. Considering that it lowers the bandwidth bill while simultaneously raising the download speeds, it's a win-win for all involved.:-)
BTW, Game Demos/Patches != Homebrews. To be clear, I mentioned homebrews being available on Bittorrent. Dreamcast homebrews in particular are difficult to find downloads for outside of Bittorrent. A lot of sites supposedly have downloads, but they're either in the wrong format or they're no longer available for direct download. Yet you can usually find them still floating around in torrent form somewhere. Thus Bittorrent becomes a necessity in those situations rather than simply an option.
Speaking of the Dreamcast, most of the piracy (which is more or less on the level of "abandonware") is run through MegaUpload and RapidShare. Funny how those nasty pirates don't actually need Bittorrent for their dirty work, eh?;-)
In this case, yes. The movie file is provides by the Azureus service Vuze. From what I understand, they have permission to provide HD trailers to Vuze users. Their business model, in fact, is based around the core idea that HD content is too expensive to host through a standard HTTP download model. To combat that cost they provide a Bittorrent service that allows content producers to upload their HD content to Vuze for ultra-fast seeding on Vuze's servers combined with the extra bandwidth of P2P users.
While it is still a long way from becoming the "Youtube in HD" that they originally pitched it as, it does still have its uses. HD Trailers are one example. Another is the HD version of various short films which have been freely distributed. (Though that "Elephant's Dream" sci-fi/fantasy movie makes absolutely no sense. It was amazingly good CG, but perhaps next time they could include a story?);-)
Sales of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in the US rose by 21% in June. Tracking firm NPD Group reported that 98,500 PS3s were sold.
Sony said that the $100 (£50) price cut to the 60GB PS3 led to a 135% sales rise over the last two weeks.
Let's see here. We have:
1. Actual numbers of sales. 2. A computed increase in sales. 3. An analysis from the company who sells the product.
It all adds up to an increase in sales due to the PS3 price drop. Something which I completely believe.
Since the launch of the PS3, the number one sticking point with consumers has been the high price. It was irrelevant if they could afford it or not, it was simply more than they were willing to pay. The temporary $100 price drop was thus able to impress upon consumers that the PS3 is currently being sold at a "value" price, and that they had better get one before the price goes back up. (Some people are suckers for sales.:P) Therefore, Sony's analysis that correlates the sales increase with the drop in price is justified. It's difficult to *prove* in a mathematical sense, but the evidence is sufficient to accept the claim on the basis of common sense, economic theory, and market trends.
The point is to encrypt ALL P2P traffic. That prevents the networks from being able to distinguish legal from illegal. And as you point out yourself, Bittorrent has plenty of legal uses.
While I don't necessarily like the idea of using legal traffic as a cover for illegal content, I would like to prevent networks from getting any bright ideas about installing naive filters. When I download that HD Quality trailer of the latest movie from Azureus, that's LEGAL content. I don't want it blocked because some idiot installed a filter that said "Latest movie title in name == TEH BAD". Not to mention attempt to block software demos and free editions because they look like illegal wares.
I don't know about anyone else, but my connection to the internet would be crippled if Bittorrent was taken away. All the OSes, software products, fanmade movies, homebrew games, and other legal content I download and evaluate/use would be simply switched off. Quite a bit of that content would be impossible to obtain through any other means. So despite any potential illegal uses available for the technology, I'm all for encrypting the traffic to prevent naive filtering. And any ISP that tries to block it outright would put themselves on the hook for a user backlash at a minimum. Potentially even a class-action lawsuit for misrepresentation of services.:-)
Did you know that prior to the Atari 2600, video game systems were ONLY sold during the Holiday Season? 'Tis true. Atari themselves started the trend when they manufactured their home Pong console for only the holidays. Sears (the only store that sold the unit) experienced long lines and stock sellouts very similar to what was seen with the Nintendo Wii. The only catch is that once the stock was sold, there were no more on the way until next Holiday Season.
Atari's primary competitor at the time, the Maganvox Odyssey, was sold year-round. However, its sales were relatively poor in comparison.
And there is your useless bit'o'trivia for the day.:-P
Whilst new features in a console are nice, the biggest problem I have with new revisions is if you want to "upgrade" what do you do with your old kit?
Sell it at a lower price so that someone who has different priorities or is not as privileged as you can purchase it?
There's a HUGE market of people who want second-hand game consoles. As long as you keep your kit in operating condition, I wouldn't worry too much about what happens to the old stuff. Simply trade it in at the local GAME for credit toward a new unit and be happy.
Harrison talks about the move of the company's sales and marketing force, acknowledges that Nintendo may 'lose some purists' while attempting to broaden the audience
If you lose 100,000 purists but gain 50,000,000 new customers, then I'd say the tradeoff is a pretty good deal!
