No, it was just a tounge in cheek way of my taking a cheap shot at Linux. It's no secret that I'm a fan of Windows on the desktop, and I don't usually follow the party line here on slashdot. I LIKE Windows. Linux is great for servers. Mac is great for... being different, I guess (seriously, great product, I just see it as a solution looking for a problem). Linux on the desktop for me though... it's just a toy. Something for me to nerd out with. If I want to be seriously productive, I go to Windows. Anything that's "work" for me via linux occurs via Telnet or SSH.
I don't really envision a future like that as being a good thing. However I also don't envision it as being very realistic, either.
I *COULD* see a day where for the stuff you need 128 Bit SSL for now (online banking, etc), you need some kind of TPM based connection instead. However I can easily see that failing too due to poor adoptation rate (look at what happened with the Processor ID numbers on the Pentium 3s (or was it P4s?)).
The fact is that if Microsoft's vision of a rosy DRM future for us all comes to fuition, we could potentially see linux PC's being denied access to large swathes of the internet simply because Microsoft deems them to be "untrustworthy", due to their refusal to comply with Microsoft's DRM requirements.
Sorry to reply to myself but that's a mistake. That should have read "HOWEVER, if you go over 1GB, the tables start to turn..." I probably put 2GB because I was thinking of my system or something. Just wanted to clear that up.
Simple anecdotal observation from my system. I'm running a Core 2 Duo 6400 (1.8GHz) on an Intel DG965WH. 2GB Mushkin 800MHz DDR2 (1GB x 2) in dual channel of course. ATI Radeon X850XT w/ 256MB onboard Several drives, etc. No raid or anything special.
I've got Vista loaded on one drive and XP MCE on a second. Only thing unusual about each install is that I have the MS firewall turned off on both, the profiles directory for XP lives on seperate physical drive, and Windows Defender service is turned off on Vista. Otherwise they're more or less stock. Nothing that should impact performance too much.
3DMark scored better under Vista (32 bit) than under XP. So did the built in benchmark of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.
From my playing around it seems that for systems with 1GB or less (my GF's PC, or the PCs at work) XP will outperform Vista on the same hardware. No surprise, Vista wants more memory.
HOWEVER, if you go over 2GB, the tables start to turn. Vista starts to outperform XP, despite the extra services running, etc. I can only guess that what MS says is actually true. Vista just has better memory managment.
I'd say that if it's a tool just to "trick" (for lack of a better term) people into thinking Army life is better / more glamorous / less risky than it realy is, then no, it's not a very good recruiting tool at all.
However if the game is as delibritly realistic as it is so that potential recruits are given a more realistic view of the risks, etc - therefore generating more recruits with a more realistic expectation going into the recruiter, then I'd say it's a good tool for that.
I have no idea if this is what the Army intended though. For all I know they did it with a philisophy of "any publicity is good publicity" and consider every download a potential recruit.
I can see it being beneficial for them though. I know if it were me, I'd want *quality* soldiers who know the risks and volunteered for them anyway, not kids who figgured they'd take a gamble for free college money, thinking "it could never happen to me" and hope to hell they never get called on their bluff and actually have to go to war.
This is as of yesterday, so it may be a bit outdated.
LOC# Location 60GB 20GB 1400 GREECE NY 65 0 384 ITHACA NY 27 1 428 ALBANY NY 16 0 433 HENRIETTA NY 63 0 459 AMHERST NY 39 1 538 SYRACUSE NY 49 0 541 SARATOGA_SPRINGS NY 12 0 545 NEW_HARTFORD NY 6 1 548 PITTSFIELD MA 0 0 1036 BIG_FLATS NY 24 0 1089 WATERTOWN NY 37 0 1127 DE_WITT NY 0 0 1131 HAMBURG NY 73 2 1152 WALDEN_GALLERIA NY 109 0
Interestingly, the 20GB models are selling out and the 60GBs are not. Without divulging too much info that I shouldn't, the 60GB PS3 is outselling the 20GB model roughly 4:1. I don't know if that's because there's more of a supply of the 60GB or not, but I suspect so.
Sorry about formatting this as code. I can't post tab delimited in POT, as the lameness filter prevents that.
Could you explain that a little more? I don't follow at all. What about the companies renowned for a "when it's done" philosiphy, like Nintendo, Blizard, Valve, and one might even say 3D Realms?
Basicly what you're saying is that after an investment of say, $10 Million, you'd rather ship your product the quarter it's scheduled for and have it take a loss, or very little gain (Say, $15 Million in Rev) than you would wait two quarters and have it bring in say, $50 Million, but in a different financial quarter.
