Imagine if you will, Sony including the only high definition format disc in their PS3. A dual layer HD-DVD has 30 gigs of storage, more than enough to hold the 22 gigs of Resistance: Fall of Man. Every single movie studio releasing their films on the only high definition format: HD-DVD. Sony would not be having the blue diode production problems that it is currently having. Because all of the manufacturers would be focusing on only one format, costs would come down even quicker. The high definition era would begin with the same unity as the DVD era. Sony would be guaranteed a huge quantity of money from licensing.
Instead, Sony decided that it had the Playstation brand as a magic bullet and gave the finger to the rest of the DVD coalition. I hope it works out for them.
Scenario A : Sony licence and buys HD DVD drives 1- Price is dictated by supplier 2- Price includes profit from third party 3- price include licencign of tech
Scenario B: Sony creates their own drives 1- Price dictated by production cosst 2- Profit is all Sony's 3- Must pay R&D.
It seems utilizing Blu-Ray instead of someone else format might help them in the long run. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are functionally the same but HD-DVD is someone else IP, someone else has control on it, and someone else grabs a portion of yrou profits. so it benifits sony to go with Blu-Ray.
Do you know how much work by how many artists it would take to fill 50GB with "A" title art?
Neither do I, exactly, but considering an "A" console title now can take the efforts of dozens of artists a couple years to complete, the costs and effort to develop a game that wisely uses 50GB is... Stupid, quite frankly.
Don't confuse more art with higher res art. The same art that had to be compressed and downsampled to fit inot a 700 meg CD and slightly less compressed to fit on a 4.5 meg DVD can now be up sampled or un changed to fit on a Blu-ray disc(BRD?).
There's a few differences, though. DVD was already doing well on its own before the release of the PS2. Hollywood Video and Blockbuster already carried a good selection of DVD titles. DVD also didn't have any real competition from other formats, like Blu-Ray has now. HD-DVD players were out before Blu-Ray players, at half the cost. The fact that the Toshiba HD-DVD player costs $450 on Amazon vs. $700 for the Samsung Blu-Ray player vs. $1000 for the Sony Blu-Ray player makes you wonder who would be excited about Blu-Ray?
Perhaps your confusing the time period. When I bought my PS2, DVD were the new thing but they were fringe products still. The PS2 was my first DVD player. I got it just aa it came out and it was almost $600 cnd. DVD were $40 CND at the time, and there wasn't that many tos elect from. Right now Blu-ray is a tad behind that but not by much. They could get to the same poitn in 2-3 mo. a few titles with most major titles beign planned to be released on bluray too. It seems to correspond pretty closely.
Let me put it this way. Sony has a monopoly on all consoles with the name "Playstation 3" and the design thereof. This is no secret, nor is there anything wrong with it. However, Sony chooses to add a Blu-Ray drive to all of their Playstation 3 systems, thus inflating the price by a few hundred dollars.
Now, I, as a consumer, would gladly plunk down $300 for a PS3 sans Blu-Ray drive. However, Sony chooses not to produce any such consoles. Therefore, all things considered, I AM left with a choice, but it's Hobson's choice: buy any PS3 you want, as long as it has a Blu-Ray drive in it.
In other words, if I want to buy a PS3, I must either: (1) pay the extra money for a Blu-Ray drive I don't want, or (2) don't buy it at all. Thus my use of the word "forced." If I want to buy a PS3, I must pay that extra money.
Thats the product they're offering. It's liek saying Coke forces you to buy a cola with carmelized sugar in it and you are forced to because they no longer make a cola without carmalized sugar. IT's a really silly idea. They made a product with a certain specification. You would have prefered a different one however that has nothing to do with "forces". they made the product the way it is. Blu-ray or not isn't yrou choice. You only ever have the choice to buy the product or not.
It means the VRAM image sent to the rasterizer is 6.75 times as large. It does not follow that the size of the raw content on disc (textures, geometrical data, etc.) will also be 6.75 times as large.