That being said, I haven't seen any sign of the Nintendo faithful ditching Nintendo. Everyone who was going to leave already left during the Gamecube generation. Now some of those players are coming back, and some of them are ranting about how they're "too grown up" for Nintendo now. I imagine that Nintendo will just shrug its shoulders and move on. They're creating a large enough NEW market that they don't need to worry about a vocal minority.
Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.
When people use the term "too old" for something, they usually mean that the item in question can no longer support the person (e.g. a playground) or that it does not challenge the person at a level commiserate with their age. (e.g. Leapfrog Leapster) Thus the only argument I could see is that the storylines are too simplistic to hold an adult's attention. Which would be a good argument if we were talking about My Little Ponies. But half the games don't actually have storylines (e.g. Excite Truck, Metal Slug, Smash Bros., Strikers) and the majority of the remainder are anything but insulting. (e.g. Zelda, Super Paper Mario, Metroid, Red Steel, etc.)
The truth is that the Wii simply does not appeal to some people, regardless of the excuses they make up. Whether they used to be or not, these people are NOT Nintendo's customers any longer. Nintendo would be foolish to try and chase them around when the truth is that these customers are better satisfied elsewhere.
8-Track tapes aren't the only example where his history is a bit... off. LaserDiscs, for example, really took off in Japan. The reason? LaserDisc players and discs were kept artificially high in the states because the movie companies were worried about box office losses due to the potential "home theater" experience. The Japanese market was by no means constrained by this artificial inflation, and became incredibly popular for Japanese anime. As a result, the format floundered here in the states only because the fools pushing the format kept the price too high.
Similarly, the article overlooks why there were tons of VHS tapes at video rental stores. Early on in the format war you had some of both. It was only after VHS won that Betamax started to fall off. While the article does mention that adult entertainment played a role in the fall of Betamax, what really did it in was the recording time. With VHS able to record 2 hours, then 4 hours, and eventually 6 hours (!) it was a lot more useful to home viewers who wanted to record their favorite television show. The quality was a non-issue because nearly everyone had rabbit-ears or rooftop antennas. With the cruddy quality of over-the-air transmissions, why would anyone worry about "better color response"?
Furthermore, I find the article's implication that a world without Mac OS X and iPods would be somehow "better" than the situation today to be... a bit disturbing. Putting aside for a moment that NEXTSTEP was just as good of a choice (perhaps better?) than BeOS, without the market push from Job's and Apple, we'd still be waiting for the ability to purchase music and television online. Technology would be potentially held back by as much as a decade due to the short-sightedness of the media conglomerates.
Have you heard of XUL? All those things are possible today with a combination of XUL and HTML 5 technologies. Considering that Parakey is run by the fellow who started the Firefox project (Blake Ross), I imagine that basing his "WebOS" on Firefox technologies was exactly what he had in mind.
Here are a few examples of these applications:
ajaxWrite - Honestly, Google Docs is more usable, but ajaxWrite shows off how XUL can look exactly like a local application.
CanvasPaint - An MS Paint clone done with HTML 5 technologies.
Video and Audio support from the WHATWG specs are already in Opera and are expected to show up in Firefox 3. Apple is also implementing the tags, though possibly without default support for OGG. (You'll need to install the codec yourself.) In the meantime, the Video tag is being emulated by some developers by using Java Applets as the shunt. As soon as the video support is in Firefox, the shunt will automatically deactivate and allow the browser to take over.
Does that mean I can be jailed? Just because I'm taking advantage of someone else's screwup?
Possibly. Taking advantage of someone else's screwup can be viewed as an intent to defraud. That being said, the station would be more likely to simply ask you to pay the difference. (Assuming it was a big enough deal to make a stink about, which it probably isn't.)
According to the TFA, that's what the Casino did. They asked people who abused the machine to return the winnings they'd received. Some of them complied. Some of them didn't. Those that didn't are the ones who are being considered for criminal charges. It hasn't been decided yet if the state is going to pursue the case or not.
Can we stop taking balanced articles and turning them into overly sensationalized summaries? This isn't the 1920's anymore. We don't need to expand an ultra-brief telegraph message or make up details while we wait for a postmarked letter.:-/
Would your average user be able to distinguish 'faulty software' from 'lucky'?
If you put $1 in the machine and got a $10 credit, I should think that the user would figure out that there's more going on than them just being "lucky".
Yahoo has a new option: perhaps the users are criminally liable for using the software.
As TFA says, the Casino contacted the winners about the fault, and several of them agreed to give back their winnings. (Total losses for the casino were nearly $500,000.) Criminal charges are being considered for the remainder of the two dozen people who exploited the machine. Those charges would result in the gambler getting hauled before a judge and made to prove that he thought that he was just "lucky" when the machine gave him a $10 credit for every $1 he put in.
At this point, it is still hard to do much to upgrade a laptop, which you can easily do with a desktop.
Thankfully, upgradability doesn't matter much these days. Your average home, business, and even most power users are content to leave the hardware that the machine came with. Extra devices are more often handled with USB ports than slotting in a new PCI or PCMCIA card.