I understand the need to show products to the shareholders, and the need to show a growth in rev, even if it's not nessisarily accompanied by a growth in margin. But what you're saying... well, I don't understand. That's incredibly short sighted and dumb.
If Command & Conquer 3 has great graphics and well balanced gameplay, it might make a splash...its been a long time since a good RTS was available.
You need to play Company of Heros. It was completly off my radar, and then it won lots of GOTY awards for various catagories. I picked it up for my GF who loves stradegy games. It's very well done.
Lynx was an Atari handheld. Why would Sonic, A Sega property, have been on it? Some kind of emulation? Perhaps you're just remembering wrong? If it really happened, I'm cusrious to know the details.
Bomberman '93 on virtual console has up to 5 player support. Through any combination of up to four gamecube controllers, up to four wiimotes or wiimotes with classic controllers. You could have 4 GCN controllers and one classic controller, or vice versa, or anywhere in between.
I suspect that Wii games can potentially use the four GCN / 4 Wiimote with Classic Controller option as well, but this is just speculation based on Bomberman.
That's just the thing. You can't put an exact price on materials for a high technology item like Cell for instance.
Well, you can, but that's only a tiny fraction of it's real cost, so it's an essentially meaningless number.
Let's make some assumptions here, for the purpose of analogy.
Assume it cost $1 Billion to develop the technology in Cell.
Assume that it cost annother $1 Billion to build and / or retool the foundries that make Cell processors.
Assume that the cost in raw materials is $20 for each cell chip.
Assume that it takes 1 hour of assembly line time to build a Cell chip.
Assume that the foundry can build 50 cell chips simultaniously.
Assume that it costs $1,000 an hour to run the foundry (not including materials).
That gives us a rough cost on the part itself. $1000 / 50 chips simultaniously = $20 in foundry time per chip + $20 in materials = $40.
That gives you a very simple, very wrong (depending on your point of view) number of $40 per chip.
Now you have the sticky matter of that $2 Billion to deal with. ($1 Billion in R&D + $1 Billion for the foundry).
This is simply a matter of scale. If I make 1 Million chips, then I divide $2 Billion by 1 Million units and come up with $2,000 per chip. For a total cost of $2,040 per chip.
Now if I don't stop building the chips after a couple months, and actually make say, 100 Million of them over a few years, then you're looking at a cost of $60 per chip (($2B / 100M Units) + $40 = $60). Huge difference. Mostly because of the startup costs. Are you amortizing those into 1 Million units or 100 Million? Simple, really. But it makes putting a precise, tidy number on the cost of the part hard to do.
Now the cost of each new technology in PS3 is going to have the same problems (though probably most intense with the Cell chip). Blu-Ray, I would expect similar issues, though not as dramaticly. And there are other factors I haven't accounted for as well (Bad yields, patents, lowering of production costs over time, etc.). But when they say the actual parts for a Core 2 or an FX are only a few dollars, they're right.
Please note that I'm not in any way an insider in this area, I've just read just enough to be dangerous. All the numbers here were just made up on the spot, and may be wildly inaccurate. They should, however convey the basic idea of how the economics of this kind of thing works. You can read a bit more about this here if you're curious, or you can purchase the origional report here if you have $3,000 sitting around.
Just need to correct myself. That player I linked was not bluray. It's in the bluray/HDDVD catagory on the site I linked from. That's what Iget for doing a 30 second search on froogle.
I can't seem to find Bluray players for under $700, which makes me wonder why the burner we carry is so much less...
My store sells IDE bluray drives for $750. These are burners too. (No idea why we still don't have SATA Blu Ray drives, but that's annother matter...) Our cost on them is like $600, IIRC.
Now, that may still make the PS3 a good value, *IF* one cares about bluray. But let's not overstate the value that it has. PS3 without bluray would probably cost roughly $400 (A semi-educated guess as to the true cost of making these drives) less to manufactuer. That savings could either be passed entirley on to the consumer to get more into people's living rooms, it could be used to keep the PS3 from being as much of a loss leader for Sony, or a combination of the two.
No you wouldn't. Perhaps with an order of magnitude or two more money you would, but you'd get laughed at for that kind of money if you proposed it to Disney. Youy don't think their mascot is worth more than that to them? Hell You Tube went for more than that. The Little Mermaid alone made more than that in the theater on it's first run. To say nothing of merchandising and video sales. And that's just the first Disney film that came up on a google search.
