i think a lot of the loss is also for the Xbox project as a whole..... so the R&D, promotion and whatever else. i don't think it's purely the physical bits in the Xbox carton cost more than $150 or $199 or whatever. So in that sense they will be reducing their costs over time.
As for the components themselves, i would think for a time the costs would go down, but at some point they would be somewhat outdated and not worth sustaining, i dont know where that curve crosses the "time to upgrade to keep up with Sony!" curve.
obviously with games costing $30 - $50 (right?) anyone with a system will spend much more on games, and M$ or Sony or whomever gets a cut of that, as well as M$ making their own games.
I wonder what other companies have to pay to Sony or M$ per game sold? THAT seems to be what sustains the console makers. when you read that the average consumer only buys a few new games a year, it makes you wonder what the licensing stuff works out to be. It also explains why theyw ould be going after anyone that is bootlegging games, or trying to use the consoles to run linux and not buy their software. The console is purely a vehicle for selling more games..... kinda like the opposite of the iTunes Music store? weird........
if they have enough money to ponder buying Disney, they can bankroll TechTV/G4 (theya re merging)..... it's not like Comcast wastes money on taxes or anything.
i agree... for $800 and something bigger than an ipod why not jump to a subnotebook......? like i really want to watch Kill Bill on a 4" LCD on the subway... or browse pictures of my trip to Las Vegas...... no thanks. running around with your own audio is like having a personal soundtrack to your activities. watching a mini screen is an activity of its own. i'm not saying this device has NO market, but it's not the same as an audio device (iPod or any other). why do people think audio is the poorman's video? someone needs to escape the cube sometime and live life.
in school the students will be required to do what the teachers call for. if some teachers want to have students play with the command line then the students will learn it even exists. If a teacher wants to teach some basic Unix commands they can do that easily with existing hardware. Even if it's just a day here and there, the students will learn it is in there and may go home to play with it and if that gets a few more kids into learning... that's great. Even 10 years ago the college i went to still required you telnet into a unix machine to check your email. EVERY university student had to do it, so everyone learned some basic unix things. unfortunately those days are gone.
as for Apache, Apple promotes the fact that Apache is in every copy of OS X. They don't hide Apache with a blue button called iServe or something. We are talking about schools with large networks and with OS X creating webpages is as easy as dropping your webpage files into a folder and turning on an option in prefs. in colleges with dorm networks that's even more common since the computers are more likely to be static.
theya re rereleasing the orig 1954 B&W Godzilla in the USA in spring/summer (no dubbing!!!!!).... then next year we will get Godzilla: Final Wars. it'll be sad they are not making more, but we still will have 28 movies to watch.... that's not too shabby. i have to admit i am just psyched to see the first one in a theater. Teaser/trailer on apple.com for the reissue. fun fun fun!
just remember caller-ID blocking does NOT work on 800 numbers in the USA.... i don't think it really matters but it's worth mentioning since people seem to forget that before they mouth off to Miss Cleo and wonder why she knows who they are.
well it will probably lack some of the chips and stuff to run OS X, but maybe Yellow Dog Linux will have a jump on turning these new Xboxs into something for more than games. They already have it running well on G5 Macs and their own hardware that uses 970 Chips (as well as G3 and G4 chips).
everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss, and they make up for it when users by software and maybe accessories. So the fact that someone will be selling hardware with a G5 for $600 won't matter too much. By the time the Xbox ships they may have 970/G5 chips in eMacs and they run about $1000 anyway.
IBM may make G4 chips, but the ones in Apple hardware are still Moto. IBM makes the G3s (not still used), and supposedly has an Altivec-enabled G3 out or coming....
There was a statement a few months back made by Phil Schiller (i think it was him?) that Apple still has a future with Moto processors for a while.
At some point Apple's hardware will eventually all go to G5/G6/whatever made by IBM, but it's going to be a while i think. In addition i think there are other Moto chips in Apple hardware besides the processor (sorry, don't feel like popping the case right now to check).
