Rigth now the average gamer doesn't want inovation, he just wants flashy graphics and a good FPS that a noob could pick up and win in, Nintendo is trying to sell in their style, but their style will not match up with the average gamer community
And that's why the prediction is likely wrong: it looks like he's predicting numbers based on what the "average gamer" will do. Nintendo's not targeting the "average gamer". Neither is Sony, for that matter: $500 is outside of what the average gamer will pay for a console.
The "non-gamer" community is still much larger than the "average gamer" community. If Nintendo manages to convince a good portion of them to buy a Wii, they'll dominate in terms of market share.
Years of trends coupled with current market research. The good analysts can be pretty accurate; they've got 20+ years of consumer preferences to reference.
The problem here though is that both Sony and Nintendo are going outside those consumer trends - the most equivalent console to the PS3 in terms of cost is the Neo Geo, and there's not much trend information there to extract. In addition, Nintendo's targeting a demographic which is completely outside previous generations, much like they did with the DS.
I have to agree with the grandparent: how can you make predictions about systems as revolutionary as the PS3 (in terms of price) and the Wii (in terms of target audience)? There's just no information about it whatsoever.
You could try to do market research, but that's difficult to do, considering neither Sony nor Nintendo have started marketing the systems yet.
Nintendo has an established handheld line, Sony just jumped in. Not to mention Sony included features most people didn't care about, like that goofy UMD movie format that costs more than a DVD and is only compatible with the PSP.
Then you'd be wrong, though, as the DS and the PSP have an equivalent install base in the US, for instance. Where the DS is decimating the PSP is in Japan - where the DS effectively tapped a new demographic.
You can see that he's kindof dismissing that possibility in the DS/PSP numbers for next year: he predicts the gap to increase, but not significantly. If the DS Lite follows the Japan behavior, that gap will grow incredibly.
He kindof lost me when he started talking about game quality, though - game quality rankings aren't absolute: they're relative to the console that they're on - which means that the more games a system has, the lower the average ranking is going to be. This isn't just because all of the games are crap - it's because the ranking scale got stretched due to the raised bar.
You really don't want to train people to know that you're going to drop the price of something within a few weeks. It's one thing to know that you could wait a year and spend $30 to get the game you're about to spend $50 on. It's another thing entirely to know that you could wait a month and spend $50 to get the game you're about to spend $80 on.
This is exactly what Nintendo's president is worried about here, although he's even worried about 6 month or 9 month typical discounting. I agree with him on that - if you have a scheduled price discount on software, you will teach people to follow it. Or heck, even with hardware.
There's a reason the moderation system is in place, and that is to highlight the good comments.
True. But that moderation system doesn't build the consensus comments into a readable story. That's what Backslash does.
Essentially they're taking the results of the moderation system and building them into a readable summary. It's not perfect yet - timothy's summaries jump around a bit - but I think it's entirely reasonable to expect it to get better.
The outputs of the moderation system are fairly "raw." This just digests them a little bit more, which some of us already do, granted. But some don't.
Well, Venus is closer, warmer and with a substantial atmosphere.
If by "warmer" you mean "melts lead", yeah, it's warmer. Space probes can't survive on Venus. People definitely can't.
But Venus's biggest problem is related: it doesn't rotate nearly fast enough.
You want an ideal planet? Smack Mars into Venus. Unsurprisingly, that's how Earth started out.
but a bonus point is that as an inner planet
That's more of a downside: I don't think liquid water can survive on Venus already for any long period of time due to the solar insolation. The Sun's so bright from Venus that it'll just rip water in the atmosphere apart.
It's definitely possible to imagine a stable, terraformed Mars. It'll hold an Earth atmosphere for long enough for it to matter, and it's close enough to the Sun that water would even be liquid for a portion of the year.
Venus, I'm not so sure. The rotation rate's a killer, for one, and I think the solar insolation might be a death knell as well. Maybe you could build a giant solar shade, though, but you could always do the reverse on Mars to heat it up as well.
But humans require life to exist. This is a point I made which you chose to overlook.