The textures must now be 6.75 times larges to not look pixelated or blurred, the models have to have more detail and so on so it's a hard call. I doubt the games will be fully 7 timeslarger but I doubt that it's goign to be a trivial increase. Remember they're not just throwing up SD FMV's for you to play now.
Actually, what really scares me are biological weapons (think Smallpox's Variola Major or other very nasty bugs) that can be transported with less readily available detection (Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" is a good read, so is Stephen King's The Stand, and then there is the movie 12 Monkeys http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/12_monkeys/). My High school biology teacher (back in the mid 80's), who sevred as an officer in the Army a few years before, said biological weapons concerned her much more than nuclear for several reasons:
Given even the most viril and horrifying biological agent (ebola/anthrax) there are those with natural immunities and infection rates can be drastically cut down through quarantine and some people just live in such remote places that they'd have little to fear. However there are no natural immunities to 4000'C temperatures.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
Also consider Iraq. The Japanese were just about a militant as the Iraqies. Given even the limited industrial capacity of current iraq, they do a lot of damage to the US. Imagine a near technological peer beign just as militant, and you've invaded their home land. The bomb completely demoralized Japan. any hope of conditional surrender or resistance died. In Iraq, the militants are fairly certain the Us will not nuke them all so it has no effect and the US has the head aches they do now.
Are you claiming that XP was aimed at the same market as 2K? That XP lacks any of the "security features" of 2k? (For the security features - yes, it's an irritating bug in the XP home UI that you can't get the ACL's of a file - but you can fix it by changing a registry value).
Woops, I accidentally forgot to type a "not".
What devices does XP support that 2K doesn't? What programs does XP run that 2K doesn't? Why is XP more stable than 95/98/ME - 'cos it's based on 2K.
shitty video cards, and cheap sound cards along with dirt cheap peripherals. The low price poitn and cheap ass drievrs made xp less stable but gave it a wider consumer appeal due to the cheapness of a lot of consumers.
Yeah, but who is going to buy a $500-600 entertainment console and then not buy any of the newer content that it can play that notionally justifies the additional expense beyond an older console like the PS2? There's not a whole lot of sense to anyone doing that.
At the 500-600 price point I doubt their losign money. I beleive this is a hedge against the ebay phenomenon. Where they price it at 499 and have others sell it on ebay for 1000. Their just tyring to capitalize on as large of a % of what people are willing to pay. I assume a mo after release the price will drop a competative point... Unless their stupid. Then I'm wrong and sony is goign to burn.
Think of a generic fast-food restaurant. Imagine they have a "value menu" with the Stinkburger Deluxe for only $0.99, but it costs $2.99 to produce. Drinks, however are $2.50 and cost about $0.15 to produce. Similarly fries are $0.99 but cost only $0.10 to produce. The restaurant will go out of business if every customer enters, purchases one Stinkburger Deluxe, and leaves. But most people aren't satisfied just downing a Stinkburger, they want fries and a drink too. That's the idea here; it's called the "razor and blades business model."
However most business are run by reckless gamblers or retards. they'll market a 4.95 meal pack, with a apparent cost of 3.95 for the burger 1.50 for the fries and 1.50 for the drink. Their real cost is problably 2.00 for the burger and 0.15 for drink and 0.15 for the fries. So if everyone grabs a burger, their profit margins go down but they still make money. The razor blade model is similiar. They're risking lower profit not loss because if a worst case happens you bank rupt yourself.
But doesn't that then hurt the store who Sony just sold more to? I understand that by buying one and never buying a game from it, Sony is investing in a customer that does not actually exist. But for each console a store sells, they'll likely restock that console, and we'll be back at square one, with the store losing out on its predicted sale.
the whole concept of a company losing money on a product is a myth. The Ps2 may have lost money on the first run of them in the first few months. But according to Sony they broke even or profitted there after. Nintnedo never lost money, and the Ps1/Neo Geo/Jaguar ect.. all made money from each sale. Ditto with Sega. The only confirmed company to have lost money and each box is Microsoft on both the 360 and Xbox. Even the Ps2 may have fudged it to include R&D costs. In which case each machien made them moeny but they had to pay down the capital investment to engineer the thing. Even buying the console and never buying a game (something that did happen to the Ps2 in japan, due to the low low price point compared to DVd players at the start); wont' bankrupt them since their nto insane enough to sell them at any actual loss. Perhaps a paper loss but not in real dollars. They may do some tricks like charging their game division 30$ per optical drive when they only really cost their electronics division 11$ to make and the 19$ difference is a tax motivated mark up.