There are some good resources online explaining the relationship between Apple, IBM and Moto and the design and manufacturing of the PPC chips. I'm on crappy dialup, so i can't find them right now. I know IBM was making the last G3s Apple used... which i guess were in the iBooks? I am 99.999% sure every Apple sold G4 chip was Mote, and IBM could sell them for other uses, including upgrades. the G4 upgrade in my G4 tower is a Moto chip though and i just got that a few months ago. actually offhand the people i asked with G4 upgrades all have Moto chips in them... so if IBM makes G4s that work in Mac hardware, i am not sure who uses it? I am not sure what YellowDog hardware was using for their G4s (could not run Mac OS 9 or OS X).
my point on format being that a new commercial Radio One station is not going to bring in anything new. Shutting down WHHS, as well as the other stations, is a loss to the community. Radio stations formats in markets like Philadelphia are only as permanant as their ratings. that's business, and i understand. That being said i don't see them bringing anything to Philadelphia we don't have already. Losing a student station in the suburbs, a classical station in the city and whatever else this new 107.9 will kill off frankly sucks.
the "rules are the rules" because Radio One, Clear Channel and their equals have the money and the citizens trying to offer something unique to their communities don't. Like any other government group, they cater to big business and not the citizens. There is NO WAY you can tell me that the people of Havertown will be better served by one more station playing Eminem (or whatever mainstream format they unleash) than they will by some students learning how to run a radio station. It's very nice someone at Radio One is offering to help them out, but frankly the whole thing sucks. i realize it's not your friend's fault and don't direct any of this angst at them.
if you can't tell i hate commercial radio as much as i hate McDonalds and Microsoft.
that's like saying the public owns the airwaves (see other FCC story from today)
or that the politicians are public servents in that they work for us
or that the cops work for you! try telling them of that. it never works on COPS
sorry, it's a saturday night and i'm home sick.
i agree with you in principle, but i only see it being a blanket rule with some sort of time delay (making the code somewhat outdated). i would think it would make the government use only open source software.... and i just don't see that happening here too soon.
at least NASA is trying some sort of open source type thing. it's more than exists now, and if it works out for the greater good of all it will only help the cause.
just last week there was a story in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer (that you can read here) about how Radio One is sinking WHHS 107.9 FMHavertown PA. WHHS is a 14 watt high-school station that has been a student station broadcasting on FM since 1949. For those of you that don't know, that's about how long FM has been around. The story talks about some new commercial station Radio One wants to put up in Jersey-hell and it would infect the Philadelphia region. WHHS and its class-d educational license is no match for the big bucks Class-A commercial station (even if it doesn't exist yet) so they must pack it in. There is a chance WHHS will find a new chunk of airwaves, but the Philadelphia market is #4 in the USA and incredibly packed. It's a shame when some new fly by night format piece of junk can kill off educational stations like this. I guess community stations are nothing compared to another station playing top 40 crap.
UPN said they would pick up Angel if WB had dropped it when Buffy first jumped to UPN..... but i think that statement was specific to the time Buffy was on UPN (to save Angel from being cut as some form of revenge).
There is a lot in these machines that a clustered supercomputer setup REALLY doesn't need. One article i read about this said the VT designer wanted to buy the chips right from IBM initially. It came down to the PowerMac G5 being the ONLY way to get those chips at the time. I guess when he made his pitch to Apple they either would not say when they expected to ship Xserves, or they were worried about looming supercomputers. i also read elsewhere that in the next year or so there are a few other massive machines that will be coming online and it's possible they would fill up the top 5. it came down to timing where a $7 Million setup could land in the top 5 machines up against machines costing 20 times as much.
anyway if you look at the specs you can see all the silly stuff.... that cluster does not need 1100 Superdrives, or 1100 Radeon 9600 cards..... let alone size and whatnot... i'm sure it was done because the Xserves were just too far off and it was the only machine out there with the G5/970 chip for sale to anyone.
look at the specs:
The systems sold by MacMall are listed as 2.0GHz Power Mac G5s equipped with 1GB DDR SDRAM (2 512MB memory cards); equipped with 160GB ATA drives, a SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports, 2 FireWire 400 ports and 1 FireWire 800 port, along with an AirPort Extreme card slot and no modem -- in other words, a stock Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz system with a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
it does seem the pulled the fibre cards out... they are optional in Xserves... maybe they just swapped those? i don't know if they are the same in both machines normally.