I didn't overlook it. We're also the only organism capable of establishing new life in an area. We tried once already, halfheartedly, with Biosphere 2. It was a failure because, well, there wasn't any incentive for the scientists. It was a PR deal, and it failed. Think a scientist will work like crazy to fix a giant PR move? Not likely. Think a scientist will work like crazy to fix a habitat supporting him? Yes.
You also have this naive idea that without civilization we're just sitting ducks waiting to be picked off. Humans and their direct ancestors have survived for over three million years. Modern humans have existed for the last two-hundred fifty thousand years. During that time there have been some pretty shitty days too, like the ice age whose remnants we're currently shaking off. Civilization is fragile. Humankind isn't.
You do realize we were on the verge of extinction several times during that period, right? We were confined to a tiny portion of Africa for all but the most recent portion of history. We're fragile. Fragile and lucky.
You make a reasonable point about a lethal environment but fail to acknowledge my point that that same environment will work on Earth.
Um, what? We can't shut off life support for a portion of Earth, and nowhere is Earth hostile enough to support the kind of "necessity breeds invention" that spurs humans on. Hell, we're too lazy to make Antarctica self-supporting. We screw up an ecosystem on Earth, and it just starts spiraling out of control until things are a total mess. We screw up an ecosystem on Mars? We made it. We can just make it again.
As for creating a controlled biosphere on Earth? Yah. Tried that. Failed. The scientists had nowhere near enough incentive. They broke the seal because they wanted peanut butter.
The resources that really matter--oxygen, water, other life, materials that have already been refined--exist on Earth. Not Mars.
There are plenty of materials that exist elsewhere in the solar system, and it's a joke to get resources to Mars from the asteroid belt, for instance. Recycling and recovering precious metals will always be more difficult than mining new, and eventually, all we're going to able to do is recycle materials. Hell, we'll be out of helium in a few hundred years. Not that there's an easy source of helium on Mars, but there sure as hell won't be a way to get more on Earth.
I see it that Earth is better than Mars because you don't have to understand it for life to survive. That's a lot of work already done when it comes to the survival game. You then contradict yourself by saying we're really bad at ecological engineering (so that's why we should place our bets on it?).
We're bad at ecological engineering because we haven't had to do it. We sucked at manipulating electricity and light for the longest time, until we needed to, and then we just took off. Put us on Mars, and we will be good at it. Really, really fast.
Your reasoning here is ridiculously naive: we have to understand things if we want to survive long term. That's what separates us from natural selection - because we can manipulate our environment rather than letting it manipulate us.
Humans staying in an environment that's beneficial to us is the same thing as a guy living in his parents' basement until he's 40. Think about it - your argument applies equally well there. A 40-year old in his parents' basement doesn't have to understand how the world works, or how things get paid for to survive. After all, there's so much that's already been done to allow him to just survive like that! The fact that he'll be in trouble when his parents die? That's far too far off for him to worry about.
Starting from scratch on a lifeless planet is much harder (and strikes me as much less sensible) than sticking around where life has clung with tenacity for the last 3.5 billion years.
Life does not equal humans. There are plenty of ways that life could stick around and still eradicate all humans. Or all human civilization. Either or, because without civilization, we're just another species waiting to be extinguished. And human civilization is really fragile.
While it may seem less sensible, starting from scratch on another planet has several advantages.
You control the environment. Unless you go full-bore terraforming (and then, if you do, see below) you're living in a meticulously controlled self-contained habitat. Anything goes wrong, and it's likely a hell of a lot easier to fix than on Earth. This sounds bizarre, but think about it: killer virus gets loose on Earth, and you're in huge trouble. Killer virus gets loose on a habitat-controlled Mars... and everyone suits up and you irradiate the hell out of the place. Being in a lethal environment has its advantages. The only things that live are the ones you want to.
More resources. We're unfortunately a very resource-hungry organism, and Earth's only got so much. While the standard argument is "we're nowhere near close to running out" - what, you want to wait until we are?
And finally, but probably most importantly, we're a very lazy organism. You think we'll bother figuring out how this ecosytem works on our own? Please. We're terrible at learning things unless there's pressure on us. "Another country might get to the moon!" "They might get the bomb!" Man. Throw those things at us, and we're freaking geniuses. We're better off living in a sucky environment. So even if we terraform the planet, we'd still be better off - we made it, so we'll understand it better than Earth.