There was a claim win xp wasn't better then what proceeded it. Still struggling with the whole "reading comprehension" concept, hey?
Thats a tautology.
I do not think that means what you think it means.
No it's exactly what I thought it meant, a statement so obvious it adds nothing to the arguement.
there is a distinct difference. It was derivative of the NT core but was created to be a succesor to win 95/98/me. 95/98/me was likely the worst of it's generation but XP was a significant improvement. The signigance is most home users had a improvement in stability and less deeply fatal errors. Since the majority has 95/98/me. 2k/NT has a difference price, market, feature set and only shared kernel code with XP, it tought to say it was the succesor. Even in that comparison 2k/nt had better security and stability but the most obvious improvement of XP over them (drivers for everything) is often what caused XP to crash. Bad drivers and spyware are the primary reason for XP to crash.
But why compare XP to 95/98? If you want to know whether it is different from the OS that preceeded it compare it to 2K.
And discover that it's almost identical (as an OS, the UI has changed a bit).
Because 95/98 was what proceeded it. It's based of the NT kernell but was aimed at the same market as 95/98. Why did XP becoem huge? it wasn't just because it was based off the NT kernel. It's because it had a wide range of supported devices, ran almost everythign 96/98 had and was more stable. It was aimed at the same market as 2000/NT because it lacked any of the security features. Why then compare it to 2k?
Curtiss JN-4Bs crashed a whole lot less than 4As as well, but they're recognisably the same plane and worked pretty much the same otherwise.
Failing to crash eventually became an expectation rather than a hope in aircraft. One day that may also be true with consumer operating systems.
And thats completely irrelavent to what I was saying. There was a claim win xp wasn't better then what rpoceeded it. That claim is obviously false. Regaurdless of what standard you hold OS's to XP was better then 95/98. Thats a tautology. No dispute.
Maybe XP is "a pretty good OS", the trouble is, it's not significantly different from the OSs that preceded it, and that's because the Windows monopoly is acting as a huge roadblock across progress in the field.
are you on crack or did you never use win95/98. XP is a massive improvement. Crashes are few and far between and there is a lot less "format/reinstall" problems. Before 1 bad driver and you have to format. Now, you have options.
I lived in 3 different towns in NJ and one in CA and I think the landline has gone down like once in 25+ years. I've never had a landline to landline call dropped, ever. I didn't even think that was possible.
I have had the cable drop off dozens of times though as have most people I know. I'd rely on Verizon for VOIP in a second but I would trust Cablevision to deliver my email. If what they are saying is actually true on a national scale then I'm shocked.
Landlines in most areas are regulated. If their dropped calls/ 1000 rise above a certain level they get fines. Most areas are about 9-15 / 1000 before fines come into play. POTS are rarely fined.
It's +5 Funny, but true. I was just in Beijing in July, and it is crazy how much knockoff stuff you can buy. There's an indoor market called Ya Show (Ya Xiao), it is 6 stories I believe. One floor is dedicated to nothing but Nike, Gucci, etc. brands that may or may not be legit. Another floor is dedicated to electronics like iPod nano ripoffs (rather nice ones, actually) and GBA cartridges loaded with NES and SNES roms.
My last day, I decided to haggle with a street vendor and buy a "genuine Rolex." I ended up buying two for $4 USD, and they are actually fairly nice. Sure, the seconds hand "ticks" (which a real Rolex doesn't), but the watch looks pretty decent overall. If you don't look really close, it rivals my nice $180 watch that I bought in Denmark.