While a 3rd party (Mark/Space, Missing Sync) is planning on providing this functionality for Mac users, a lack of built-in functionality is unfortunate.
the info on that is vague.... it's possible Apple will make it work straight through with iSync. Hopefully they will, and add some way to upload Palm OS apps? Maybe Palm desktop is not worth them working on when iCal and Addressbook are on every Mac now running OS X (unless the user deletes them).
i was wondering about this..... Apple splits the 9950/50 right? and they pay their expenses out of that?
in addition to bandwith, servers, humans, bla..... what about the fees taken by the people handling the credit card purchase?
Apple's iTMS also allows the 1 Click shopping as well as adding purchases to a cart and checking out. i bought 2 songs about 2 minutes apart using 1Click (not thinking about it) but the 2 charges showed up on my credit card as 2 charges... makes sense... but unless Apple has some deal with the people handling the credit cards, they are paying 30 to them per purchase, right? any stores i worked at the card company took 30 per transaction plus somehting like.00179%..... that's why many stores have a minimum purchase for credit cards, the store loses that much over a cash sale but it leads to more sales, and i guess less physical cash to handle. is it me or does that leave less than 19 cents a song for Apple to squeeze profits from? maybe Apple has a better deal with the charges.
again, Apple says their store is there to keep the iPod sales up, but if Apple is "doing it right" and motivated to REALLY be selling iPods, how can the other online music stores make any money? i guess the answer is volume?
i agree..... i guess i'm not much of a gamer, but playing games on MacMame is fun. Then again doing that on a new G5 and not a 540c laptop seems silly.
i dont know any current cool games, i only have a G4 400
any old Mac person knows the fun of Tetris..... granted on a G5 it won't be under the Apple menu like it was on my Mac SE, but i bet it exists somehow?
oddly i only had an issue like that under 10.3.2...... i am back to 10.3.1 and just updated Safari today. after my machine freaked out a few times in 10.3.2 i left the Activity Monitor.app running and every so often Safari would freak out and the processor graph would surge to full green and stay there. i could force quit the one app, but the computer was hostile till restarted.
maybe i'll try 10.3.2 again?
p.s. running an older Sawtooth G4 400 with an 800MHz upgrade
this is kind of offtopic, but here's the earthlink page
from: http://news.earthlink.net/
Is there a download quota limit? Yes. In order to make our News service fair to all users, EarthLink does enforce download limits on its Usenet service. The limit is 5GB during the last 30 days. Please note that "Headers" and articles count towards the limit.
Unlike other services, we do not set limits based on calendar months. If you were to download 5GB on January 29th, you would be considered over quota until 30 days from then, or February 28th. Users that have not downloaded 5GB are able to interact with the server without any limits, while users that exceed the 5GB quota in their last 30 days of usage are rate-limited, or throttled, to 64 kilobits per second.
Slashdot Mirror
i think a lot of the loss is also for the Xbox project as a whole..... so the R&D, promotion and whatever else. i don't think it's purely the physical bits in the Xbox carton cost more than $150 or $199 or whatever. So in that sense they will be reducing their costs over time.
As for the components themselves, i would think for a time the costs would go down, but at some point they would be somewhat outdated and not worth sustaining, i dont know where that curve crosses the "time to upgrade to keep up with Sony!" curve.
obviously with games costing $30 - $50 (right?) anyone with a system will spend much more on games, and M$ or Sony or whomever gets a cut of that, as well as M$ making their own games.
I wonder what other companies have to pay to Sony or M$ per game sold? THAT seems to be what sustains the console makers. when you read that the average consumer only buys a few new games a year, it makes you wonder what the licensing stuff works out to be. It also explains why theyw ould be going after anyone that is bootlegging games, or trying to use the consoles to run linux and not buy their software. The console is purely a vehicle for selling more games..... kinda like the opposite of the iTunes Music store? weird........
if they have enough money to ponder buying Disney, they can bankroll TechTV/G4 (theya re merging)..... it's not like Comcast wastes money on taxes or anything.
the press conference is on right now and they broke Mach 7, and climbed to over 95,000 feet.....
this is from prelim data, but i am sure NASA will release some factoids as soon as everything is verified.....
