US Congress in the pocket of US gaming industry association. The WTO is in the pocket of International gaming association. Good fight. Promises great action. Wanna bet who is going to win?
The US views the WTO as a convenient hammer to get it's ways in certain situations and as a small nuisance when it rules against them. The US hardly ever listens. And generally is a asshole to it's friends and trading partners. Thankfully it's economic influence looks to be waning due to very poor economic management.
Science must 'fight fair' or it isn't science. If you distort the facts then it isn't science at all, it's a belief system.
America teaches that being morally and ethically right means nothing. No one fights fair (see politics). Your not trying to persuade other scientists the exaggeration are right. Your trying to persuade the American public that their demagogues are wrong. Fighting fair means you lose in such a distorted field. Some fights are too important to lose.
spoken like a true nazi. Bush is only responsible for the government, of which there is too much. You are responsible for your own energy usage.
I invoke Godwins law, you lose.
Guess what, those people in India and China are FUCKING POOR AND HAVE NOTHING. What you are advocating is that the people of the USA go back to living in the same kind of crappy lives that people live in the third world. How much more proof do you need to see that you are advocating the injection of a massive level into the USA in order to make the world more equal. Faced with such stark choices, and stark facism by the enviro-left wing, how can any sane person not think that g.w. is a massive left wing lie designed to bring about socialism.
India and china are heterogeneous areas. some areas have prosperity levels in line with western levels, others are poor. Both countries are objectively richer then a a fair chunk of the world. The US doesn't have to go back to anything. Simple changes to fix loopholes in tax laws concerning SUV's would go a long ways to reduce emissions. The reason such a simple fix has not been instituted is due to the failure of the US Automobile industry. They can't compete in the car market and thus lean heavily on the light truck/SUV market to stay afloat. Other high emissions causes is illogical reaction against nuclear power, too much energy spent on disposable products, cities built around cars not people, and urban sprawl. Some of these issues can be addressed.
PS. Socialism isn't bad. The entirety of the western powers practice some form of "socialism" and no "socialism" != "Communism". In fact the social security, welfare, medical subsidies, public education, the central bank tampering with the economy etc.. are all socialist programs/ideas. Socialism is a very broad idea and its implementation varies. Your simplistic ideology betrays how simple you must be.
Translation: Lying something to make sound scary is OK if it gets your message across. End justifies the means?
When your target audience are idiots and the other side exaggerates more then indeed it may be justified. Science fights fair too often and gets steam rollered by the lies of the opponents to science. The technicalities of why he is wrong would confuse the target audience so this means if the opposition started picking at it, it would complicate their lies making it less likely they are believed.
The world will not turn into an oven, but it's not going to stay the same. The cause is at least partially us.
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? String collecting? Mayan hunting techniques? No, my friend, there's a lot more stuff to wiki about.
Well you can say wikipedia is a fairly complete catalog of everything that concerns people with an internet connection.
The story was that John Malm embezzled a large portion of nothing records assets. Trent was left with a defunct label, no money, and no means to publish a record on his own. So he signed with interscope to build up his financial situation so he could self-publish again or at least have creative control.
The validity of this story is vague as I only got it from blogs/forums. I can't find official bits on it.
Me, I have a small indie CD collection of home grown talent and I used to send money through MP3.com to the artists that published tracks I enjoyed. From all reports it got to the artists.
In order to download games, you need to be able to store them somewhere. The Wii has 512MB of internal flash storage, which is not very much when you consider that all of your VC downloads and game saves have to be stored there (the SD card slot is only for archival purposes, as you can't save games or run VC titles off of an SD card). Had Nintendo included a hard drive, they never would've been able to hit their $250 price tag.
Yeah, any also some really simple games like high stake poker are 316mb which is 3/5 of your drive.
While I'm in the camp that thinks axing the backwards compatibility is idiotic for Sony (like everything these days...), if you can indicate it with a color that would be very helpful for customers.
Only for the bottom end 40gb. The 80gb will continue to have the EU type chipset layout and SW EE emulation.
