The point is that in reporting the facts, you don't "pick a side".
"Reporting" hasn't been about "facts" in a long time. No one cares about "facts" any more. You're out of step with the times.
s/any more/ever/g
Journalism has always been about 2nd/3rd hand information heavily mixed with the reporters bias and dumb down to the point where the arts degree or no degree journalists can comprehend. It has always been this way and nay 1st hand or accurate news is just an accident. Just ask anyone who has been invoved with a news story of any signifigance and they'll tell you the reporters were wrong on a lot of facts.
Instead of havign an idea "all drivers of X race/gener/nationality are terrible" and then collecting emperical data to justify that hypothesis. People just have that idea and then pick example to support that idea. The sceitific method and stats helps remove this factor ins ceince but for such intangibles like "the board doesn't like my research topic". It's difficult to get emeprical data and also to circumvent confirmation bias.
A legitimate counter claim is a study that does not support the idea of climate change that comes from academia (as opposed to corprate studies) that gets repeatitly rejected but looks like legit reserch. If we can find a dozen that have valid methodology but are being conitinously refused by the peer reviewed journals that you give substance to the claim of bias. If you can't then it's just lots of people with alternative motivations spreading mis information.
Your proposal simply forces those without the resources to have smaller houses and cheaper cars. You are now errecting a monetary wall, that is arbitrarily set. If you gradiuate the extra tarrifs enough you might get around that but it's become a worse nightmare then the current scheme. The money to fund public projects and services needs to come from somewhere. Income tax is about as fair as you can get it.
Lets reverse this. prove to me the PS2, Xbox 360 is sold ata loss or the PS3 is sold at a significant loss? Remember logical fallacies don't mean the person is wrong. Only that they aren't answering your question with a validly structured counter point.
No offense but that's obviously false. A few companies like Blizzard and Bioware can get a lot of people to show up to buy a game just because they made it. People give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'll agree EA never had such a status to "lose" though.
Dont' forget Square-Enix, the guys at Valve and bungee. Ubisoft is no slouch either.
The only one to ever say a console is sold at a loss over manufacturing costs are analsyst and Microsoft for the first Xbox. Check the numbers the analsysts are using. 100% of the time is "wholesale" and "retail" estimates. Look at any report. Thats all the info they ever use. Now if your wholesalign anythign at X dollars your problably profiting at least 33% of X. So every loss scenario analyst is off by at least 33%. Go ahead try to find one that does nto use wholesale numbers. Sony/Nintendo/intel/Microsoft/ATI/nvidia ect.. never release what it costs them to make a chip.
Sony's claim that the PS2 "made money" includes licensing money for games. If you think otherwise, go ahead and show concrete numbers and sources. Everyone has always made money on games, and sold consoles at a loss to sell games, with the arguable exception of Nintendo (whose consoles are often panned for being built on cheap hardware).
No they said the machine itself made them money after the first few months. Again the whole "consoles as razors" scenario is a myth and has only been confirmed to have happened once (xbox). The Ps1 Ps2 Dreamcast Xbox360 GC N64 WII have all made profits on each machine soon after launch. Your labourign under a pretty shakey business model and the analysts often lump in R&D costs or use wholesale/retail prices to come up with their "loss scenario". Neither means anything. If a console costs X dollars in labor, materials, and shipping but is sold for Y. Then the profit per machine is Y-X. Analysts often attach R&D costs or use wholesale/retail estimates because if they write about the obvious (Consumer product beign sold at a profit) they do not get any press.
It is actually not that difficult to come to a reasonable estimate of what it would cost to produce the PS3 because most of the PS3's components are readily available (or are very similar to components that are readily available) to purchase by manufacturers; many of these components will have published prices and will even publish the price scale depending on how many components you're buying ($100 per unit for 1,000 to 5,000 units, $95 per unit from 5,000 to 20,000, etc.) and you can use that to estimate the price Sony can get if they're making 10,000,000 units.
For components designed in house by Sony (Cell, Blu-Ray drive, etc.) you can estimate the per unit price by taking the estimated cost to build and adding the cost of Research and Development by the number of units they will sell in order to break even (for something like the PS3 you'd probably want to break even in the 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 range).
Now, most of the losses are not losses in the sense that Sony is physically paying $900 to build a $600 system, but are the Research and Development costs for the platform and the components that have to be paid for in a certain ammount of time.
The first part is exactly the problem with analysts. Using wholesale numbers as manufacturign costs. Wholesale is still mroe then actual costs.