That being said, desktops aren't going to die. There are still people who need the performance and form-factor, particularly workstation users. However, that doesn't mean that most of the market isn't moving toward laptops. For the vast majority of users, I fully expect that laptops (inconveniences and all) will continue to replace desktops as user's primary home and work machine.
Actually, I want the Storage APIs so I can replace my wife's Palm Pilot with a web-enabled financial application. It would be nice if I could get the iPhone to store transactions rather than downloading them every time.:-/
How about some security for a change?
Have you read the HTML5 spec? Every feature has a section discussing both required and optional security features to prevent exploits. For example:
User agents must raise a security exception whenever any of the members of an HTMLDocument object are accessed by scripts whose origin is not the same as the Document's origin
[...]
To prevent information leakage, the toDataURL() and getImageData() methods should raise a security exception if the canvas has ever had an image painted on it whose origin is different from that of the script calling the method.
[...]
User agents must raise a security exception whenever any of the members of a Window object are accessed by scripts whose origin is not the same as the Window object's browsing context's active document's origin.
[...]
Warning! It is imperative that the rules in this section be followed exactly. When two user agents use different heuristics for content type detection, security problems can occur. For example, if a server believes a contributed file to be an image (and thus benign), but a Web browser believes the content to be HTML (and thus capable of executing script), the end user can be exposed to malicious content, making the user vulnerable to cookie theft attacks and other cross-site scripting attacks. (Description of secure sniffing technique then discussed.)
[...]
User agents should raise security exceptions if the methods are called with protocol or mimeType values that the UA deems to be "privileged". For example, a site attempting to register a handler for http URIs or text/html content in a Web browser would likely cause an exception to be raised.
[...]
If the script's origin has no domain part, e.g. if only the server's IP address is known, and the normalised requested domain is not the empty string, then the user agent must raise a security exception.
[...]
First, if the domain part of the script's origin is not a host name (e.g. it is an IP address) then the UA must raise a security exception. If either:
* the target host is not a valid host name, or
* the port argument is neither equal to 80, nor equal to 443, nor greater than or equal to 1024 and less than or equal to 65535,...then the UA must raise a security exception.
The user agent may also raise a security exception at this time if, for some reason, permission to create a direct TCP connection to the relevant host is denied. Reasons could include the UA being instructed by the user to not allow direct connections, or the UA establishing (for instance using UPnP) that the network topology will cause connections on the specified port to be directed at the wrong host.
Which in the real world is practically never, considering that IE doesn't support any of them
Wait... hear that sound? It's faint, but it's getting louder. That sound? That's the sound of Microsoft getting left behind.
It was Microsoft's choice not to join the WHATWG, Microsoft's choice not to implement DOM2, and Microsoft's choice to continue shipping a browser that sucks. They are now paying for it in dwindling market share. Microsoft's share is still a concern, but not for too much longer. Developers are only going to drag IE along with shunts for so long before they start updating their sites to "recommend" an upgrade for their users. I've already seen a few sites do this, so it's just a matter of time.
Devices like the Wii and iPhone are further cutting into Microsoft's share. Unlike the desktop, these devices are powered by modern browsers capable of powerful multimediagames and applications. (fewmore) This is helping drive the use of these new technologies regardless of what Microsoft does. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile market share is dropping like a rock, with Mobile IE along with it. All while Opera Mini use on standard cell phones goes up.
Consumers want rich web technology. Microsoft isn't providing it, so they WILL be displaced. The key is that consumers aren't necessarily making a conscious choice between IE and WHATWG browsers like Safari, Opera, and Firefox. They're deciding between "this does what I want and this doesn't". Thus the death of IE will be without much fanfare and will only accelerate in the days to come.
I know businesses have to do this song-and-dance for shareholders and the IRS and all.
Actually, it's more complex than that. By earmarking the money now, Microsoft is avoiding the problem impacting future returns. i.e. It would suck if in 2 years Microsoft is going gangbuster on sales, but its quarterly earnings show a loss thanks to the extended warranty two years ago. By doing it this way, Microsoft gets the loss out of the way in a single quarter, thus providing themselves and investors with a better understanding of how they're doing in the future.
Accounts payable vs. receivable may seem like the best accounting method, but in many cases it's not. Payables vs. Receivables is always in a state of flux, so you tend to try and account for known quantities instead. To a certain degree you do this yourself (or at least SHOULD be doing this!) when you record checks you made out in your checkbook. The balance reflected in your checkbook is entirely on paper and does not necessarily represent the actual contents of your account at any given point in time. The more checks you make out, the less likely the two sources are to be in sync. Which isn't really a problem as at the end of the day you still have the same amounts of money going in and out.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that the Treo is competitive with the iPhone, except that it has fewer features (about $250 worth of fewer features if you look at the price of an iPod) and a clunkier interface. But it makes up for those issues because it costs less.