The third point is really the big one. Just look at our pathetic attempts at ecological engineering - they're jokes. We usually end up constantly screwing things up. But I wouldn't discount the second one, either: Mars has a pretty big advantage in terms of depth of its gravity well.
Plus, from a very practical standpoint, you could also think of it as the start of interplanetary zoning laws. It'd be real nice to offload really crappy industry to Mars, after all.
1) If you can create a condition where a goto is to be placed, you can add that same condition to the top loop in the nest and let it exit out gracefully.
Isn't that slower, though? A normal infinite loop is just a jump, with no branch prediction issues. Adding in a conditional jump to each one could add a slew of branch mispredicts into the code as the predictor fails for each conditional jump.
As in int ok = 0; while (ok) {// loop A
do_something();
while (ok) {// loop B
for (i=0;i != 100;i++) {// loop C
if (!(ok = do_something2())) break;
}
} }
When do_something2 returns 0, the break is just a jump, so there's no mispredict penalty there. But loop B will likely be mispredicted, and then loop A will be mispredicted as well, which gives you two pipeline stalls right in a row. Whereas if you just had a goto in the end, it'd just be a jump, with no mispredict penalty at all.
Of course, basically the only time I ever consider using gotos is nested loops. Which means gee, it'd be nice if C had a mechanism for specifying a break level (i.e. break(2), break(3), etc.).
Actually, the onboard ones usually have an antenna which runs up the side of the screen of the laptop and connects to the miniPCI card. The PCI ones typically have an external antenna connector.
If you had your choice between a box that did Blu Ray for $1000, or a box that did Blu Ray + lots of other stuff, for $600, a lot of non-elitist consumers are going to go with the cheaper bargain.
The problem with this is simple: what percentage of potential Blu-ray purchasers are not going to be elitist?
The elitist group will go with the standalone player because the PS3 looks cheap. The non-elitist group doesn't buy early new technology anyway.
This kills 2 birds with 1 stone; it get's people buying the PS3 for games and for the Blu-ray capabilities. Either way, they win.
People buying the PS3 for games see a $500-600 system that's the most expensive "new console" out there. By a lot. Heck, there'll still be PS2 systems sitting on shelves this Christmas, and so now they've got to compare a $129 (if it doesn't drop to $99) system to a $500-600 system? Yah. So it's fair to say that the only section of this market they'll get are the ones that have loads of money to throw away, or Sony fanboys. By any measure, that's a niche portion of the market.
People buying the system for Blu-ray capabilities are going to start off as a small market anyway, as it's a $500-600 movie player. But at that point, you're getting someone who wants a top-end home theatre system, and is willing to throw money at it. Now there'll be $1000 standalone players, and a $500-600 PS3. Does Sony really think that those kind of people are going to be swayed by the "ooh, it's $400 cheaper" argument? Of course not - they spent $1500 on an HDTV with marginal amounts of programming available for it. They'll go after the $1000 Blu-ray player, which will be advertised as a "better player" than the PS3. Hint for any Circuit City employees, it's easy enough to just reference the PS2's disc read error issues as well as the poor quality of the DVD output and the compatibility issues it had with certain DVDs, and you'll get people looking at the Blu-ray player instead. So here, again, they're targeting a niche portion of a small market.
I think describing the PS3 as a "cheap" Blu-ray player is the easiest way to keep videophiles from buying them. They'd be better off with standalone Blu-ray players being $500-600. At $400 less, now they just look like there's something wrong with them.
I suppose it all depends on your definition of "computer." Computers have processor(s), RAM, a boot ROM, and some sort of non-volitile storage, right? So does my Cisco 871W. =D
I mean, if you're not wedded to applications, you can get almost any Linux install to run, better, on a machine that can handle 98SE, but some people aren't down for that
That's not entirely true - Linux support for a few devices from that era is worse than Win98's, and Win2K/WinXP support is often nonexistent. If those devices are the core logic chipset, the machine can easily run bog-slow under Linux, but perfectly snappy under Windows.
I'm mainly thinking of the experiences I've had with a SiS 530-based motherboard, which is painfully slow under Linux, and still pretty slow under Win2K, but really very snappy under Win98.