The second part amoratizes R&D costs into each console which is tricky. R&D is spent money, it's also a one time expense largely. So including it is silly. If Sony gets $5 dollars more then it takes to make the machine(labor + material + shipping) then it's $5 dollars they profit from each machine. Factoring in R&D is meaningless. The 30 game rate to recoup the cost of a machien is not right. Sony is likely losing some small amount on each machien now but by next christmas they';ll make some small amount. The 30 games might be whats required to recoup the R&D bu I doubt the machien really costs them that much to make.
Your costs are potentially important info for the competition. Most companies play with those cards very tightly to their chests. I work for a telecom. We don't release any infor about the true cost of our modems or our incremental cost per subscriber. Why should sony?
Where do you get the idea that they're NOT selling at a loss? Analyst estimates of the cost of making the PS2 were always substantially higher than retail value; I've seen estimates of $300 THIS year.
Sony gets substantially less than the retail price, too.
I have no reason to believe that Sony has ever made money selling a console; it's always been game licensing.
When people say that only the Xbox has been a loss, they mean the WHOLE BUSINESS is a loss -- Microsoft lost money even taking licensing into account. Without licensing income, nearly all consoles are losses.... you live in a very special world don't you. Again analysts always predict console X sells at loss Y but there has ever only been 1 that has been confirmed to sell at a lose. Most analyst use retail or wholesale component prices. Those prices were only ever valid for the first exbox all the rest had some large portion of custom gear made in house. The PS2 was said to be sold at a loss for the first 2 years by analysts but sony came out and said, aside fromt he initial few months the PS2 made them money. All nintendo's consoles also make them money as does the 360. The idea of selling at a loss is something business avoid because there is never a garentee that they will "buy enough" of your other product for you to make up for it. The whole business has never sold at a loss. Thats an urban myth.
The whole notion that they are selling the machines at a massive loss pussles me. The analysts use retail or whole sale values for their estimated prices but Sony produces almost all the parts in house. Wholesale is still 40-100% over the cost of manufacturing and retail is often 200-500% over basic costs. Sony has never said they are selling it at a loss and they have traditionally never done so. The only console confirmed to sell at a loss is the Xbox. All other consoles were either profit or break even propositions. Sony is likely taking a loss initially as some have said they did with the PS2 for the first few months. Since they do the majority of manufacturing in house their cost per unit drop quickly as their yeilds get higher ect... Right now it's still too early to say the PS3 is dead. It had a terrible start and it needs to get some new management (which they sorta did).
I think it has the potential to lose the #1 spot but may be 2nd fiddle to WII or XBOX360. I'm waiting till 3 mo after their first hardware revision to get one.
"As the 18-25 year olds graduate from college, get jobs, and get promoted, the difference in price between a Mac and a cheap PC becomes less and less significant."
Not only that - youngsters have always proven themselves very adept at spending money. While a Mac Pro is outside the average college student's range, a MacBook or Mac Mini is not. Being in college right now, I'm seeing droves of my colleagues switch over the last year, the vast majority going to the MacBooks. Nowadays in college, if you're getting a new laptop, it's either a Mac, some ludicrous gaming laptop, or an extreme low-end Dell. Contrary to popular belief (hehe, good one), college students are not in fact rational consumers. The Mighty Mouse is a pretty crappy mouse in all honesty, but I know a ton of people who have it simply because it looks so much sexier than Generic Bluetooth Mouse #21286.
Apple's got themselves in a fine position here. The youngsters want it, the ones that have a job will get it; the hip-craving baby boomers have all the cash in the world to get it; and us techies recommend it to gramps so we're not caught deleting junk from their machines every 3 weeks.
The general pattern I see are the artsy types get macs because they either arent' interested in gaming or want a "just works" box. The compsi geeks all have x86 machines to dual boot and play games on and every else uses PC's with windows because they know nothing else and think the learning cruve isn't worth the benifits of a mac. Also the benifits have grow much smaller now that Widnows doesn't eat yoru machien randomly every 3 months. So Macs have few edges on PC's and Pc's have the benifit of being the most familiar system. thats why new mac acolytes are seemingly hard to find. The kids grow up as PC gamers and become PC power users and never even think about Mac as an option. They like their ipos though so apple will always have some sort of niche.
Are you an accountant? Because, seriously, there's no way that a normal customer would case in the slightest how much their device made profit for the company that made it. Seriously.
The reason, and ONLY reason, you're bringing up profitability is because it's a quick and easy way to make Microsoft look bad... especially among people who don't realize that Microsoft never planned or intended the Xbox to make a profit! If MS didn't expect a profit from it, and it didn't make a profit, then is it still a failure?