:-P
Congratulations, you've stated the obvious.
BTW, a brand new Treo is ~$250-$300 with a service plan. $250 (Treo) + $250 (iPod) = $500 (iPhone). Using the low-end of variable eBay prices on used goods is far more disingenuous than my not stating the blatantly obvious tie-in with iTunes.
Yes, I see what you're saying. The market will soon abandon its Wiis and Playstations to go and play web games on their iPhone.
[...]
On second thought, I have no idea what you're talking about. And neither do you. The iPhone is in a completely different market from the video game market. You can't simply take data from one market and presume it will hold true in another! Unless you can show some sort of correlation between the behavior of the markets, the only result of such a comparison would be a huge potential for financial disaster.
iPhone indeed.
In the early 1990's, Rare spent millions of dollars on acquiring SGI equipment and Alias software capable of doing the models necessary for Donkey Kong Country. If the game has sold poorly, Rare would have gone bankrupt.
Today, the same work can be done on a commodity PC with free or inexpensive modeling and rendering software.
Believe it or not, there actually are a lot of fixed inputs relating to development of a new game. These inputs allow more output from the same team. Furthermore, even the team itself is an input that lowers its cost with scale. Now that video games are big business, it's becoming cheaper to obtain talented artists and programmers at lower costs. That trend continues as centers for higher education are being setup to provide focused degrees for the industry.
Code can and is reused during different developments. In addition, models, textures, and sound effects can be reused. Nintendo successfully proved this during the GameCube generation by reusing assets between the Mario games and the Metriod games. Sega also appears to have reused assets between Sonic games.
Basically, if it were true that economics of scale did not affect game development, then it would still take a small team of developers a year and a half to recreate Pacman. Yet the truth is that your average college student can replicate the feat with a weekend of coding.
I believe you mean "expandable storage". The miniSD slot is exactly what the Casio has, and is exactly what the market is rejecting! You technophile may appreciate the ability to swap 2GB SD cards, but to your average user it's a single 2GB expansion. (They're not going to spend $$$ getting multiple SD cards, assuming they spend the money to get the first one.) Which means that the 4-8 GB hard drive options are much more appealing.
This is 6 of 1, half-dozen of another. While a physical keyboard may seem superior, the market is saying that they're about the same. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal went on record saying that the two methods are more or less equivalent.
The WebKit browser that Nokia provides is severely lacking in usability. Opera Mini is better, but neither one compares to the Safari on the iPhone. Especially in the area of usability. The "Zoom on Element" feature alone greatly boosts the usability of the browser. This is still a definite win for the iPhone.
???
Email on the iPhone appears to work just fine?
This is a bit misleading. The Nokia phones have a Flash development platform for creating phone applications. That's not the same as being able to surf Flash movies on the web. Neither phone can do that. The iPhone handles YouTube by directly streaming H.264 versions of the movies. Its Quicktime decoders take care of the rest.
The iPhone has on-screen menus to conference in other callers. Just press a button. Most other phones require you to pull the PBX-style tricks of putting one caller on hold so you can dial up another caller, then transfer them together to create a conference. It's a pain, and completely non-intuitive.
The most striking problem with your analysis is that you're saying, "This geek feature doesn't work, that's why I don't like the iPhone." Which makes my point perfectly. You are not Apple's customer! You are a geek who knows how to make your smart-phone work for you. The majority of consumers are not. However, nearly all of them can make an iPhone work for them. Which is why the iPhone is trouncing the competition.
Lastly, the Nokia E61i is not a "European Phone". It's available here in the states.
Might I recommend moving beyond Economics 101 into the more daring regions of inflation vs. economics of scale? Thanks to the economics of scale, the price per unit falls dramatically even as inflation drives the price upward. The result is that there exists a "sweet-spot" where the price may remain stable. It's only through the introduction of radical new developments that prices go upward.
Basic Market Fact: The market for video games is larger than at any previous point in history. Every generation has seen a distinct rise in the number of overall units sold. (i.e. There's more pie for the competitors to divide.)
The Wii prices have remained stable because Nintendo is riding the economics of scale to combat inflationary costs. The XBox 360 and PS3 are so costly because they bucked these economics and embraced the cost of the disruptive HDTV technology. HDTV is at the edge of technology. It's what the CD-ROM was in the days of the 3DO. It's a high-technology item that still has limited scale to back it. Prices of the sets and microchips to support them are dropping, but not fast enough for the consoles to exist in a competitive region of scale vs. inflation.
Thus it's a gamble: Will the consumer pay more for cutting edge video-game technology?
The traditional market response has always been a negative. The 3DO priced itself out of a market, the Jaguar priced itself out of a market, the Saturn priced itself out of a market, the Turbo-Grafx priced itself out of a market, etc. The closest example of this trend being disrupted was the original Playstation. It was introduced to the market at $299, a full $100 more than the market was used to for new consoles. However, its price fell quickly and newer models dropped the unit cost by that much more. The majority of consoles were sold at a much lower price. The trend repeated with the PS2.