If the devices are niche enough (i.e. no one gives enough of a crap to try to reverse engineer them, and the documents are likely missing), then Win98 might be the only available option, just for speed reasons.
The main difference between HBC and Nintendo, though, is that Nintendo's a family business - which I also said. This would be more like Wal-Mart being bought out, although even less so, as Nintendo's still very much a family business, with Yamauchi still the majority shareholder (and he only stepped down off the board of executives when he thought the company was in good hands), and Wal-Mart's only in its second generation, whereas Hiroshi Yamauchi was fourth generation. Selling out your dad's business is one thing - selling out your great-grandfather's (and grandfather's) is quite another.
The amount of nepotism in Nintendo is fairly insane: Nintendo of America was originally headed by Yamauchi's son-in-law, and in fact, before Yamauchi's grandfather stepped down, Hiroshi had him fire a bunch of relatives so his authority wouldn't be questioned. Nintendo's more like a clan than it is a corporation. You don't take it over with money. You take it over with skill (Gunpei Yokoi) and with family ties (Yamauchi, Miyamoto).
Besides, the HBC buyout wasn't really a corporate buyout. More like a "forced internal reorganization". HBC is still a corporation all by itself, and I doubt that the HBC board would've agreed to the stock buy if Zucker had planned to merge the business with something else.
Sure, I get that (and I agree - odds are high they really don't want to). But they may not have a choice in certain circumstances.
What? They always have a choice. They own those shares, and Yamauchi is currently the majority shareholder. I think it's entirely likely that Nintendo + Yamauchi + others who would never sell have a controlling interest (that is, greater than half) in Nintendo.
There are no circumstances for publicly traded companies (short of... like, murder or something) that you can just abscond with someone's shares. They own them.
So what? Honestly, does that make a difference, especially now that they are publically traded?
Yes.
Just because they're publicly traded, do you really think that the Yamauchis and other longtime (as in, decades-long) investors in Nintendo would be willing to sell?
Do you really think that the family of those who founded a company don't place a value in their stock slightly higher than the market value?
Actaully, it's been traded on a number of exchanges during it's history, most recently the Tokyo exchange (since 1983).
That being said, it's been executing stock buybacks for a number of years to prevent any possible takeover. I don't know the actual shareholder lists, but Nintendo's bought at least 15% of its outstanding stock in the past 5 years. Presumedly they held a decent amount before then as well.
nor does he suggest anywhere that Nintendo might be a little opposed to the deal.
Nor does he do the research to realize that Nintendo's been executing stock buybacks exactly to prevent any sort of hostile takeover in recent years. Apple can't just up and buy Nintendo without the company's approval, and given that the company is one hundred and seventeen years old I've got a feeling they might look at Apple and say, "Uh huh. Yeah. Right. So how many industrial revolutions, world wars, and global economy collapses have you been through unscathed again? Oh? Really? Call us in a hundred years."
Money? Whatever. Nintendo's got a few more assets than just their stock price and cash on hand. Like, you know, a brand image that would probably be undervalued at a few billion, a back catalog of video games that's probably worth roughly the same, the Seattle Mariners... need I go on?
If Apple offered a good enough price, I assume the stockholders would sell.
I'm pretty sure you assume wrong.
From 2001:
"Reuters is reporting, "Nintendo Co Ltd said on Friday it was considering executing a planned buyback of up to 14 million of its own shares, or about 10 percent of its total outstanding stock, after October 1." The move will help to prop up Nintendo shares. The buyback also serves as a defensive measure to prevent another company from launching a hostile takeover."
TOKYO--Nintendo today said it would acquire 2.2 million shares of its own stock. The figure represents 1.55 percent of the 130.08 million shares currently outstanding. The company will purchase the shares next week and will pay 11,650 yen ($106) a share, the same as today's closing price.
The purchase is expected to cost the company a total of 25.63 billion yen ($233.5 million), assuming the company can acquire all 2.2 million shares.
Nintendo has been cautious about corporate takeovers for about the past year, analysts say. Today's move is seen as another step toward heading off any uninvited takeover bids. The Nintendo announcement comes only four days after Square Enix announced a friendly $600 million takeover bid for Taito.
In other words, "all you young whippersnappers who think you've got boatloads of cash, shove off!"