So you're 0 for 1 right out of the gate.
A consumer product that is ackowledged by it's board to lose money and missed revenue targets for every quarter except 2 is a failure. I need not be a accountant working under Microsoft to declare ti such and the information is public knowledge.
Sure, if you utterly ignore Xbox Live, Xbox Live Arcade, the ability to rip music, the ability to use it as a Media Center (given, the software sucked, but it existed which is more than you can say for the PS2 or Gamecube), the HDTV support, the ability to display on a (VGA) computer monitor, and all the other goodies it innovated.
Again all done before. Online tiered play, battle net. Rip music? Any Pc. Media center? Microsoft themselves had a dedicated media center PC OS with several vendors selling it with their "media PC". Also the concept of a "media" center merely meant it was a Computer you hooked up to yoru TV. I had one running back in the PIII days. Doubled as a DVD player, a music player, ect.. Your really listing conventional features the xbox happen to aggrigate. They did not innovate.
No, it wasn't a failure. It was always intended to grab a foothold in the gaming market, not to dominate it. It wasn't intended to make a profit in the first generation. This is all well-documented. By Microsoft's own standards, it's been a success.
#2nd place? They weren't aiming for #1 right away but they had projected much higher. they wanted 1/2 of the PS2s base at elast. they fell short. They own targets were not met.
Are you talking about the Dashboard interface? What's wrong with it?
No, I'm talking about the initial controllers. Garbage.
That must be why it has so many platformers, RPGs, and Adventure games. And a couple of Sims.
The genre list is not debatable. They have gotten either multi platform games, FPS's, and several notable platformers (ninja gaiden). However it's RPGS are all wRPG's in the spirit of PC games.
The sales total!? Have you seen the sales of Halo 2? Are you kidding me?
0 for 3.
Xbox ~24 million sold GC ~21.20 million sold PS2 ~92 million sold
It seems most gamers did in fact pick the compitition. A single game may sell a lot but it does nto mean you had major penetration. The Halo market does nto overlap all markets. It has a fairly specific demographic. Xbox did nto attain popular appeal like the PS2 or the Gameboy advances / DS.
Compared to what? The Gamecube? It had tons more memory, more CPU power, more GPU power. It had more than the PS2.
It was off the shelf Pc hardware with a custom GPU. Again the tech was soso. Not bad not good.
The only genre of games it was missing was Japanese RPGs. And, as I posted above, it had two genres that do not appear on other consoles, Western-style RPGs, and Adventure games.
Also missing were puzzle games; weird games like Katamari damacy or brain age; Lack of party games like Mario party. It basically catered to it's core demo: Frat boys.
The xbox 360 is a much better thought out product. The Xbox was a first try and had a lot of problems. Take as you will fan boy.
1) What the hell does it matter how much it cost MS? Is that how you judge every product? "Well, I liked this vacuum, but it cost Hoover too much, so I guess it's a bad product." Crazy.
Ways to judge a product:
profitability: In this regaurds the Xbox ia terrible. A failure. A abject failure. In 10 years it still will not recover Ms investment.
Innovation: Not that much. As someone pointed out the HDD wasn't the first, the PS2 did it first. The only real innovation was that it was a cheap PC slickly packaged as a console.
User Enjoyment: Not all products have to be cashcows or the next big thing to be great. But the Xbox did not do it for me. The machine with it's PC style games (FPS/wRPg's/Multi platform releases) just didn't find a niche in my living room. And fromt he sales total this is true of most gamers. It just didn't make itself different enough from a PC to warrant the expenditure if I already had a PC and wasn't dying to play halo. I got a GC because I wanted zelda, I got a PS2 for FF titles and other jRPGs.
The Xbox was Microsofts learning failure. they took the leasons and moved on. They learned to keep your own IP so the costs scale down with time. They learned focus groups should not be the only thing you use to design your interface. They learned games genres are important and no matter how well you do it; not every one wants a FPS or multiplayer. But the box was ugly, the tech was so so, the intergration was good but the games were lackign diversity. Thus A Terrible rpoduct.
1) The Xbox is a damned good product, regardless of how you look at it. The Xbox 360 is even better.
2) The bias in the comments here is for Nintendo products. The Xbox bias is NOTHING compared to the Nintendo bias.
1) the Xbox was a terrible product with a very limited genre list and cost MS a fortune. The 360 is good.