... shares the channel with Philadelphia Park Horse racing.... so instead of scramjets i saw ponies. yay for broadband!
i agree... for $800 and something bigger than an ipod why not jump to a subnotebook......?
like i really want to watch Kill Bill on a 4" LCD on the subway... or browse pictures of my trip to Las Vegas...... no thanks.
running around with your own audio is like having a personal soundtrack to your activities. watching a mini screen is an activity of its own. i'm not saying this device has NO market, but it's not the same as an audio device (iPod or any other). why do people think audio is the poorman's video? someone needs to escape the cube sometime and live life.
in school the students will be required to do what the teachers call for. if some teachers want to have students play with the command line then the students will learn it even exists. If a teacher wants to teach some basic Unix commands they can do that easily with existing hardware. Even if it's just a day here and there, the students will learn it is in there and may go home to play with it and if that gets a few more kids into learning... that's great. Even 10 years ago the college i went to still required you telnet into a unix machine to check your email. EVERY university student had to do it, so everyone learned some basic unix things. unfortunately those days are gone.
as for Apache, Apple promotes the fact that Apache is in every copy of OS X. They don't hide Apache with a blue button called iServe or something. We are talking about schools with large networks and with OS X creating webpages is as easy as dropping your webpage files into a folder and turning on an option in prefs. in colleges with dorm networks that's even more common since the computers are more likely to be static.
theya re rereleasing the orig 1954 B&W Godzilla in the USA in spring/summer (no dubbing!!!!!).... then next year we will get Godzilla: Final Wars.
it'll be sad they are not making more, but we still will have 28 movies to watch.... that's not too shabby. i have to admit i am just psyched to see the first one in a theater.
Teaser/trailer on apple.com for the reissue. fun fun fun!
just remember caller-ID blocking does NOT work on 800 numbers in the USA.... i don't think it really matters but it's worth mentioning since people seem to forget that before they mouth off to Miss Cleo and wonder why she knows who they are.
well it will probably lack some of the chips and stuff to run OS X, but maybe Yellow Dog Linux will have a jump on turning these new Xboxs into something for more than games. They already have it running well on G5 Macs and their own hardware that uses 970 Chips (as well as G3 and G4 chips).
everyone knows Xbox and PS2 and all those game systems are sold at a loss, and they make up for it when users by software and maybe accessories. So the fact that someone will be selling hardware with a G5 for $600 won't matter too much. By the time the Xbox ships they may have 970/G5 chips in eMacs and they run about $1000 anyway.
There was a statement a few months back made by Phil Schiller (i think it was him?) that Apple still has a future with Moto processors for a while.
At some point Apple's hardware will eventually all go to G5/G6/whatever made by IBM, but it's going to be a while i think. In addition i think there are other Moto chips in Apple hardware besides the processor (sorry, don't feel like popping the case right now to check).
There are some good resources online explaining the relationship between Apple, IBM and Moto and the design and manufacturing of the PPC chips. I'm on crappy dialup, so i can't find them right now.
I know IBM was making the last G3s Apple used... which i guess were in the iBooks? I am 99.999% sure every Apple sold G4 chip was Mote, and IBM could sell them for other uses, including upgrades. the G4 upgrade in my G4 tower is a Moto chip though and i just got that a few months ago. actually offhand the people i asked with G4 upgrades all have Moto chips in them... so if IBM makes G4s that work in Mac hardware, i am not sure who uses it? I am not sure what YellowDog hardware was using for their G4s (could not run Mac OS 9 or OS X).
Radio stations formats in markets like Philadelphia are only as permanant as their ratings. that's business, and i understand. That being said i don't see them bringing anything to Philadelphia we don't have already. Losing a student station in the suburbs, a classical station in the city and whatever else this new 107.9 will kill off frankly sucks.
the "rules are the rules" because Radio One, Clear Channel and their equals have the money and the citizens trying to offer something unique to their communities don't. Like any other government group, they cater to big business and not the citizens. There is NO WAY you can tell me that the people of Havertown will be better served by one more station playing Eminem (or whatever mainstream format they unleash) than they will by some students learning how to run a radio station. It's very nice someone at Radio One is offering to help them out, but frankly the whole thing sucks. i realize it's not your friend's fault and don't direct any of this angst at them.
if you can't tell i hate commercial radio as much as i hate McDonalds and Microsoft.
or that the politicians are public servents in that they work for us
or that the cops work for you! try telling them of that. it never works on COPS
sorry, it's a saturday night and i'm home sick.
i agree with you in principle, but i only see it being a blanket rule with some sort of time delay (making the code somewhat outdated). i would think it would make the government use only open source software
at least NASA is trying some sort of open source type thing. it's more than exists now, and if it works out for the greater good of all it will only help the cause.