Could someone please remind me how patenting something obvious is not evil?
Many companies keep a defensive collection of patents. Say AT&T sues Google about some algorithm they patented. Google digs and finds a few AT&T infringes on and presents that. They realize a fight would only benefit lawyers and settle on mutual cross licensing. Sort of a corporate brinkmanship/deterrence.
Randall Munroe (xkcd author) also made this comic entitled "Online Communities". Also a nice way to make a map of the internet. (Extra points for those, who find "Stallman's Airship") It's a bit out of date, facebook expanded a lot. Myspace shrank and wheres slashdot.
The "problem", philosophically, with a purely Newtonian universe, derives from the niggling little detail that free will cannot exist. Every possible action you could ever take will have already happened, just not yet.
Free will is just an idea. It isn't some essential observed bit of the universe. From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines. We are entirely physical, deterministic machines.
As well Microsoft has announced about 100$ for each xbox 360 sold thus far($1 billion dollars). Which would be warranty repair costs and replacements costs for 1/3 of it's units if each replacement costs the same price as a new one in product costs and handling costs. Some say they may just be overly cautious but no manufacturer would announce such a huge warranty budget and risk extremely bad PR if there wasn't a problem. Given the next revision (falcon) will utilize the 65nm chip fab for the CPU it's less likely those will fail thus that billion is likely for machines already sold. Those new boxes aren't in the retail channels yet either.
Specifically, a 1 in 34 fail rate for consumer electronics, given the cost of handling returns, etc., IS a fiasco, unless its some cheapie $10 item that people are going to just throw away if it doesn't work.
There is no arguing that the 360'd 1 in 3 fail rate is horrible but 1% doesn't make the news as warranty replacements and exchanges capacity within the retail system can work with 1%. At 30% it gets silly and another system has to be worked out but if 1% of your goods fails within 1 year it's not too bad. Of course I'm just a armchair logistics accountant.
XBox360 is actually quite a high performance machine, I think to get the similar performance in a PC, you would be out several times the price.
Not really. The 3 core PPC is a dumbed down version with a lot of the branch prediction hardware missing from the CPU. The memory bandwidth of all 3 machines are far greater then a normal PC with lower latency etc but it's not meant to be general purpose machine. and it has a lot less overhead from the OS. Your getting essentially a lower-mid range GPU with a highly specialized CPU. The graphic muscle is derived from the high memory bandwidth and some unique features in the GPU but a mid/upper range PC at the time of the 360'd release would have rivaled the machine in graphic muscle. Also the 480p/720p that most 360/ps3 games are, are generally lower then PC games. So you get more graphic muscle simply from pushing less pixels.
1 in every 34 elevators failing, 1 in every 34 food items sold at stores being rotten, 1 in every 34 newspapers or books you buy filled with blank pages instead of news, 1 in every 34 flushes not "doing the job"...
If elevators were $300 then yeah 1/34 might be about right. Newpapers do indeed have a high rate of misprints, smeared ink and blank pages. 1/34 is not unlikely. Books too have smeared ink and blank pages and offset print. 1/34 books at elast. Depending on what you make 1% may be very good, terrible, or legally compromising. Car Breaks with a 1% fail rate would be a fiasco. A toilet plunger wiht a 1% fail rate would be okay.
1) Most Xboxes run just fine. People don't go online and post "my Xbox 360 is still working today!" 2) It's been fixed for months, in any case.
There is hard data that 360's fail at a much greater rate then any other console or even any other non economy home electronic device. So no it's not just a few people. If you look for some data some distributors noted a ~30% exchange rate.
. Secondly, what is the known, fatal design flaw anyway?/i>
A number of things 1- cheap solder on the motherboard which is prone to crack and break 2- screw placements that cause damage if the board moves 3- A motherboard that warps when heated just right and if the solder softens 4- insufficient cooling 5- too much heat generation from CPU/GPU
Added together it makes it likely that the motherboard will warp and break the board. Thats what the red ring of death is.