2) Fanboys are always loudest and th emainstream tends to have the fewest fan boys. Also Xbox tends towards western formerly PC style games. Which happens to cater to the slashdot demographic. If we were to go to say RPG planet the concensus would be different or to Hello kitty fan club the concensus would be different again.
Selling things online is not illegal. HE merely did it without a green card. This is on the list of illegal things with speeding, not yeilding fully to a stop sign or ripping the tags off a matress while it's being shipped.
You know, the fact that China has managed to become the manufacturing center it has is rather astounding. They turn around and steal the technology of the companies who have decided to put plants there. Their system of law is simply unpredictable. By and large, companies who moved there should have known better. As irritated as outsourcing to India has been, in retrospect, we should have made a more concentrated effort in making India, rather than China, the mass-manufacturing center for the American market. India has a few things going for it that China probably never will. First and foremost, they have a republican (small r) system of government. They have benefitted from hundreds of years of English Common Law, which is arguably what makes Biz so seamless and efficient (relatively speaking) in the UK, US, and Canada. Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China.
this is not the first time this has happened. See America shortly after the war of independence.
Sony (at least SoE) doesn't have a "warden" process snooping around your computer looking for third party programs. They polled the user base about 5 years ago on this idea and got a resounding "f'off" response, so have never gone back to trying to monitor the other programs running on your PC at the time.
I don't get how Blizzard is the "good guys" for apologizing when their own snoop program returned a false positive, when they remain completely unrepentant for the fact their process deliberately fishes around the PC for things that may be totally unrelated to the game. That's not classy - that's just apologizing for getting caught.
Of course, if you meant Sony's rootkit fiasco then at least Sony recalled the rootkit. Blizzard is still running the warden last I looked.
Perhaps they just asked all the botters. The problem with polls is the people with vested interests tend to vote first. Most don't care and only botters and the technically inclined would take any noticable interest. I'd prefer having warden and prventign the bull that was Diablo i rather then having a cheating/bot infested game.
Or, they could make a game which is even slightly unpredictable in ways that a retarded-monkey-AI couldn't cope, and thus make bot writing either pointlessly difficult (or at least engender a whole new generation of complex heuristic programming and perhaps advance the science of AI...).
So basically your proposing Blizzard solve an intractable problem? I can't think of too many games where a computer wouldn't be able to play it better then most people. You can add things like enviromental queues but how do you propose to do that without sending packets of data that can be sniffed? You also have to deal with natural latency and the limits on server power as well as havign to market your new game and find peopel who want a game like that. I don't think it's goign to happen.
Blizzard has a difficult problem with cheaters but independant verification of all details would make it an intrackable problem. As a company they'd rather deal with a couple of false positives rather then let the bots run rampant. There may be steps inbetween but I doubt any of them would satisfy you.
If they added a "cheat detected" thing. It just notifyies you to stop until a new program is created, it wouldn't discourage it as much as a random ban hammer. They just log the infraction and then slam you with a ban hoping to get most of your ill gotten gear/gold. They did the same thing with diablo 2.
The level grinding is ridiculous in this game, absolutely have to run around in circles most of the time, rarely had to do that before.
If you have to level to finish the main storyline then you aren't very good at these games. If you are tyring to level by just grinding then you aren't very intelligent. You can level a lot faster by using mist knacks on higher level monsters. A 3-4 chain on a werewolf at lvl 10 will kill it and give you a level.
Mists are essential for early power leveling and item aquisition. I'm lvl 38, do 400-600 dmg on a normal enemy and have not been to the nabina fortress dungeon yet.
It's also consistent with our status as an independent nation-state.
It's incredibly funny that the WTO is being used to abuse the sovereignty of the US. However, it is still an abuse of our right to run our affiars amongst ourselves the way we see fit. Next these jokers will tell Saudi Arabia that the Dutch should be free to export porn there.
It's NOT a violation of the notion of free trade to ban or restrict items from other countries that are ALREADY banned or restricted domestically.
The US already uses the WTO to blugeon other nations. They tend to ignore any incovenient rulings against them though. But they freely use it to threaaten others. See the soft wood lumber deal with canada.
Switching from WoW to a desktop app is amazingly fast and painless. Major difference from Windows.
That does not surprise me at all. From what I understand, Windows both gives high priority to the current interactive process, and you don't get more interactive than a full-screen game, and it aggressively swaps out unused processes. So switching from your game session to your desktop means Windows has to hit the swap immediately.