just last week there was a story in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer (that you can read here) about how Radio One is sinking WHHS 107.9 FMHavertown PA. WHHS is a 14 watt high-school station that has been a student station broadcasting on FM since 1949. For those of you that don't know, that's about how long FM has been around. The story talks about some new commercial station Radio One wants to put up in Jersey-hell and it would infect the Philadelphia region. WHHS and its class-d educational license is no match for the big bucks Class-A commercial station (even if it doesn't exist yet) so they must pack it in. There is a chance WHHS will find a new chunk of airwaves, but the Philadelphia market is #4 in the USA and incredibly packed. It's a shame when some new fly by night format piece of junk can kill off educational stations like this. I guess community stations are nothing compared to another station playing top 40 crap.
not really.... soda has nasty things in it well beyond sugar.
the sugar/corn syrup is probably one of the least harmful things in a bottle of soda.
UPN said they would pick up Angel if WB had dropped it when Buffy first jumped to UPN..... but i think that statement was specific to the time Buffy was on UPN (to save Angel from being cut as some form of revenge).
I think that excuse was when they were still trying to blame Canada.
My friends were at Niagra Falls a day or so before this happened and i was sure they were somehow responsible.
anyway if you look at the specs you can see all the silly stuff.... that cluster does not need 1100 Superdrives, or 1100 Radeon 9600 cards..... let alone size and whatnot... i'm sure it was done because the Xserves were just too far off and it was the only machine out there with the G5/970 chip for sale to anyone.
look at the specs:
The systems sold by MacMall are listed as 2.0GHz Power Mac G5s equipped with 1GB DDR SDRAM (2 512MB memory cards); equipped with 160GB ATA drives, a SuperDrive, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro graphics processor, Gigabit Ethernet, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 2 USB 1.1 ports, 2 FireWire 400 ports and 1 FireWire 800 port, along with an AirPort Extreme card slot and no modem -- in other words, a stock Power Mac G5 Dual 2GHz system with a memory upgrade from 512MB to 1GB
it does seem the pulled the fibre cards out... they are optional in Xserves... maybe they just swapped those? i don't know if they are the same in both machines normally.
thanks! it looks pretty ok.....
There is an article on what Cobalt lacks...
Macrumors posted this toot hough:
the info on that is vague.... it's possible Apple will make it work straight through with iSync. Hopefully they will, and add some way to upload Palm OS apps? Maybe Palm desktop is not worth them working on when iCal and Addressbook are on every Mac now running OS X (unless the user deletes them).
i was wondering about this..... Apple splits the 9950/50 right? and they pay their expenses out of that?
.00179% ..... that's why many stores have a minimum purchase for credit cards, the store loses that much over a cash sale but it leads to more sales, and i guess less physical cash to handle. is it me or does that leave less than 19 cents a song for Apple to squeeze profits from? maybe Apple has a better deal with the charges.
in addition to bandwith, servers, humans, bla..... what about the fees taken by the people handling the credit card purchase?
Apple's iTMS also allows the 1 Click shopping as well as adding purchases to a cart and checking out. i bought 2 songs about 2 minutes apart using 1Click (not thinking about it) but the 2 charges showed up on my credit card as 2 charges... makes sense... but unless Apple has some deal with the people handling the credit cards, they are paying 30 to them per purchase, right? any stores i worked at the card company took 30 per transaction plus somehting like
again, Apple says their store is there to keep the iPod sales up, but if Apple is "doing it right" and motivated to REALLY be selling iPods, how can the other online music stores make any money? i guess the answer is volume?
i agree..... i guess i'm not much of a gamer, but playing games on MacMame is fun. Then again doing that on a new G5 and not a 540c laptop seems silly.
i dont know any current cool games, i only have a G4 400
any old Mac person knows the fun of Tetris..... granted on a G5 it won't be under the Apple menu like it was on my Mac SE, but i bet it exists somehow?
oddly i only had an issue like that under 10.3.2...... i am back to 10.3.1 and just updated Safari today. after my machine freaked out a few times in 10.3.2 i left the Activity Monitor.app running and every so often Safari would freak out and the processor graph would surge to full green and stay there. i could force quit the one app, but the computer was hostile till restarted.
maybe i'll try 10.3.2 again?
p.s. running an older Sawtooth G4 400 with an 800MHz upgrade
from:
http://news.earthlink.net/