What is it people in the tech industry don't understand about Nintendo?
Nintendo is a 117 year old company. The analogy I used last time when someone mentioned Microsoft is still apt - this is the equivalent of a 15 year old kid coming over and saying "here's $500, can I buy your house?"
For 113 years of its life, Nintendo was a family owned business. It only passed the reigns on to someone not in the Yamauchi family when Hiroshi Yamauchi named Satoru Iwata his successor, and it's not like the Yamauchi family just up and sold all of their shares.
You can't buy a company if they're not willing to sell the shares.
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Rigth now the average gamer doesn't want inovation, he just wants flashy graphics and a good FPS that a noob could pick up and win in, Nintendo is trying to sell in their style, but their style will not match up with the average gamer community
And that's why the prediction is likely wrong: it looks like he's predicting numbers based on what the "average gamer" will do. Nintendo's not targeting the "average gamer". Neither is Sony, for that matter: $500 is outside of what the average gamer will pay for a console.
The "non-gamer" community is still much larger than the "average gamer" community. If Nintendo manages to convince a good portion of them to buy a Wii, they'll dominate in terms of market share.
Years of trends coupled with current market research. The good analysts can be pretty accurate; they've got 20+ years of consumer preferences to reference.
The problem here though is that both Sony and Nintendo are going outside those consumer trends - the most equivalent console to the PS3 in terms of cost is the Neo Geo, and there's not much trend information there to extract. In addition, Nintendo's targeting a demographic which is completely outside previous generations, much like they did with the DS.
I have to agree with the grandparent: how can you make predictions about systems as revolutionary as the PS3 (in terms of price) and the Wii (in terms of target audience)? There's just no information about it whatsoever.
You could try to do market research, but that's difficult to do, considering neither Sony nor Nintendo have started marketing the systems yet.
Nintendo has an established handheld line, Sony just jumped in. Not to mention Sony included features most people didn't care about, like that goofy UMD movie format that costs more than a DVD and is only compatible with the PSP.
Then you'd be wrong, though, as the DS and the PSP have an equivalent install base in the US, for instance. Where the DS is decimating the PSP is in Japan - where the DS effectively tapped a new demographic.
You can see that he's kindof dismissing that possibility in the DS/PSP numbers for next year: he predicts the gap to increase, but not significantly. If the DS Lite follows the Japan behavior, that gap will grow incredibly.
He kindof lost me when he started talking about game quality, though - game quality rankings aren't absolute: they're relative to the console that they're on - which means that the more games a system has, the lower the average ranking is going to be. This isn't just because all of the games are crap - it's because the ranking scale got stretched due to the raised bar.
You really don't want to train people to know that you're going to drop the price of something within a few weeks. It's one thing to know that you could wait a year and spend $30 to get the game you're about to spend $50 on. It's another thing entirely to know that you could wait a month and spend $50 to get the game you're about to spend $80 on.
This is exactly what Nintendo's president is worried about here, although he's even worried about 6 month or 9 month typical discounting. I agree with him on that - if you have a scheduled price discount on software, you will teach people to follow it. Or heck, even with hardware.
There's a reason the moderation system is in place, and that is to highlight the good comments.
True. But that moderation system doesn't build the consensus comments into a readable story. That's what Backslash does.
Essentially they're taking the results of the moderation system and building them into a readable summary. It's not perfect yet - timothy's summaries jump around a bit - but I think it's entirely reasonable to expect it to get better.
The outputs of the moderation system are fairly "raw." This just digests them a little bit more, which some of us already do, granted. But some don't.
Well, Venus is closer, warmer and with a substantial atmosphere.
If by "warmer" you mean "melts lead", yeah, it's warmer. Space probes can't survive on Venus. People definitely can't.
But Venus's biggest problem is related: it doesn't rotate nearly fast enough.
You want an ideal planet? Smack Mars into Venus. Unsurprisingly, that's how Earth started out.
but a bonus point is that as an inner planet
That's more of a downside: I don't think liquid water can survive on Venus already for any long period of time due to the solar insolation. The Sun's so bright from Venus that it'll just rip water in the atmosphere apart.