The Linux kernel's VM subsystem seems te be slightly more sane. Although I guess you have adequate physical RAM, because in low-RAM situations you might see some hiccups when switching too. I know my HP Omnibook laptop gets hit sometimes by slowdowns when switching desktops, but it's only 512M anyway, and it has a slow harddisk Mart
on my core 2 duo 2 gig machine swapping to windows costs almost nothing time wise.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that in reporting the facts, you don't "pick a side".
"Reporting" hasn't been about "facts" in a long time. No one cares about "facts" any more. You're out of step with the times.
s/any more/ever/g
Journalism has always been about 2nd/3rd hand information heavily mixed with the reporters bias and dumb down to the point where the arts degree or no degree journalists can comprehend. It has always been this way and nay 1st hand or accurate news is just an accident. Just ask anyone who has been invoved with a news story of any signifigance and they'll tell you the reporters were wrong on a lot of facts.
It's called confirmation bias.
Instead of havign an idea "all drivers of X race/gener/nationality are terrible" and then collecting emperical data to justify that hypothesis. People just have that idea and then pick example to support that idea. The sceitific method and stats helps remove this factor ins ceince but for such intangibles like "the board doesn't like my research topic". It's difficult to get emeprical data and also to circumvent confirmation bias.
A legitimate counter claim is a study that does not support the idea of climate change that comes from academia (as opposed to corprate studies) that gets repeatitly rejected but looks like legit reserch. If we can find a dozen that have valid methodology but are being conitinously refused by the peer reviewed journals that you give substance to the claim of bias. If you can't then it's just lots of people with alternative motivations spreading mis information.
Your proposal simply forces those without the resources to have smaller houses and cheaper cars. You are now errecting a monetary wall, that is arbitrarily set. If you gradiuate the extra tarrifs enough you might get around that but it's become a worse nightmare then the current scheme. The money to fund public projects and services needs to come from somewhere. Income tax is about as fair as you can get it.
Lets reverse this. prove to me the PS2, Xbox 360 is sold ata loss or the PS3 is sold at a significant loss? Remember logical fallacies don't mean the person is wrong. Only that they aren't answering your question with a validly structured counter point.
No offense but that's obviously false. A few companies like Blizzard and Bioware can get a lot of people to show up to buy a game just because they made it. People give them the benefit of the doubt.
I'll agree EA never had such a status to "lose" though.
Dont' forget Square-Enix, the guys at Valve and bungee. Ubisoft is no slouch either.
The only one to ever say a console is sold at a loss over manufacturing costs are analsyst and Microsoft for the first Xbox. Check the numbers the analsysts are using. 100% of the time is "wholesale" and "retail" estimates. Look at any report. Thats all the info they ever use. Now if your wholesalign anythign at X dollars your problably profiting at least 33% of X. So every loss scenario analyst is off by at least 33%. Go ahead try to find one that does nto use wholesale numbers. Sony/Nintendo/intel/Microsoft/ATI/nvidia ect.. never release what it costs them to make a chip.
Sony's claim that the PS2 "made money" includes licensing money for games. If you think otherwise, go ahead and show concrete numbers and sources. Everyone has always made money on games, and sold consoles at a loss to sell games, with the arguable exception of Nintendo (whose consoles are often panned for being built on cheap hardware).
No they said the machine itself made them money after the first few months. Again the whole "consoles as razors" scenario is a myth and has only been confirmed to have happened once (xbox). The Ps1 Ps2 Dreamcast Xbox360 GC N64 WII have all made profits on each machine soon after launch. Your labourign under a pretty shakey business model and the analysts often lump in R&D costs or use wholesale/retail prices to come up with their "loss scenario". Neither means anything. If a console costs X dollars in labor, materials, and shipping but is sold for Y. Then the profit per machine is Y-X. Analysts often attach R&D costs or use wholesale/retail estimates because if they write about the obvious (Consumer product beign sold at a profit) they do not get any press.
It is actually not that difficult to come to a reasonable estimate of what it would cost to produce the PS3 because most of the PS3's components are readily available (or are very similar to components that are readily available) to purchase by manufacturers; many of these components will have published prices and will even publish the price scale depending on how many components you're buying ($100 per unit for 1,000 to 5,000 units, $95 per unit from 5,000 to 20,000, etc.) and you can use that to estimate the price Sony can get if they're making 10,000,000 units.
For components designed in house by Sony (Cell, Blu-Ray drive, etc.) you can estimate the per unit price by taking the estimated cost to build and adding the cost of Research and Development by the number of units they will sell in order to break even (for something like the PS3 you'd probably want to break even in the 10,000,000 to 20,000,000 range).
Now, most of the losses are not losses in the sense that Sony is physically paying $900 to build a $600 system, but are the Research and Development costs for the platform and the components that have to be paid for in a certain ammount of time.