I shopped there as well as soem large markets in Ghoung Zhou and I came back with 5 designer purses that my label whore GF could not distinguish between the real thing.
Heh, China is going to endure the India Effect, which happened when the US outsourced to Indian firms. All we need to do now is pull the rug out and shift it to China. Indian workers are now forever comfortable with that nice plush salary, yet unsupportable after foreign companies pull out. Lather rinse and repeat in China. That leaves for unrestive local populations that demand more. If it's not more $$$ it will be more freedoms. Something will break.
You say the US would never pull out of these places? Another bubble burst would do it. POP! Then watch massive Indian and Chinese offices get closed overnight. Then what?
India had service contracts. There was a noticable disparity betweenn the product they offered (indian customer service) to Us product (American customer service). Thus it wasn't cash only that led the decision to pull those service contracts. There is a backlash over the indian product and companies had a greater competative advantage dumping the indian service and migrating back to more familiar services.
China has products. Often these products are indistinguisshabel from products produced elsewhere (a lot of top end fashion is produced in china, as is a lot of electronics). Since there isn't a significant difference any effort to pull those contracts are based purely on nationalistic reasons. It gets hard. Not many countries will sacrafice the bottom line for queen and country these days.
And I am not talking a 2001-like recession. I am talking about a 1930s depression, which will put China back another few decades at least. Then once their government finally loses its grip on its population, its a fall just like Russia in the 80s. Just look how good Russia is doing even 20 years after its collapse.
On what basis are you making this grand prediction? The 1930's depression was caused partly by a massive stock crash and partly a deeply unsound financial system and a deficiency in the basics of the US economy. China does not have the same problems in it's financial system. They may face a recession similiar to japans due to their fiasco with their banking system but a 1930's style depression is unlikely.
Russia is a whole other animal. They collapsed partly due to following the advice of the Americans and almost completely privatized their indutries leadign to a halving of their GDP. China has obstinantly dismissed most US advise and has roughly doubled their GDP. Russia has a much higher level of corruption and the fundementals of their economy is shot to pieces due to mistakes made during the transition to a market economy and the rampant corruption and the deterance of foreign investment due to this corruption and crime.
1-"Everyone said I was crazy. I said F* everybody and I tried it anyway. Now I am a millionaire and everyone is trying to copy me." A. United States B. China
1-"Everyone said I was crazy. I said F* everybody and I tried it anyway. Now I am in a re-education camp having my personality broken down and rebuilt into one more suitable to the party." A. United States B. China
Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled, we don't fix our currency rate, and, above all else, it's possible to become very, very, VERY rich if you're successful in tech.
You can also grow very very very rich in china too. It a different game but the essentials are the same. Connections, hard work, a bit of luck, a few bribes, and exploiting those below you. Same in the US as in China. There are apartments in beijing with a lease price of 500,000+ yuan (~90,000+ US) per mo. It's a sign of wealth when you have such sky high realistate.
Different kind of fighters, different kind fo war. To those people, propaganda is just as effective a weapon as gullets. It's an effective recruiting tool as well.
I remember beign hti bya gullet.. My god blood evrywhere.
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Imagine if you will, Sony including the only high definition format disc in their PS3. A dual layer HD-DVD has 30 gigs of storage, more than enough to hold the 22 gigs of Resistance: Fall of Man. Every single movie studio releasing their films on the only high definition format: HD-DVD. Sony would not be having the blue diode production problems that it is currently having. Because all of the manufacturers would be focusing on only one format, costs would come down even quicker. The high definition era would begin with the same unity as the DVD era. Sony would be guaranteed a huge quantity of money from licensing.
Instead, Sony decided that it had the Playstation brand as a magic bullet and gave the finger to the rest of the DVD coalition. I hope it works out for them.
Scenario A : Sony licence and buys HD DVD drives
1- Price is dictated by supplier
2- Price includes profit from third party
3- price include licencign of tech
Scenario B: Sony creates their own drives
1- Price dictated by production cosst
2- Profit is all Sony's
3- Must pay R&D.