In fact, history shows that the inferior technology often wins out. Atari 2600 v. Intellivision, NES v. Master System, SNES/Genesis v. 3DO/Jaguar, Playstation v. N64, PS2 v. GameCube/XBox, etc.
All this adds up to bad news for overly expensive consoles. They are gambling on superior technology, but the market tends to not put much value there.
Not if Nintendo has anything to say about it. They went down this $60/game road once before with the Nintendo 64, and it cost them dearly. In the Gamecube generation, Nintendo set out to reverse the trend. They looked into methods of reducing costs (anyone notice how much Nintendo reused models, scenery, textures, and sound effects between games?) and bringing the average game purchase down to something closer to $20-$30. Blockbuster games still started at $50, but came down quickly.
Now with the Wii, Nintendo is continuing that trend. They intentionally kept the console away from HD to realize the cost benefits of SD development. Their console is still the cheapest on the market, and their games have been keeping their prices in line with what consumers have come to expect. Many of the older titles are already dropping in price. If and when the supply problem is resolved, I fully expect that Nintendo and Co. will look into dropping the price on games to make a lion's share of profits by moving larger quantities.
IMHO, the article merely demonstrates that it is possible to sell $60 games. The question that has gone unanswered yet is, "Is it possible to profit from $60 games?" Will the profits of these high-ticket games exceed the profits of the more homely Nintendo and Ps2 titles? Or is it being driven by the hype surrounding new consoles?
Which raises the question: What happened during the last generation of console launches? The Ps2 and Gamecube both sold very well out of the gate before their sales diverged. If we went back in time and looked at the launch, would we find a similar, but temporary, trend? According to the article, the average is being pulled upward by the introduction of a large number of $50 games by Nintendo and Co. Thus I have a feeling that the same trend would be present if the numbers were crunched back during the last generational launch.
All together, I fear that the Next Generation data simply adds up to another case of "How to lie with numbers". Since there are no real baselines established, the numbers make it appear that we consumers are going to be in for the most expensive games ever. Unfortunately, they have not given any historical context upon which to base that conclusion, so their numbers are nothing more than interesting data points about the current market. They don't tell the whole story.
This is possibly the most insightful comment in this entire thread. Everyone is so busy considering why American telcos "suck" that they're not stopping to actually carry through on the comparison made. For those of you in the dark, this is a Casio W41CA:
/ 2006/01/20/Casio-Mobile-Rocks-For-Movies/p1
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-devices/news
An impressive phone? Certainly. It's on the order of something like the Motorola Q phone, but with a better form factor. At the end of the day, though, the Casio is still just a phone. The iPhone, however, is a complete hand computer and digital assistant that hits a sweet spot in the market's needs. The iPhone may appear to have a similar feature list, until you actually get down to the nitty gritty of it:
iPhone - Casio
128MB - 70MB
4-8 GB Hard Drive - 2GB SD Slot
Visual Voicemail - ???
Auto-Landscape Mode - Manual Swivel
Phone Numbers from Webpages - No
Integration with Movie/Music Service - No
Easy "Pinch" and "Spin" Navigation - Phone Keypad
Auto-Threading of SMS Conversations - Standard SMS Mailbox
On-Screen Conferencing options - Play on-hold games with the phone
Safari Browser with "Zoom on Element" Features - Opera Mini with imprecise Zooming
Rich email client - ???
Smooth Integration with Google Maps, Youtube, and Mac Widgets - Some functionality through Opera. No Flash
Basically, it comes down to usability. The iPhone is a modest step from a pure technology and feature-set perspective, but it's a quantum leap from a usability perspective. While the iPhone's design does not meet everyone's needs, it meets the largest cross-section of users on the market. i.e. The people who are not technophiles and have little to no idea how to use all the bizarre and excessive features of a smart-phone. For the most part, people just want a phone. The iPhone gives them a phone + a comprehensive feature set that easily performs other daily tasks that people do (e.g. check whether, look up maps, etc.) and handily replaces several other devices that they might carry around.
Folks around here tend to laugh at Taco's initial assessment of the iPod. ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.") Yet they turn around and make the exact same mistake with the iPhone. It's an interesting trend to behold.
The iPhone can't use a stylus. It uses a capacitive touch screen, which means that you have to physically touch it with a finger to operate it.
CDROMs are solid-state media and aren't affected by EMP or solar flares. The exact lifetime of a pressed CD is still, as of yet, unknown, but there's a good chance that the electronic data would make it long enough for archeologists to recover the data.
The court must "test" the GPL if the defendant claims that he accepted the terms. At that point the judge will attempt to decide whether the defendant did indeed keep up his half of the bargain, potentially restricting the power of the GPL agreement where local laws say otherwise.