The first part is exactly the problem with analysts. Using wholesale numbers as manufacturign costs. Wholesale is still mroe then actual costs.
The second part amoratizes R&D costs into each console which is tricky. R&D is spent money, it's also a one time expense largely. So including it is silly. If Sony gets $5 dollars more then it takes to make the machine(labor + material + shipping) then it's $5 dollars they profit from each machine. Factoring in R&D is meaningless. The 30 game rate to recoup the cost of a machien is not right. Sony is likely losing some small amount on each machien now but by next christmas they';ll make some small amount. The 30 games might be whats required to recoup the R&D bu I doubt the machien really costs them that much to make.
Your costs are potentially important info for the competition. Most companies play with those cards very tightly to their chests. I work for a telecom. We don't release any infor about the true cost of our modems or our incremental cost per subscriber. Why should sony?
Where do you get the idea that they're NOT selling at a loss? Analyst estimates of the cost of making the PS2 were always substantially higher than retail value; I've seen estimates of $300 THIS year.
... you live in a very special world don't you. Again analysts always predict console X sells at loss Y but there has ever only been 1 that has been confirmed to sell at a lose. Most analyst use retail or wholesale component prices. Those prices were only ever valid for the first exbox all the rest had some large portion of custom gear made in house. The PS2 was said to be sold at a loss for the first 2 years by analysts but sony came out and said, aside fromt he initial few months the PS2 made them money. All nintendo's consoles also make them money as does the 360. The idea of selling at a loss is something business avoid because there is never a garentee that they will "buy enough" of your other product for you to make up for it. The whole business has never sold at a loss. Thats an urban myth.
Sony gets substantially less than the retail price, too.
I have no reason to believe that Sony has ever made money selling a console; it's always been game licensing.
When people say that only the Xbox has been a loss, they mean the WHOLE BUSINESS is a loss -- Microsoft lost money even taking licensing into account. Without licensing income, nearly all consoles are losses.
The whole notion that they are selling the machines at a massive loss pussles me. The analysts use retail or whole sale values for their estimated prices but Sony produces almost all the parts in house. Wholesale is still 40-100% over the cost of manufacturing and retail is often 200-500% over basic costs. Sony has never said they are selling it at a loss and they have traditionally never done so. The only console confirmed to sell at a loss is the Xbox. All other consoles were either profit or break even propositions. Sony is likely taking a loss initially as some have said they did with the PS2 for the first few months. Since they do the majority of manufacturing in house their cost per unit drop quickly as their yeilds get higher ect... Right now it's still too early to say the PS3 is dead. It had a terrible start and it needs to get some new management (which they sorta did).
I think it has the potential to lose the #1 spot but may be 2nd fiddle to WII or XBOX360. I'm waiting till 3 mo after their first hardware revision to get one.
"As the 18-25 year olds graduate from college, get jobs, and get promoted, the difference in price between a Mac and a cheap PC becomes less and less significant."
Not only that - youngsters have always proven themselves very adept at spending money. While a Mac Pro is outside the average college student's range, a MacBook or Mac Mini is not. Being in college right now, I'm seeing droves of my colleagues switch over the last year, the vast majority going to the MacBooks. Nowadays in college, if you're getting a new laptop, it's either a Mac, some ludicrous gaming laptop, or an extreme low-end Dell. Contrary to popular belief (hehe, good one), college students are not in fact rational consumers. The Mighty Mouse is a pretty crappy mouse in all honesty, but I know a ton of people who have it simply because it looks so much sexier than Generic Bluetooth Mouse #21286.
Apple's got themselves in a fine position here. The youngsters want it, the ones that have a job will get it; the hip-craving baby boomers have all the cash in the world to get it; and us techies recommend it to gramps so we're not caught deleting junk from their machines every 3 weeks.
The general pattern I see are the artsy types get macs because they either arent' interested in gaming or want a "just works" box. The compsi geeks all have x86 machines to dual boot and play games on and every else uses PC's with windows because they know nothing else and think the learning cruve isn't worth the benifits of a mac. Also the benifits have grow much smaller now that Widnows doesn't eat yoru machien randomly every 3 months. So Macs have few edges on PC's and Pc's have the benifit of being the most familiar system. thats why new mac acolytes are seemingly hard to find. The kids grow up as PC gamers and become PC power users and never even think about Mac as an option. They like their ipos though so apple will always have some sort of niche.
Are you an accountant? Because, seriously, there's no way that a normal customer would case in the slightest how much their device made profit for the company that made it. Seriously.