It seems utilizing Blu-Ray instead of someone else format might help them in the long run. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are functionally the same but HD-DVD is someone else IP, someone else has control on it, and someone else grabs a portion of yrou profits. so it benifits sony to go with Blu-Ray.
At least an implied challenge.
... Stupid, quite frankly.
Do you know how much work by how many artists it would take to fill 50GB with "A" title art?
Neither do I, exactly, but considering an "A" console title now can take the efforts of dozens of artists a couple years to complete, the costs and effort to develop a game that wisely uses 50GB is
Don't confuse more art with higher res art. The same art that had to be compressed and downsampled to fit inot a 700 meg CD and slightly less compressed to fit on a 4.5 meg DVD can now be up sampled or un changed to fit on a Blu-ray disc(BRD?).
My Ps2 also has this weird thing where the "voice" track on all my movies plays very quietly but the background is full volume.
There's a few differences, though. DVD was already doing well on its own before the release of the PS2. Hollywood Video and Blockbuster already carried a good selection of DVD titles. DVD also didn't have any real competition from other formats, like Blu-Ray has now. HD-DVD players were out before Blu-Ray players, at half the cost. The fact that the Toshiba HD-DVD player costs $450 on Amazon vs. $700 for the Samsung Blu-Ray player vs. $1000 for the Sony Blu-Ray player makes you wonder who would be excited about Blu-Ray?
Perhaps your confusing the time period. When I bought my PS2, DVD were the new thing but they were fringe products still. The PS2 was my first DVD player. I got it just aa it came out and it was almost $600 cnd. DVD were $40 CND at the time, and there wasn't that many tos elect from. Right now Blu-ray is a tad behind that but not by much. They could get to the same poitn in 2-3 mo. a few titles with most major titles beign planned to be released on bluray too. It seems to correspond pretty closely.
Yay for missing the point entirely.
Let me put it this way. Sony has a monopoly on all consoles with the name "Playstation 3" and the design thereof. This is no secret, nor is there anything wrong with it. However, Sony chooses to add a Blu-Ray drive to all of their Playstation 3 systems, thus inflating the price by a few hundred dollars.
Now, I, as a consumer, would gladly plunk down $300 for a PS3 sans Blu-Ray drive. However, Sony chooses not to produce any such consoles. Therefore, all things considered, I AM left with a choice, but it's Hobson's choice: buy any PS3 you want, as long as it has a Blu-Ray drive in it.
In other words, if I want to buy a PS3, I must either: (1) pay the extra money for a Blu-Ray drive I don't want, or (2) don't buy it at all. Thus my use of the word "forced." If I want to buy a PS3, I must pay that extra money.
Thats the product they're offering. It's liek saying Coke forces you to buy a cola with carmelized sugar in it and you are forced to because they no longer make a cola without carmalized sugar. IT's a really silly idea. They made a product with a certain specification. You would have prefered a different one however that has nothing to do with "forces". they made the product the way it is. Blu-ray or not isn't yrou choice. You only ever have the choice to buy the product or not.
It means the VRAM image sent to the rasterizer is 6.75 times as large. It does not follow that the size of the raw content on disc (textures, geometrical data, etc.) will also be 6.75 times as large.
The textures must now be 6.75 times larges to not look pixelated or blurred, the models have to have more detail and so on so it's a hard call. I doubt the games will be fully 7 timeslarger but I doubt that it's goign to be a trivial increase. Remember they're not just throwing up SD FMV's for you to play now.
Actually, what really scares me are biological weapons (think Smallpox's Variola Major or other very nasty bugs) that can be transported with less readily available detection (Frank Herbert's "The White Plague" is a good read, so is Stephen King's The Stand, and then there is the movie 12 Monkeys http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/12_monkeys/). My High school biology teacher (back in the mid 80's), who sevred as an officer in the Army a few years before, said biological weapons concerned her much more than nuclear for several reasons:
Given even the most viril and horrifying biological agent (ebola/anthrax) there are those with natural immunities and infection rates can be drastically cut down through quarantine and some people just live in such remote places that they'd have little to fear. However there are no natural immunities to 4000'C temperatures.