The GPL is a fairly air-tight design, but there's nothing erroneous about its need for court testing. A judge can (and will!) strike various parts of the agreement if he finds them to be in conflict with either the law or the intent of the agreement. As a result, it's difficult to legally "prove" that a given type of agreement will hold up in court unless either that same agreement or a similar agreement is tested. The GPL has had sufficient legal testing to show that it will hold up in court.
If I'm not mistaken, your confusion stems from section 5 of the GPL, which explicitly provides for the fact that no proof of an agreement takes place. According to the GPL, you don't have to accept it to use the software. It falls back on standard copyright law in that case. Thus when an infringer is identified, he faces a double-edged sword. Does he claim that he did not accept the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for copyright infringement? Or does he claim that he did indeed accept the terms of the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for (I'll phrase this carefully just to annoy the "contract vs. license" folks out there
The GPL is an interesting experiment in using a legal loophole as the foundation for a distribution agreement. This case provides further evidence that the concept works as well in practice as it does in legal theory.
I know what you mean, but I think you mean to say "often" rather than "usually". It's becoming more and more common for content providers to use Bittorrent as their distribution method of choice. Considering that it lowers the bandwidth bill while simultaneously raising the download speeds, it's a win-win for all involved. :-)
;-)
BTW, Game Demos/Patches != Homebrews. To be clear, I mentioned homebrews being available on Bittorrent. Dreamcast homebrews in particular are difficult to find downloads for outside of Bittorrent. A lot of sites supposedly have downloads, but they're either in the wrong format or they're no longer available for direct download. Yet you can usually find them still floating around in torrent form somewhere. Thus Bittorrent becomes a necessity in those situations rather than simply an option.
Speaking of the Dreamcast, most of the piracy (which is more or less on the level of "abandonware") is run through MegaUpload and RapidShare. Funny how those nasty pirates don't actually need Bittorrent for their dirty work, eh?
In this case, yes. The movie file is provides by the Azureus service Vuze. From what I understand, they have permission to provide HD trailers to Vuze users. Their business model, in fact, is based around the core idea that HD content is too expensive to host through a standard HTTP download model. To combat that cost they provide a Bittorrent service that allows content producers to upload their HD content to Vuze for ultra-fast seeding on Vuze's servers combined with the extra bandwidth of P2P users.
;-)
While it is still a long way from becoming the "Youtube in HD" that they originally pitched it as, it does still have its uses. HD Trailers are one example. Another is the HD version of various short films which have been freely distributed. (Though that "Elephant's Dream" sci-fi/fantasy movie makes absolutely no sense. It was amazingly good CG, but perhaps next time they could include a story?)
Let's see here. We have:
1. Actual numbers of sales.
2. A computed increase in sales.
3. An analysis from the company who sells the product.
It all adds up to an increase in sales due to the PS3 price drop. Something which I completely believe.
Since the launch of the PS3, the number one sticking point with consumers has been the high price. It was irrelevant if they could afford it or not, it was simply more than they were willing to pay. The temporary $100 price drop was thus able to impress upon consumers that the PS3 is currently being sold at a "value" price, and that they had better get one before the price goes back up. (Some people are suckers for sales.
The point is to encrypt ALL P2P traffic. That prevents the networks from being able to distinguish legal from illegal. And as you point out yourself, Bittorrent has plenty of legal uses.
:-)
While I don't necessarily like the idea of using legal traffic as a cover for illegal content, I would like to prevent networks from getting any bright ideas about installing naive filters. When I download that HD Quality trailer of the latest movie from Azureus, that's LEGAL content. I don't want it blocked because some idiot installed a filter that said "Latest movie title in name == TEH BAD". Not to mention attempt to block software demos and free editions because they look like illegal wares.
I don't know about anyone else, but my connection to the internet would be crippled if Bittorrent was taken away. All the OSes, software products, fanmade movies, homebrew games, and other legal content I download and evaluate/use would be simply switched off. Quite a bit of that content would be impossible to obtain through any other means. So despite any potential illegal uses available for the technology, I'm all for encrypting the traffic to prevent naive filtering. And any ISP that tries to block it outright would put themselves on the hook for a user backlash at a minimum. Potentially even a class-action lawsuit for misrepresentation of services.
Did you know that prior to the Atari 2600, video game systems were ONLY sold during the Holiday Season? 'Tis true. Atari themselves started the trend when they manufactured their home Pong console for only the holidays. Sears (the only store that sold the unit) experienced long lines and stock sellouts very similar to what was seen with the Nintendo Wii. The only catch is that once the stock was sold, there were no more on the way until next Holiday Season.
:-P
Atari's primary competitor at the time, the Maganvox Odyssey, was sold year-round. However, its sales were relatively poor in comparison.
And there is your useless bit'o'trivia for the day.