The extended 3 warranty is only this problem. Supposedly the next CPU version will use 45nm technology to reduce heat generation nd will stop cheaping out on solder. Initially the "replacement" 360's were refurbished. Thus you're getting someone else machine that crapped out and just has a few new parts in it. I'm not sure what the status of that is. I have a friend on his 3rd 360 all of my friends have had to replace their once and there is a story of a guy who had 8 boxes in two different house with many attempt to prevent overheating on slashdot a while ago too. It might be more common with hardcore gamers who use their machine more often.
You are correct, however, Sony's real hopes lie with the 40 GB model, not the 80. To not include such a major feature in the lower-priced model (this new price point may actually save them from total failure in this console generation, but we'll have to see) is pretty stupid, imho. It's like getting rid of the biggest problem, but introducing a new big problem at the same time... there isn't going to be that much of an overall improvement.
Their hope lies in widespread adoption in japan thus locking in the Japaneses developers again. The BC is important there and the economy is somewhat stronger then the US right now. The slow uptake of the US market to the PS3 is mostly price related. Some of us (slashdot crowd) have beefs with the rootkit. Others have issues with the insanity/inconsistency of Sony PR. Both will be forgiven if they can deliver some quality games. I think their most monumental failure isn't with BC. Once a steady stream of games comes BC will be forgotten. Just look at the 360. 2 years on and no one bitches about the 30% BC. The trick is to get a steady stream going. Their biggest failure is within not locking in third parties.
I think there is only so much you can throw at developers to make them stay but they should have really tried to retain exclusivity of GTA and Devil May cry. Right now their running on the Square main storyline FFXIII, their own internally developed titles and MGS4. The extra 2 might have made it a easy #2 next tot he wii. They might have even made more money then Nintendo due to higher game sales (I but 4-10 titles a month. My wii friends buy ~1/mo so far). They lost those 2 and now it's sort of iffy. the 360 has a whole bunch of PC gaming like high quality exclusives while Sony appears to have fewer top shelf exclusives.
Still too early to call. The PS3 is actually moving in any place except the US and is catching up to the 360. Octobers numbers may revamp this but they were at 1/3 the 360's numbers (4.6mil vs 12.5 mil) in june. Which is roughly in line with how well the 360 was doing at the same time in it's life.
You're not having to emulate 9,000 games. Sony OWNS the PS2 in every sense of the word. They have all the developer documentation. Hell, they even have all of the source code used in the PS2. Emulation is difficult when you DON'T have access to the source code, and every new game means finding a new piece of the system that must be emulated.
EMU is never 100%. 10 years and 1000x the computing power and SNES games are still not 100%. You may have the official documentation on everything but PS2 developers outnumber Sony developers and those hordes of third parties have utilized many undocumented tricks on the PS2 to squeeze more out of it with else effort. That's why the hardware EMU was only 90+% while the software + hardware EMU was 80%. EMU isn't a simple issue. Slight variations on how a value returns can hang a game. For instance suppose your used to true 32bit values for a certain function but in the PS3 it first does the equation in 64bit then rounds/truncates into 32bit. Now the function isn't 100% the same. So a ps2 game expecting certain values will glitch up. Even though sony has full documentation it's not trivial to find all the undocumented tricks other developers use. The 360's BC suffers from this more severely because the chipsets are completely different. so they have to tweak their EMU to bridge the gap between implementations. But this requires basically making EMU on a per title basis.
>i?I'm waiting to get a high def TV before I switch. It seems incredibly short sighted for Sony to eliminate the backward compatibility that differentiated your system from the xbox. Now why shouldn't you buy and xbox, (besides reliability) the xbox has better games and is slightly cheaper and you can't play your ps2 games on ps3 or xbox360.
They aren't eliminating it completely. only in their cheapest 40GB model.
Slashdot Mirror
US Congress in the pocket of US gaming industry association. The WTO is in the pocket of International gaming association. Good fight. Promises great action. Wanna bet who is going to win?