It's definitely possible to imagine a stable, terraformed Mars. It'll hold an Earth atmosphere for long enough for it to matter, and it's close enough to the Sun that water would even be liquid for a portion of the year.
Venus, I'm not so sure. The rotation rate's a killer, for one, and I think the solar insolation might be a death knell as well. Maybe you could build a giant solar shade, though, but you could always do the reverse on Mars to heat it up as well.
But humans require life to exist. This is a point I made which you chose to overlook.
I didn't overlook it. We're also the only organism capable of establishing new life in an area. We tried once already, halfheartedly, with Biosphere 2. It was a failure because, well, there wasn't any incentive for the scientists. It was a PR deal, and it failed. Think a scientist will work like crazy to fix a giant PR move? Not likely. Think a scientist will work like crazy to fix a habitat supporting him? Yes.
You also have this naive idea that without civilization we're just sitting ducks waiting to be picked off. Humans and their direct ancestors have survived for over three million years. Modern humans have existed for the last two-hundred fifty thousand years. During that time there have been some pretty shitty days too, like the ice age whose remnants we're currently shaking off. Civilization is fragile. Humankind isn't.
You do realize we were on the verge of extinction several times during that period, right? We were confined to a tiny portion of Africa for all but the most recent portion of history. We're fragile. Fragile and lucky.
You make a reasonable point about a lethal environment but fail to acknowledge my point that that same environment will work on Earth.
Um, what? We can't shut off life support for a portion of Earth, and nowhere is Earth hostile enough to support the kind of "necessity breeds invention" that spurs humans on. Hell, we're too lazy to make Antarctica self-supporting. We screw up an ecosystem on Earth, and it just starts spiraling out of control until things are a total mess. We screw up an ecosystem on Mars? We made it. We can just make it again.
As for creating a controlled biosphere on Earth? Yah. Tried that. Failed. The scientists had nowhere near enough incentive. They broke the seal because they wanted peanut butter.
The resources that really matter--oxygen, water, other life, materials that have already been refined--exist on Earth. Not Mars.
There are plenty of materials that exist elsewhere in the solar system, and it's a joke to get resources to Mars from the asteroid belt, for instance. Recycling and recovering precious metals will always be more difficult than mining new, and eventually, all we're going to able to do is recycle materials. Hell, we'll be out of helium in a few hundred years. Not that there's an easy source of helium on Mars, but there sure as hell won't be a way to get more on Earth.
I see it that Earth is better than Mars because you don't have to understand it for life to survive. That's a lot of work already done when it comes to the survival game. You then contradict yourself by saying we're really bad at ecological engineering (so that's why we should place our bets on it?).
We're bad at ecological engineering because we haven't had to do it. We sucked at manipulating electricity and light for the longest time, until we needed to, and then we just took off. Put us on Mars, and we will be good at it. Really, really fast.
Your reasoning here is ridiculously naive: we have to understand things if we want to survive long term. That's what separates us from natural selection - because we can manipulate our environment rather than letting it manipulate us.
Humans staying in an environment that's beneficial to us is the same thing as a guy living in his parents' basement until he's 40. Think about it - your argument applies equally well there. A 40-year old in his parents' basement doesn't have to understand how the world works, or how things get paid for to survive. After all, there's so much that's already been done to allow him to just survive like that! The fact that he'll be in trouble when his parents die? That's far too far off for him to worry about.
Life does not equal humans. There are plenty of ways that life could stick around and still eradicate all humans. Or all human civilization. Either or, because without civilization, we're just another species waiting to be extinguished. And human civilization is really fragile.
While it may seem less sensible, starting from scratch on another planet has several advantages.
The third point is really the big one. Just look at our pathetic attempts at ecological engineering - they're jokes. We usually end up constantly screwing things up. But I wouldn't discount the second one, either: Mars has a pretty big advantage in terms of depth of its gravity well.
Plus, from a very practical standpoint, you could also think of it as the start of interplanetary zoning laws. It'd be real nice to offload really crappy industry to Mars, after all.
then the statement "all cats have tails" is simply an arbitrary definition of "cat", rather than a useful scientific theory.
Exactly. Just like Newton's second law - there is no alternate definition of force, so Newton's second law is actually just a definition.
Newton's third law is a theory, though (and depending on the wording, an incorrect one).