The reason, and ONLY reason, you're bringing up profitability is because it's a quick and easy way to make Microsoft look bad... especially among people who don't realize that Microsoft never planned or intended the Xbox to make a profit! If MS didn't expect a profit from it, and it didn't make a profit, then is it still a failure?
So you're 0 for 1 right out of the gate.
A consumer product that is ackowledged by it's board to lose money and missed revenue targets for every quarter except 2 is a failure. I need not be a accountant working under Microsoft to declare ti such and the information is public knowledge.
Sure, if you utterly ignore Xbox Live, Xbox Live Arcade, the ability to rip music, the ability to use it as a Media Center (given, the software sucked, but it existed which is more than you can say for the PS2 or Gamecube), the HDTV support, the ability to display on a (VGA) computer monitor, and all the other goodies it innovated.
Again all done before. Online tiered play, battle net. Rip music? Any Pc. Media center? Microsoft themselves had a dedicated media center PC OS with several vendors selling it with their "media PC". Also the concept of a "media" center merely meant it was a Computer you hooked up to yoru TV. I had one running back in the PIII days. Doubled as a DVD player, a music player, ect.. Your really listing conventional features the xbox happen to aggrigate. They did not innovate.
No, it wasn't a failure. It was always intended to grab a foothold in the gaming market, not to dominate it. It wasn't intended to make a profit in the first generation. This is all well-documented. By Microsoft's own standards, it's been a success.
#2nd place? They weren't aiming for #1 right away but they had projected much higher. they wanted 1/2 of the PS2s base at elast. they fell short. They own targets were not met.
Are you talking about the Dashboard interface? What's wrong with it?
No, I'm talking about the initial controllers. Garbage.
That must be why it has so many platformers, RPGs, and Adventure games. And a couple of Sims.
The genre list is not debatable. They have gotten either multi platform games, FPS's, and several notable platformers (ninja gaiden). However it's RPGS are all wRPG's in the spirit of PC games.
The sales total!? Have you seen the sales of Halo 2? Are you kidding me?
0 for 3.
Xbox ~24 million sold
GC ~21.20 million sold
PS2 ~92 million sold
It seems most gamers did in fact pick the compitition. A single game may sell a lot but it does nto mean you had major penetration. The Halo market does nto overlap all markets. It has a fairly specific demographic. Xbox did nto attain popular appeal like the PS2 or the Gameboy advances / DS.
Compared to what? The Gamecube? It had tons more memory, more CPU power, more GPU power. It had more than the PS2.
It was off the shelf Pc hardware with a custom GPU. Again the tech was soso. Not bad not good.
The only genre of games it was missing was Japanese RPGs. And, as I posted above, it had two genres that do not appear on other consoles, Western-style RPGs, and Adventure games.
Also missing were puzzle games; weird games like Katamari damacy or brain age; Lack of party games like Mario party. It basically catered to it's core demo: Frat boys.
The xbox 360 is a much better thought out product. The Xbox was a first try and had a lot of problems. Take as you will fan boy.
1) What the hell does it matter how much it cost MS? Is that how you judge every product? "Well, I liked this vacuum, but it cost Hoover too much, so I guess it's a bad product." Crazy.
Ways to judge a product:
profitability: In this regaurds the Xbox ia terrible. A failure. A abject failure. In 10 years it still will not recover Ms investment.
Innovation: Not that much. As someone pointed out the HDD wasn't the first, the PS2 did it first. The only real innovation was that it was a cheap PC slickly packaged as a console.
User Enjoyment: Not all products have to be cashcows or the next big thing to be great. But the Xbox did not do it for me. The machine with it's PC style games (FPS/wRPg's/Multi platform releases) just didn't find a niche in my living room. And fromt he sales total this is true of most gamers. It just didn't make itself different enough from a PC to warrant the expenditure if I already had a PC and wasn't dying to play halo. I got a GC because I wanted zelda, I got a PS2 for FF titles and other jRPGs.
The Xbox was Microsofts learning failure. they took the leasons and moved on. They learned to keep your own IP so the costs scale down with time. They learned focus groups should not be the only thing you use to design your interface. They learned games genres are important and no matter how well you do it; not every one wants a FPS or multiplayer. But the box was ugly, the tech was so so, the intergration was good but the games were lackign diversity. Thus A Terrible rpoduct.
A couple points:
1) The Xbox is a damned good product, regardless of how you look at it. The Xbox 360 is even better.
2) The bias in the comments here is for Nintendo products. The Xbox bias is NOTHING compared to the Nintendo bias.