Disney is much, much larger than any kind of grass roots campaign like this. And that's just a little bit frightening.
While that segment does indeed exist out there in respectable numbers, I disagree that it's "most people".
As someone who sells PCs daily to people, retail, just average Joes, even most of them realize that computers get replaced every few years. Most people say four or five years. But it'll vary from person to person.
These are widely publicised attitudes. The idea that "computers are obsolete when you buy them", while not entirely accurate is something I hear on a daily basis.
People may not fylly understand these things, but they've been told them by CNN, or the local paper, and they do believe them.
Joystiq has the closest I can find to live english coverage. There's also a live stream of the conferance, however it's just coming up 403 for me. Perhaps they're only letting.jp IPs through?
When flat panel LCD monitors came out, the prices were obscene, the sizes were small, and the image quality, in many cases was below that of CRT tubes.
Put annother way, you could hire a contractor to mount a tube monitor INTO your wall for less than the price of an LCD when they were new. But they sold because they "took up less space".
In this room, I have two computers. Mine still has a CRT, which is long overdue for replacement, and will probably be replaced by a LCD soon enough. My girlfriend's PC has an LCD I picked up for her last year. They're on the same large desk, side by side. The front of the two are aligned, and there's just a big old dead zone behind her LCD. This is fairly typical of the setups I see. LCDs take up less space, but that space savings isn't used.
They sold initially because they were novel. To a large extent, they still do. I see this the same way. Besides, name an HD source that hasn't had compression artifacts introduced to it before it reaches your screen.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it was just a tounge in cheek way of my taking a cheap shot at Linux. It's no secret that I'm a fan of Windows on the desktop, and I don't usually follow the party line here on slashdot. I LIKE Windows. Linux is great for servers. Mac is great for... being different, I guess (seriously, great product, I just see it as a solution looking for a problem). Linux on the desktop for me though... it's just a toy. Something for me to nerd out with. If I want to be seriously productive, I go to Windows. Anything that's "work" for me via linux occurs via Telnet or SSH.
I don't really envision a future like that as being a good thing. However I also don't envision it as being very realistic, either.
I *COULD* see a day where for the stuff you need 128 Bit SSL for now (online banking, etc), you need some kind of TPM based connection instead. However I can easily see that failing too due to poor adoptation rate (look at what happened with the Processor ID numbers on the Pentium 3s (or was it P4s?)).
The fact is that if Microsoft's vision of a rosy DRM future for us all comes to fuition, we could potentially see linux PC's being denied access to large swathes of the internet simply because Microsoft deems them to be "untrustworthy", due to their refusal to comply with Microsoft's DRM requirements.
One can hope so!
Sorry to reply to myself but that's a mistake. That should have read "HOWEVER, if you go over 1GB, the tables start to turn..." I probably put 2GB because I was thinking of my system or something. Just wanted to clear that up.
Simple anecdotal observation from my system.
I'm running a Core 2 Duo 6400 (1.8GHz) on an Intel DG965WH.
2GB Mushkin 800MHz DDR2 (1GB x 2) in dual channel of course.
ATI Radeon X850XT w/ 256MB onboard
Several drives, etc. No raid or anything special.
I've got Vista loaded on one drive and XP MCE on a second. Only thing unusual about each install is that I have the MS firewall turned off on both, the profiles directory for XP lives on seperate physical drive, and Windows Defender service is turned off on Vista. Otherwise they're more or less stock. Nothing that should impact performance too much.
3DMark scored better under Vista (32 bit) than under XP. So did the built in benchmark of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.
From my playing around it seems that for systems with 1GB or less (my GF's PC, or the PCs at work) XP will outperform Vista on the same hardware. No surprise, Vista wants more memory.
HOWEVER, if you go over 2GB, the tables start to turn. Vista starts to outperform XP, despite the extra services running, etc. I can only guess that what MS says is actually true. Vista just has better memory managment.
YMMV, but this is my experience.
That depends on your definition of "effective".
I'd say that if it's a tool just to "trick" (for lack of a better term) people into thinking Army life is better / more glamorous / less risky than it realy is, then no, it's not a very good recruiting tool at all.
However if the game is as delibritly realistic as it is so that potential recruits are given a more realistic view of the risks, etc - therefore generating more recruits with a more realistic expectation going into the recruiter, then I'd say it's a good tool for that.
I have no idea if this is what the Army intended though. For all I know they did it with a philisophy of "any publicity is good publicity" and consider every download a potential recruit.