1) If you can create a condition where a goto is to be placed, you can add that same condition to the top loop in the nest and let it exit out gracefully.
// loop A // loop B // loop C
Isn't that slower, though? A normal infinite loop is just a jump, with no branch prediction issues. Adding in a conditional jump to each one could add a slew of branch mispredicts into the code as the predictor fails for each conditional jump.
As in
int ok = 0;
while (ok) {
do_something();
while (ok) {
for (i=0;i != 100;i++) {
if (!(ok = do_something2())) break;
}
}
}
When do_something2 returns 0, the break is just a jump, so there's no mispredict penalty there. But loop B will likely be mispredicted, and then loop A will be mispredicted as well, which gives you two pipeline stalls right in a row. Whereas if you just had a goto in the end, it'd just be a jump, with no mispredict
penalty at all.
Of course, basically the only time I ever consider using gotos is nested loops. Which means gee, it'd be nice if C had a mechanism for specifying a break level (i.e. break(2), break(3), etc.).
Given that the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, that means that if I spend the time unplugging the PS2, then I'll be losing money!
You get paid to stay sitting on your couch?
Wow! Where can I get that job?
Actually, the onboard ones usually have an antenna which runs up the side of the screen of the laptop and connects to the miniPCI card. The PCI ones typically have an external antenna connector.
If you had your choice between a box that did Blu Ray for $1000, or a box that did Blu Ray + lots of other stuff, for $600, a lot of non-elitist consumers are going to go with the cheaper bargain.
The problem with this is simple: what percentage of potential Blu-ray purchasers are not going to be elitist?
The elitist group will go with the standalone player because the PS3 looks cheap. The non-elitist group doesn't buy early new technology anyway.
This kills 2 birds with 1 stone; it get's people buying the PS3 for games and for the Blu-ray capabilities. Either way, they win.
People buying the PS3 for games see a $500-600 system that's the most expensive "new console" out there. By a lot. Heck, there'll still be PS2 systems sitting on shelves this Christmas, and so now they've got to compare a $129 (if it doesn't drop to $99) system to a $500-600 system? Yah. So it's fair to say that the only section of this market they'll get are the ones that have loads of money to throw away, or Sony fanboys. By any measure, that's a niche portion of the market.
People buying the system for Blu-ray capabilities are going to start off as a small market anyway, as it's a $500-600 movie player. But at that point, you're getting someone who wants a top-end home theatre system, and is willing to throw money at it. Now there'll be $1000 standalone players, and a $500-600 PS3. Does Sony really think that those kind of people are going to be swayed by the "ooh, it's $400 cheaper" argument? Of course not - they spent $1500 on an HDTV with marginal amounts of programming available for it. They'll go after the $1000 Blu-ray player, which will be advertised as a "better player" than the PS3. Hint for any Circuit City employees, it's easy enough to just reference the PS2's disc read error issues as well as the poor quality of the DVD output and the compatibility issues it had with certain DVDs, and you'll get people looking at the Blu-ray player instead. So here, again, they're targeting a niche portion of a small market.
I think describing the PS3 as a "cheap" Blu-ray player is the easiest way to keep videophiles from buying them. They'd be better off with standalone Blu-ray players being $500-600. At $400 less, now they just look like there's something wrong with them.
Oh, you thought I meant "[they] wouldn't want to sell (the company)." I meant "[they] wouldn't want to sell (their shares)."
Sure a hostile takeover can take away a family corporation, but not if the family's maintained a majority of the shares.
I suppose it all depends on your definition of "computer." Computers have processor(s), RAM, a boot ROM, and some sort of non-volitile storage, right? So does my Cisco 871W. =D
So does my remote, by that definition.
I mean, if you're not wedded to applications, you can get almost any Linux install to run, better, on a machine that can handle 98SE, but some people aren't down for that
That's not entirely true - Linux support for a few devices from that era is worse than Win98's, and Win2K/WinXP support is often nonexistent. If those devices are the core logic chipset, the machine can easily run bog-slow under Linux, but perfectly snappy under Windows.
I'm mainly thinking of the experiences I've had with a SiS 530-based motherboard, which is painfully slow under Linux, and still pretty slow under Win2K, but really very snappy under Win98.