Sell it at a lower price so that someone who has different priorities or is not as privileged as you can purchase it?
There's a HUGE market of people who want second-hand game consoles. As long as you keep your kit in operating condition, I wouldn't worry too much about what happens to the old stuff. Simply trade it in at the local GAME for credit toward a new unit and be happy.
If you lose 100,000 purists but gain 50,000,000 new customers, then I'd say the tradeoff is a pretty good deal!
That being said, I haven't seen any sign of the Nintendo faithful ditching Nintendo. Everyone who was going to leave already left during the Gamecube generation. Now some of those players are coming back, and some of them are ranting about how they're "too grown up" for Nintendo now. I imagine that Nintendo will just shrug its shoulders and move on. They're creating a large enough NEW market that they don't need to worry about a vocal minority.
Personally, I tend to laugh at the "grown up" comments. What's "grown up"? Sex, violence, disturbing imagery, and online play that lets you swear at each other? I'm not really sure why any adult would want to exclusively subject themselves to such content, but that is their choice. It just doesn't make the "kiddie" argument against Nintendo any stronger.
When people use the term "too old" for something, they usually mean that the item in question can no longer support the person (e.g. a playground) or that it does not challenge the person at a level commiserate with their age. (e.g. Leapfrog Leapster) Thus the only argument I could see is that the storylines are too simplistic to hold an adult's attention. Which would be a good argument if we were talking about My Little Ponies. But half the games don't actually have storylines (e.g. Excite Truck, Metal Slug, Smash Bros., Strikers) and the majority of the remainder are anything but insulting. (e.g. Zelda, Super Paper Mario, Metroid, Red Steel, etc.)
The truth is that the Wii simply does not appeal to some people, regardless of the excuses they make up. Whether they used to be or not, these people are NOT Nintendo's customers any longer. Nintendo would be foolish to try and chase them around when the truth is that these customers are better satisfied elsewhere.
8-Track tapes aren't the only example where his history is a bit... off. LaserDiscs, for example, really took off in Japan. The reason? LaserDisc players and discs were kept artificially high in the states because the movie companies were worried about box office losses due to the potential "home theater" experience. The Japanese market was by no means constrained by this artificial inflation, and became incredibly popular for Japanese anime. As a result, the format floundered here in the states only because the fools pushing the format kept the price too high.
Similarly, the article overlooks why there were tons of VHS tapes at video rental stores. Early on in the format war you had some of both. It was only after VHS won that Betamax started to fall off. While the article does mention that adult entertainment played a role in the fall of Betamax, what really did it in was the recording time. With VHS able to record 2 hours, then 4 hours, and eventually 6 hours (!) it was a lot more useful to home viewers who wanted to record their favorite television show. The quality was a non-issue because nearly everyone had rabbit-ears or rooftop antennas. With the cruddy quality of over-the-air transmissions, why would anyone worry about "better color response"?
Furthermore, I find the article's implication that a world without Mac OS X and iPods would be somehow "better" than the situation today to be... a bit disturbing. Putting aside for a moment that NEXTSTEP was just as good of a choice (perhaps better?) than BeOS, without the market push from Job's and Apple, we'd still be waiting for the ability to purchase music and television online. Technology would be potentially held back by as much as a decade due to the short-sightedness of the media conglomerates.
Have you heard of XUL? All those things are possible today with a combination of XUL and HTML 5 technologies. Considering that Parakey is run by the fellow who started the Firefox project (Blake Ross), I imagine that basing his "WebOS" on Firefox technologies was exactly what he had in mind.
Here are a few examples of these applications:
ajaxWrite - Honestly, Google Docs is more usable, but ajaxWrite shows off how XUL can look exactly like a local application.
CanvasPaint - An MS Paint clone done with HTML 5 technologies.
Video and Audio support from the WHATWG specs are already in Opera and are expected to show up in Firefox 3. Apple is also implementing the tags, though possibly without default support for OGG. (You'll need to install the codec yourself.) In the meantime, the Video tag is being emulated by some developers by using Java Applets as the shunt. As soon as the video support is in Firefox, the shunt will automatically deactivate and allow the browser to take over.
Possibly. Taking advantage of someone else's screwup can be viewed as an intent to defraud. That being said, the station would be more likely to simply ask you to pay the difference. (Assuming it was a big enough deal to make a stink about, which it probably isn't.)
According to the TFA, that's what the Casino did. They asked people who abused the machine to return the winnings they'd received. Some of them complied. Some of them didn't. Those that didn't are the ones who are being considered for criminal charges. It hasn't been decided yet if the state is going to pursue the case or not.
If you put $1 in the machine and got a $10 credit, I should think that the user would figure out that there's more going on than them just being "lucky".
As TFA says, the Casino contacted the winners about the fault, and several of them agreed to give back their winnings. (Total losses for the casino were nearly $500,000.) Criminal charges are being considered for the remainder of the two dozen people who exploited the machine. Those charges would result in the gambler getting hauled before a judge and made to prove that he thought that he was just "lucky" when the machine gave him a $10 credit for every $1 he put in.