I can see it being beneficial for them though. I know if it were me, I'd want *quality* soldiers who know the risks and volunteered for them anyway, not kids who figgured they'd take a gamble for free college money, thinking "it could never happen to me" and hope to hell they never get called on their bluff and actually have to go to war.
This is as of yesterday, so it may be a bit outdated.
LOC# Location 60GB 20GB
1400 GREECE NY 65 0
384 ITHACA NY 27 1
428 ALBANY NY 16 0
433 HENRIETTA NY 63 0
459 AMHERST NY 39 1
538 SYRACUSE NY 49 0
541 SARATOGA_SPRINGS NY 12 0
545 NEW_HARTFORD NY 6 1
548 PITTSFIELD MA 0 0
1036 BIG_FLATS NY 24 0
1089 WATERTOWN NY 37 0
1127 DE_WITT NY 0 0
1131 HAMBURG NY 73 2
1152 WALDEN_GALLERIA NY 109 0
Interestingly, the 20GB models are selling out and the 60GBs are not. Without divulging too much info that I shouldn't, the 60GB PS3 is outselling the 20GB model roughly 4:1. I don't know if that's because there's more of a supply of the 60GB or not, but I suspect so.
Sorry about formatting this as code. I can't post tab delimited in POT, as the lameness filter prevents that.
Best Buy in Fairless Hills, PA. 19030 Near the Oxford Valley Mall
Last I checked (Thursday) we had 42 in stock. Most if not all 60GB. We hadn't recieved a shippment since Monday.
They are not selling.
If you'd like, I can check for stock of nearby stores to you when I go in tomorrow. Just give me a zip. Or a store #.
We are not alone in this.
Could you explain that a little more? I don't follow at all.
What about the companies renowned for a "when it's done" philosiphy, like Nintendo, Blizard, Valve, and one might even say 3D Realms?
Basicly what you're saying is that after an investment of say, $10 Million, you'd rather ship your product the quarter it's scheduled for and have it take a loss, or very little gain (Say, $15 Million in Rev) than you would wait two quarters and have it bring in say, $50 Million, but in a different financial quarter.
I understand the need to show products to the shareholders, and the need to show a growth in rev, even if it's not nessisarily accompanied by a growth in margin. But what you're saying... well, I don't understand. That's incredibly short sighted and dumb.
Yes, Acer still makes PCs. Some of them are hardly budget machines.
If Command & Conquer 3 has great graphics and well balanced gameplay, it might make a splash...its been a long time since a good RTS was available.
You need to play Company of Heros. It was completly off my radar, and then it won lots of GOTY awards for various catagories. I picked it up for my GF who loves stradegy games. It's very well done.
Lynx was an Atari handheld. Why would Sonic, A Sega property, have been on it? Some kind of emulation? Perhaps you're just remembering wrong? If it really happened, I'm cusrious to know the details.
At least five, probably eight.
Bomberman '93 on virtual console has up to 5 player support. Through any combination of up to four gamecube controllers, up to four wiimotes or wiimotes with classic controllers. You could have 4 GCN controllers and one classic controller, or vice versa, or anywhere in between.
I suspect that Wii games can potentially use the four GCN / 4 Wiimote with Classic Controller option as well, but this is just speculation based on Bomberman.
That's just the thing. You can't put an exact price on materials for a high technology item like Cell for instance.
Well, you can, but that's only a tiny fraction of it's real cost, so it's an essentially meaningless number.
Let's make some assumptions here, for the purpose of analogy.
Assume it cost $1 Billion to develop the technology in Cell.
Assume that it cost annother $1 Billion to build and / or retool the foundries that make Cell processors.
Assume that the cost in raw materials is $20 for each cell chip.
Assume that it takes 1 hour of assembly line time to build a Cell chip.
Assume that the foundry can build 50 cell chips simultaniously.
Assume that it costs $1,000 an hour to run the foundry (not including materials).
That gives us a rough cost on the part itself. $1000 / 50 chips simultaniously = $20 in foundry time per chip + $20 in materials = $40.
That gives you a very simple, very wrong (depending on your point of view) number of $40 per chip.
Now you have the sticky matter of that $2 Billion to deal with. ($1 Billion in R&D + $1 Billion for the foundry).
This is simply a matter of scale. If I make 1 Million chips, then I divide $2 Billion by 1 Million units and come up with $2,000 per chip. For a total cost of $2,040 per chip.