The US views the WTO as a convenient hammer to get it's ways in certain situations and as a small nuisance when it rules against them. The US hardly ever listens. And generally is a asshole to it's friends and trading partners. Thankfully it's economic influence looks to be waning due to very poor economic management.
Science must 'fight fair' or it isn't science. If you distort the facts then it isn't science at all, it's a belief system.
America teaches that being morally and ethically right means nothing. No one fights fair (see politics). Your not trying to persuade other scientists the exaggeration are right. Your trying to persuade the American public that their demagogues are wrong. Fighting fair means you lose in such a distorted field. Some fights are too important to lose.
spoken like a true nazi. Bush is only responsible for the government, of which there is too much. You are responsible for your own energy usage.
I invoke Godwins law, you lose.
Guess what, those people in India and China are FUCKING POOR AND HAVE NOTHING. What you are advocating is that the people of the USA go back to living in the same kind of crappy lives that people live in the third world. How much more proof do you need to see that you are advocating the injection of a massive level into the USA in order to make the world more equal. Faced with such stark choices, and stark facism by the enviro-left wing, how can any sane person not think that g.w. is a massive left wing lie designed to bring about socialism.
India and china are heterogeneous areas. some areas have prosperity levels in line with western levels, others are poor. Both countries are objectively richer then a a fair chunk of the world. The US doesn't have to go back to anything. Simple changes to fix loopholes in tax laws concerning SUV's would go a long ways to reduce emissions. The reason such a simple fix has not been instituted is due to the failure of the US Automobile industry. They can't compete in the car market and thus lean heavily on the light truck/SUV market to stay afloat. Other high emissions causes is illogical reaction against nuclear power, too much energy spent on disposable products, cities built around cars not people, and urban sprawl. Some of these issues can be addressed.
PS. Socialism isn't bad. The entirety of the western powers practice some form of "socialism" and no "socialism" != "Communism". In fact the social security, welfare, medical subsidies, public education, the central bank tampering with the economy etc.. are all socialist programs/ideas. Socialism is a very broad idea and its implementation varies. Your simplistic ideology betrays how simple you must be.
Translation: Lying something to make sound scary is OK if it gets your message across. End justifies the means?
When your target audience are idiots and the other side exaggerates more then indeed it may be justified. Science fights fair too often and gets steam rollered by the lies of the opponents to science. The technicalities of why he is wrong would confuse the target audience so this means if the opposition started picking at it, it would complicate their lies making it less likely they are believed.
The world will not turn into an oven, but it's not going to stay the same. The cause is at least partially us.
Are you saying that because a computerized knowledge base, owned, operated, and edited by people with computers, has a lot of stuff about computers in it, that it must therefore have a lot of stuff about everything in it? What about needlepoint? String collecting? Mayan hunting techniques? No, my friend, there's a lot more stuff to wiki about.
Well you can say wikipedia is a fairly complete catalog of everything that concerns people with an internet connection.
which means no money gets to the artists themselves
You misspelled "gets burned up in fake overhead for distribution expenses by the RIAA".
The story was that John Malm embezzled a large portion of nothing records assets. Trent was left with a defunct label, no money, and no means to publish a record on his own. So he signed with interscope to build up his financial situation so he could self-publish again or at least have creative control.
The validity of this story is vague as I only got it from blogs/forums. I can't find official bits on it.
Me,
I have a small indie CD collection of home grown talent and I used to send money through MP3.com to the artists that published tracks I enjoyed. From all reports it got to the artists.
You need 316 MB for poker? I could make poker in 316 KB.
They have animated opponents who have "tells". it's sort of fun finding them.
In order to download games, you need to be able to store them somewhere. The Wii has 512MB of internal flash storage, which is not very much when you consider that all of your VC downloads and game saves have to be stored there (the SD card slot is only for archival purposes, as you can't save games or run VC titles off of an SD card). Had Nintendo included a hard drive, they never would've been able to hit their $250 price tag.
Yeah, any also some really simple games like high stake poker are 316mb which is 3/5 of your drive.