If the devices are niche enough (i.e. no one gives enough of a crap to try to reverse engineer them, and the documents are likely missing), then Win98 might be the only available option, just for speed reasons.
The main difference between HBC and Nintendo, though, is that Nintendo's a family business - which I also said. This would be more like Wal-Mart being bought out, although even less so, as Nintendo's still very much a family business, with Yamauchi still the majority shareholder (and he only stepped down off the board of executives when he thought the company was in good hands), and Wal-Mart's only in its second generation, whereas Hiroshi Yamauchi was fourth generation. Selling out your dad's business is one thing - selling out your great-grandfather's (and grandfather's) is quite another.
The amount of nepotism in Nintendo is fairly insane: Nintendo of America was originally headed by Yamauchi's son-in-law, and in fact, before Yamauchi's grandfather stepped down, Hiroshi had him fire a bunch of relatives so his authority wouldn't be questioned. Nintendo's more like a clan than it is a corporation. You don't take it over with money. You take it over with skill (Gunpei Yokoi) and with family ties (Yamauchi, Miyamoto).
Besides, the HBC buyout wasn't really a corporate buyout. More like a "forced internal reorganization". HBC is still a corporation all by itself, and I doubt that the HBC board would've agreed to the stock buy if Zucker had planned to merge the business with something else.
Sure, I get that (and I agree - odds are high they really don't want to). But they may not have a choice in certain circumstances.
What? They always have a choice. They own those shares, and Yamauchi is currently the majority shareholder. I think it's entirely likely that Nintendo + Yamauchi + others who would never sell have a controlling interest (that is, greater than half) in Nintendo.
There are no circumstances for publicly traded companies (short of... like, murder or something) that you can just abscond with someone's shares. They own them.
So what? Honestly, does that make a difference, especially now that they are publically traded?
Yes.
Just because they're publicly traded, do you really think that the Yamauchis and other longtime (as in, decades-long) investors in Nintendo would be willing to sell?
Do you really think that the family of those who founded a company don't place a value in their stock slightly higher than the market value?
Actaully, it's been traded on a number of exchanges during it's history, most recently the Tokyo exchange (since 1983).
That being said, it's been executing stock buybacks for a number of years to prevent any possible takeover. I don't know the actual shareholder lists, but Nintendo's bought at least 15% of its outstanding stock in the past 5 years. Presumedly they held a decent amount before then as well.
For 113 years of its life, Nintendo was a family owned business.
Family run. Dangit. I should read through stuff multiple times.
Obviously they've been public for a long time, although they've been executing stock buybacks for the past few years, so they're "kinda sorta" public.
nor does he suggest anywhere that Nintendo might be a little opposed to the deal.
Nor does he do the research to realize that Nintendo's been executing stock buybacks exactly to prevent any sort of hostile takeover in recent years. Apple can't just up and buy Nintendo without the company's approval, and given that the company is one hundred and seventeen years old I've got a feeling they might look at Apple and say, "Uh huh. Yeah. Right. So how many industrial revolutions, world wars, and global economy collapses have you been through unscathed again? Oh? Really? Call us in a hundred years."
Money? Whatever. Nintendo's got a few more assets than just their stock price and cash on hand. Like, you know, a brand image that would probably be undervalued at a few billion, a back catalog of video games that's probably worth roughly the same, the Seattle Mariners... need I go on?
I'm pretty sure you assume wrong.
From 2001:
And 2005 (here):
In other words, "all you young whippersnappers who think you've got boatloads of cash, shove off!"
This sounds familiar.
What is it people in the tech industry don't understand about Nintendo?
Nintendo is a 117 year old company. The analogy I used last time when someone mentioned Microsoft is still apt - this is the equivalent of a 15 year old kid coming over and saying "here's $500, can I buy your house?"
For 113 years of its life, Nintendo was a family owned business. It only passed the reigns on to someone not in the Yamauchi family when Hiroshi Yamauchi named Satoru Iwata his successor, and it's not like the Yamauchi family just up and sold all of their shares.
You can't buy a company if they're not willing to sell the shares.
However in this case it would be an antenna between two rooms without anything being used to boost the signal.
Yeah. Two antennas.