Now if I don't stop building the chips after a couple months, and actually make say, 100 Million of them over a few years, then you're looking at a cost of $60 per chip (($2B / 100M Units) + $40 = $60). Huge difference. Mostly because of the startup costs. Are you amortizing those into 1 Million units or 100 Million? Simple, really. But it makes putting a precise, tidy number on the cost of the part hard to do.
Now the cost of each new technology in PS3 is going to have the same problems (though probably most intense with the Cell chip). Blu-Ray, I would expect similar issues, though not as dramaticly. And there are other factors I haven't accounted for as well (Bad yields, patents, lowering of production costs over time, etc.). But when they say the actual parts for a Core 2 or an FX are only a few dollars, they're right.
Please note that I'm not in any way an insider in this area, I've just read just enough to be dangerous. All the numbers here were just made up on the spot, and may be wildly inaccurate. They should, however convey the basic idea of how the economics of this kind of thing works. You can read a bit more about this here if you're curious, or you can purchase the origional report here if you have $3,000 sitting around.
Hopefully this clears things up though.
That's a terrible analogy. Perhaps you'd like to come up with a bad car an logy next.
"You see it's like this: If Honda designed a car with seven engines..."
The parent post doesn't think PS3 is all that great / doesn't think it has all that much of a chance of success.
Was it just this that led you to say that Microsoft is paying them to post? OR is there something I missed?
Is everyone who posts something negative about Sony and / or PS3 being paid by MS or Nintendo or someone else?
Am I?
Just need to correct myself. That player I linked was not bluray. It's in the bluray/HDDVD catagory on the site I linked from. That's what Iget for doing a 30 second search on froogle.
I can't seem to find Bluray players for under $700, which makes me wonder why the burner we carry is so much less...
My store sells IDE bluray drives for $750. These are burners too. (No idea why we still don't have SATA Blu Ray drives, but that's annother matter...) Our cost on them is like $600, IIRC.
You can now purchase a stand alone bluray player for around $400 (first link on a quick froogle search).
Now, that may still make the PS3 a good value, *IF* one cares about bluray. But let's not overstate the value that it has. PS3 without bluray would probably cost roughly $400 (A semi-educated guess as to the true cost of making these drives) less to manufactuer. That savings could either be passed entirley on to the consumer to get more into people's living rooms, it could be used to keep the PS3 from being as much of a loss leader for Sony, or a combination of the two.
Maybe Video Games made them do it.
No you wouldn't. Perhaps with an order of magnitude or two more money you would, but you'd get laughed at for that kind of money if you proposed it to Disney. Youy don't think their mascot is worth more than that to them? Hell You Tube went for more than that. The Little Mermaid alone made more than that in the theater on it's first run. To say nothing of merchandising and video sales. And that's just the first Disney film that came up on a google search.
Disney is much, much larger than any kind of grass roots campaign like this. And that's just a little bit frightening.
While that segment does indeed exist out there in respectable numbers, I disagree that it's "most people".
As someone who sells PCs daily to people, retail, just average Joes, even most of them realize that computers get replaced every few years. Most people say four or five years. But it'll vary from person to person.
These are widely publicised attitudes. The idea that "computers are obsolete when you buy them", while not entirely accurate is something I hear on a daily basis.
People may not fylly understand these things, but they've been told them by CNN, or the local paper, and they do believe them.
Joystiq has the closest I can find to live english coverage. There's also a live stream of the conferance, however it's just coming up 403 for me. Perhaps they're only letting .jp IPs through?
When flat panel LCD monitors came out, the prices were obscene, the sizes were small, and the image quality, in many cases was below that of CRT tubes.
Put annother way, you could hire a contractor to mount a tube monitor INTO your wall for less than the price of an LCD when they were new. But they sold because they "took up less space".
In this room, I have two computers. Mine still has a CRT, which is long overdue for replacement, and will probably be replaced by a LCD soon enough. My girlfriend's PC has an LCD I picked up for her last year. They're on the same large desk, side by side. The front of the two are aligned, and there's just a big old dead zone behind her LCD. This is fairly typical of the setups I see. LCDs take up less space, but that space savings isn't used.
They sold initially because they were novel. To a large extent, they still do. I see this the same way. Besides, name an HD source that hasn't had compression artifacts introduced to it before it reaches your screen.
Yes it does, my source said so too!
Bom means "fuck you" in Polish.
You can. The concept is not new, however I believe most practical headway in developing it is quite recent.
/. articles about this.
There were even two recent
Large Scale Production of Artificial Meat
Space Meat Coming to your Kitchen