Thankfully, upgradability doesn't matter much these days. Your average home, business, and even most power users are content to leave the hardware that the machine came with. Extra devices are more often handled with USB ports than slotting in a new PCI or PCMCIA card.
That being said, desktops aren't going to die. There are still people who need the performance and form-factor, particularly workstation users. However, that doesn't mean that most of the market isn't moving toward laptops. For the vast majority of users, I fully expect that laptops (inconveniences and all) will continue to replace desktops as user's primary home and work machine.
Actually, I want the Storage APIs so I can replace my wife's Palm Pilot with a web-enabled financial application. It would be nice if I could get the iPhone to store transactions rather than downloading them every time.
Have you read the HTML5 spec? Every feature has a section discussing both required and optional security features to prevent exploits. For example:
User agents must raise a security exception whenever any of the members of an HTMLDocument object are accessed by scripts whose origin is not the same as the Document's origin
[...]
To prevent information leakage, the toDataURL() and getImageData() methods should raise a security exception if the canvas has ever had an image painted on it whose origin is different from that of the script calling the method.
[...]
User agents must raise a security exception whenever any of the members of a Window object are accessed by scripts whose origin is not the same as the Window object's browsing context's active document's origin.
[...]
Warning! It is imperative that the rules in this section be followed exactly. When two user agents use different heuristics for content type detection, security problems can occur. For example, if a server believes a contributed file to be an image (and thus benign), but a Web browser believes the content to be HTML (and thus capable of executing script), the end user can be exposed to malicious content, making the user vulnerable to cookie theft attacks and other cross-site scripting attacks. (Description of secure sniffing technique then discussed.)
[...]
User agents should raise security exceptions if the methods are called with protocol or mimeType values that the UA deems to be "privileged". For example, a site attempting to register a handler for http URIs or text/html content in a Web browser would likely cause an exception to be raised.
[...]
If the script's origin has no domain part, e.g. if only the server's IP address is known, and the normalised requested domain is not the empty string, then the user agent must raise a security exception.
[...]
First, if the domain part of the script's origin is not a host name (e.g. it is an IP address) then the UA must raise a security exception. If either:
* the target host is not a valid host name, or
* the port argument is neither equal to 80, nor equal to 443, nor greater than or equal to 1024 and less than or equal to 65535,
The user agent may also raise a security exception at this time if, for some reason, permission to create a direct TCP connection to the relevant host is denied. Reasons could include the UA being instructed by the user to not allow direct connections, or the UA establishing (for instance using UPnP) that the network topology will cause connections on the specified port to be directed at the wrong host.
You were saying?
Wait... hear that sound? It's faint, but it's getting louder. That sound? That's the sound of Microsoft getting left behind.
It was Microsoft's choice not to join the WHATWG, Microsoft's choice not to implement DOM2, and Microsoft's choice to continue shipping a browser that sucks. They are now paying for it in dwindling market share. Microsoft's share is still a concern, but not for too much longer. Developers are only going to drag IE along with shunts for so long before they start updating their sites to "recommend" an upgrade for their users. I've already seen a few sites do this, so it's just a matter of time.
Devices like the Wii and iPhone are further cutting into Microsoft's share. Unlike the desktop, these devices are powered by modern browsers capable of powerful multimedia games and applications. (few more) This is helping drive the use of these new technologies regardless of what Microsoft does. Meanwhile, Windows Mobile market share is dropping like a rock, with Mobile IE along with it. All while Opera Mini use on standard cell phones goes up.
Consumers want rich web technology. Microsoft isn't providing it, so they WILL be displaced. The key is that consumers aren't necessarily making a conscious choice between IE and WHATWG browsers like Safari, Opera, and Firefox. They're deciding between "this does what I want and this doesn't". Thus the death of IE will be without much fanfare and will only accelerate in the days to come.
Actually, it's more complex than that. By earmarking the money now, Microsoft is avoiding the problem impacting future returns. i.e. It would suck if in 2 years Microsoft is going gangbuster on sales, but its quarterly earnings show a loss thanks to the extended warranty two years ago. By doing it this way, Microsoft gets the loss out of the way in a single quarter, thus providing themselves and investors with a better understanding of how they're doing in the future.
Accounts payable vs. receivable may seem like the best accounting method, but in many cases it's not. Payables vs. Receivables is always in a state of flux, so you tend to try and account for known quantities instead. To a certain degree you do this yourself (or at least SHOULD be doing this!) when you record checks you made out in your checkbook. The balance reflected in your checkbook is entirely on paper and does not necessarily represent the actual contents of your account at any given point in time. The more checks you make out, the less likely the two sources are to be in sync. Which isn't really a problem as at the end of the day you still have the same amounts of money going in and out.