1) the Xbox was a terrible product with a very limited genre list and cost MS a fortune. The 360 is good.
2) Fanboys are always loudest and th emainstream tends to have the fewest fan boys. Also Xbox tends towards western formerly PC style games. Which happens to cater to the slashdot demographic. If we were to go to say RPG planet the concensus would be different or to Hello kitty fan club the concensus would be different again.
Selling things online is not illegal. HE merely did it without a green card. This is on the list of illegal things with speeding, not yeilding fully to a stop sign or ripping the tags off a matress while it's being shipped.
You know, the fact that China has managed to become the manufacturing center it has is rather astounding. They turn around and steal the technology of the companies who have decided to put plants there. Their system of law is simply unpredictable. By and large, companies who moved there should have known better. As irritated as outsourcing to India has been, in retrospect, we should have made a more concentrated effort in making India, rather than China, the mass-manufacturing center for the American market. India has a few things going for it that China probably never will. First and foremost, they have a republican (small r) system of government. They have benefitted from hundreds of years of English Common Law, which is arguably what makes Biz so seamless and efficient (relatively speaking) in the UK, US, and Canada. Finally, they don't seem to have an appetite for superpower status. We picked the wrong country to invest in. If I owned a manufacturing company, I'd get the heck out of China.
this is not the first time this has happened. See America shortly after the war of independence.
Sony (at least SoE) doesn't have a "warden" process snooping around your computer looking for third party programs. They polled the user base about 5 years ago on this idea and got a resounding "f'off" response, so have never gone back to trying to monitor the other programs running on your PC at the time.
I don't get how Blizzard is the "good guys" for apologizing when their own snoop program returned a false positive, when they remain completely unrepentant for the fact their process deliberately fishes around the PC for things that may be totally unrelated to the game. That's not classy - that's just apologizing for getting caught.
Of course, if you meant Sony's rootkit fiasco then at least Sony recalled the rootkit. Blizzard is still running the warden last I looked.
Perhaps they just asked all the botters. The problem with polls is the people with vested interests tend to vote first. Most don't care and only botters and the technically inclined would take any noticable interest. I'd prefer having warden and prventign the bull that was Diablo i rather then having a cheating/bot infested game.
Or, they could make a game which is even slightly unpredictable in ways that a retarded-monkey-AI couldn't cope, and thus make bot writing either pointlessly difficult (or at least engender a whole new generation of complex heuristic programming and perhaps advance the science of AI...).
So basically your proposing Blizzard solve an intractable problem? I can't think of too many games where a computer wouldn't be able to play it better then most people. You can add things like enviromental queues but how do you propose to do that without sending packets of data that can be sniffed? You also have to deal with natural latency and the limits on server power as well as havign to market your new game and find peopel who want a game like that. I don't think it's goign to happen.
Blizzard has a difficult problem with cheaters but independant verification of all details would make it an intrackable problem. As a company they'd rather deal with a couple of false positives rather then let the bots run rampant. There may be steps inbetween but I doubt any of them would satisfy you.
If they added a "cheat detected" thing. It just notifyies you to stop until a new program is created, it wouldn't discourage it as much as a random ban hammer. They just log the infraction and then slam you with a ban hoping to get most of your ill gotten gear/gold. They did the same thing with diablo 2.
The level grinding is ridiculous in this game, absolutely have to run around in circles most of the time, rarely had to do that before.
If you have to level to finish the main storyline then you aren't very good at these games. If you are tyring to level by just grinding then you aren't very intelligent. You can level a lot faster by using mist knacks on higher level monsters. A 3-4 chain on a werewolf at lvl 10 will kill it and give you a level.
Yeah and the Mists are kinda worthless.
Mists are essential for early power leveling and item aquisition. I'm lvl 38, do 400-600 dmg on a normal enemy and have not been to the nabina fortress dungeon yet.
It's also consistent with our status as an independent nation-state.
It's incredibly funny that the WTO is being used to abuse the sovereignty of the US. However, it is still an abuse of our right to run our affiars amongst ourselves the way we see fit. Next these jokers will tell Saudi Arabia that the Dutch should be free to export porn there.
It's NOT a violation of the notion of free trade to ban or restrict items from other countries that are ALREADY banned or restricted domestically.
The US already uses the WTO to blugeon other nations. They tend to ignore any incovenient rulings against them though. But they freely use it to threaaten others. See the soft wood lumber deal with canada.
on my core 2 duo 2 gig machine swapping to windows costs almost nothing time wise.