While I'm in the camp that thinks axing the backwards compatibility is idiotic for Sony (like everything these days...), if you can indicate it with a color that would be very helpful for customers.
Only for the bottom end 40gb. The 80gb will continue to have the EU type chipset layout and SW EE emulation.
Could someone please remind me how patenting something obvious is not evil?
Many companies keep a defensive collection of patents. Say AT&T sues Google about some algorithm they patented. Google digs and finds a few AT&T infringes on and presents that. They realize a fight would only benefit lawyers and settle on mutual cross licensing. Sort of a corporate brinkmanship/deterrence.
The "problem", philosophically, with a purely Newtonian universe, derives from the niggling little detail that free will cannot exist. Every possible action you could ever take will have already happened, just not yet.
Free will is just an idea. It isn't some essential observed bit of the universe. From all scientific evidence we are complicated finite state machines. We are entirely physical, deterministic machines.
360
fail
rate
and
here
and
here.
This anecdote
An Over view.
another article
As well Microsoft has announced about 100$ for each xbox 360 sold thus far($1 billion dollars). Which would be warranty repair costs and replacements costs for 1/3 of it's units if each replacement costs the same price as a new one in product costs and handling costs. Some say they may just be overly cautious but no manufacturer would announce such a huge warranty budget and risk extremely bad PR if there wasn't a problem. Given the next revision (falcon) will utilize the 65nm chip fab for the CPU it's less likely those will fail thus that billion is likely for machines already sold. Those new boxes aren't in the retail channels yet either.
Specifically, a 1 in 34 fail rate for consumer electronics, given the cost of handling returns, etc., IS a fiasco, unless its some cheapie $10 item that people are going to just throw away if it doesn't work.
There is no arguing that the 360'd 1 in 3 fail rate is horrible but 1% doesn't make the news as warranty replacements and exchanges capacity within the retail system can work with 1%. At 30% it gets silly and another system has to be worked out but if 1% of your goods fails within 1 year it's not too bad. Of course I'm just a armchair logistics accountant.
XBox360 is actually quite a high performance machine, I think to get the similar performance in a PC, you would be out several times the price.
Not really. The 3 core PPC is a dumbed down version with a lot of the branch prediction hardware missing from the CPU. The memory bandwidth of all 3 machines are far greater then a normal PC with lower latency etc but it's not meant to be general purpose machine. and it has a lot less overhead from the OS. Your getting essentially a lower-mid range GPU with a highly specialized CPU. The graphic muscle is derived from the high memory bandwidth and some unique features in the GPU but a mid/upper range PC at the time of the 360'd release would have rivaled the machine in graphic muscle. Also the 480p/720p that most 360/ps3 games are, are generally lower then PC games. So you get more graphic muscle simply from pushing less pixels.
1 in every 34 elevators failing, 1 in every 34 food items sold at stores being rotten, 1 in every 34 newspapers or books you buy filled with blank pages instead of news, 1 in every 34 flushes not "doing the job" ...
If elevators were $300 then yeah 1/34 might be about right. Newpapers do indeed have a high rate of misprints, smeared ink and blank pages. 1/34 is not unlikely. Books too have smeared ink and blank pages and offset print. 1/34 books at elast. Depending on what you make 1% may be very good, terrible, or legally compromising. Car Breaks with a 1% fail rate would be a fiasco. A toilet plunger wiht a 1% fail rate would be okay.
CPU version will use 45nm technology
Oops thats 65nm.
1) Most Xboxes run just fine. People don't go online and post "my Xbox 360 is still working today!"
2) It's been fixed for months, in any case.
There is hard data that 360's fail at a much greater rate then any other console or even any other non economy home electronic device. So no it's not just a few people. If you look for some data some distributors noted a ~30% exchange rate.
. Secondly, what is the known, fatal design flaw anyway?/i>
A number of things
1- cheap solder on the motherboard which is prone to crack and break
2- screw placements that cause damage if the board moves
3- A motherboard that warps when heated just right and if the solder softens
4- insufficient cooling
5- too much heat generation from CPU/GPU
Added together it makes it likely that the motherboard will warp and break the board. Thats what the red ring of death is.
The extended 3 warranty is only this problem. Supposedly the next CPU version will use 45nm technology to reduce heat generation nd will stop cheaping out on solder. Initially the "replacement" 360's were refurbished. Thus you're getting someone else machine that crapped out and just has a few new parts in it. I'm not sure what the status of that is. I have a friend on his 3rd 360 all of my friends have had to replace their once and there is a story of a guy who had 8 boxes in two different house with many attempt to prevent overheating on slashdot a while ago too. It might be more common with hardcore gamers who use their machine more often.
You are correct, however, Sony's real hopes lie with the 40 GB model, not the 80. To not include such a major feature in the lower-priced model (this new price point may actually save them from total failure in this console generation, but we'll have to see) is pretty stupid, imho. It's like getting rid of the biggest problem, but introducing a new big problem at the same time... there isn't going to be that much of an overall improvement.
Their hope lies in widespread adoption in japan thus locking in the Japaneses developers again. The BC is important there and the economy is somewhat stronger then the US right now. The slow uptake of the US market to the PS3 is mostly price related. Some of us (slashdot crowd) have beefs with the rootkit. Others have issues with the insanity/inconsistency of Sony PR. Both will be forgiven if they can deliver some quality games. I think their most monumental failure isn't with BC. Once a steady stream of games comes BC will be forgotten. Just look at the 360. 2 years on and no one bitches about the 30% BC. The trick is to get a steady stream going. Their biggest failure is within not locking in third parties.
I think there is only so much you can throw at developers to make them stay but they should have really tried to retain exclusivity of GTA and Devil May cry. Right now their running on the Square main storyline FFXIII, their own internally developed titles and MGS4. The extra 2 might have made it a easy #2 next tot he wii. They might have even made more money then Nintendo due to higher game sales (I but 4-10 titles a month. My wii friends buy ~1/mo so far). They lost those 2 and now it's sort of iffy. the 360 has a whole bunch of PC gaming like high quality exclusives while Sony appears to have fewer top shelf exclusives.
Still too early to call. The PS3 is actually moving in any place except the US and is catching up to the 360. Octobers numbers may revamp this but they were at 1/3 the 360's numbers (4.6mil vs 12.5 mil) in june. Which is roughly in line with how well the 360 was doing at the same time in it's life.
You're not having to emulate 9,000 games. Sony OWNS the PS2 in every sense of the word. They have all the developer documentation. Hell, they even have all of the source code used in the PS2. Emulation is difficult when you DON'T have access to the source code, and every new game means finding a new piece of the system that must be emulated.
EMU is never 100%. 10 years and 1000x the computing power and SNES games are still not 100%. You may have the official documentation on everything but PS2 developers outnumber Sony developers and those hordes of third parties have utilized many undocumented tricks on the PS2 to squeeze more out of it with else effort. That's why the hardware EMU was only 90+% while the software + hardware EMU was 80%. EMU isn't a simple issue. Slight variations on how a value returns can hang a game. For instance suppose your used to true 32bit values for a certain function but in the PS3 it first does the equation in 64bit then rounds/truncates into 32bit. Now the function isn't 100% the same. So a ps2 game expecting certain values will glitch up. Even though sony has full documentation it's not trivial to find all the undocumented tricks other developers use. The 360's BC suffers from this more severely because the chipsets are completely different. so they have to tweak their EMU to bridge the gap between implementations. But this requires basically making EMU on a per title basis.
>i?I'm waiting to get a high def TV before I switch.
It seems incredibly short sighted for Sony to eliminate the backward compatibility that differentiated your system from the xbox. Now why shouldn't you buy and xbox, (besides reliability) the xbox has better games and is slightly cheaper and you can't play your ps2 games on ps3 or xbox360.
They aren't eliminating it completely. only in their cheapest 40GB model.
The 80gb will be fully BC like the 60gb (maybe more like the EU version).