Case in point. Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
Also consider Iraq. The Japanese were just about a militant as the Iraqies. Given even the limited industrial capacity of current iraq, they do a lot of damage to the US. Imagine a near technological peer beign just as militant, and you've invaded their home land. The bomb completely demoralized Japan. any hope of conditional surrender or resistance died. In Iraq, the militants are fairly certain the Us will not nuke them all so it has no effect and the US has the head aches they do now.
Are you claiming that XP was aimed at the same market as 2K? That XP lacks any of the "security features" of 2k? (For the security features - yes, it's an irritating bug in the XP home UI that you can't get the ACL's of a file - but you can fix it by changing a registry value).
Woops, I accidentally forgot to type a "not".
What devices does XP support that 2K doesn't? What programs does XP run that 2K doesn't? Why is XP more stable than 95/98/ME - 'cos it's based on 2K.
shitty video cards, and cheap sound cards along with dirt cheap peripherals. The low price poitn and cheap ass drievrs made xp less stable but gave it a wider consumer appeal due to the cheapness of a lot of consumers.
Yeah, but who is going to buy a $500-600 entertainment console and then not buy any of the newer content that it can play that notionally justifies the additional expense beyond an older console like the PS2? There's not a whole lot of sense to anyone doing that.
At the 500-600 price point I doubt their losign money. I beleive this is a hedge against the ebay phenomenon. Where they price it at 499 and have others sell it on ebay for 1000. Their just tyring to capitalize on as large of a % of what people are willing to pay. I assume a mo after release the price will drop a competative point... Unless their stupid. Then I'm wrong and sony is goign to burn.
Think of a generic fast-food restaurant. Imagine they have a "value menu" with the Stinkburger Deluxe for only $0.99, but it costs $2.99 to produce. Drinks, however are $2.50 and cost about $0.15 to produce. Similarly fries are $0.99 but cost only $0.10 to produce. The restaurant will go out of business if every customer enters, purchases one Stinkburger Deluxe, and leaves. But most people aren't satisfied just downing a Stinkburger, they want fries and a drink too. That's the idea here; it's called the "razor and blades business model."
However most business are run by reckless gamblers or retards. they'll market a 4.95 meal pack, with a apparent cost of 3.95 for the burger 1.50 for the fries and 1.50 for the drink. Their real cost is problably 2.00 for the burger and 0.15 for drink and 0.15 for the fries. So if everyone grabs a burger, their profit margins go down but they still make money. The razor blade model is similiar. They're risking lower profit not loss because if a worst case happens you bank rupt yourself.
But doesn't that then hurt the store who Sony just sold more to? I understand that by buying one and never buying a game from it, Sony is investing in a customer that does not actually exist. But for each console a store sells, they'll likely restock that console, and we'll be back at square one, with the store losing out on its predicted sale.
the whole concept of a company losing money on a product is a myth. The Ps2 may have lost money on the first run of them in the first few months. But according to Sony they broke even or profitted there after. Nintnedo never lost money, and the Ps1/Neo Geo/Jaguar ect.. all made money from each sale. Ditto with Sega. The only confirmed company to have lost money and each box is Microsoft on both the 360 and Xbox. Even the Ps2 may have fudged it to include R&D costs. In which case each machien made them moeny but they had to pay down the capital investment to engineer the thing. Even buying the console and never buying a game (something that did happen to the Ps2 in japan, due to the low low price point compared to DVd players at the start); wont' bankrupt them since their nto insane enough to sell them at any actual loss. Perhaps a paper loss but not in real dollars. They may do some tricks like charging their game division 30$ per optical drive when they only really cost their electronics division 11$ to make and the 19$ difference is a tax motivated mark up.
There was a claim win xp wasn't better then what proceeded it.
Still struggling with the whole "reading comprehension" concept, hey?
Thats a tautology.
I do not think that means what you think it means.
No it's exactly what I thought it meant, a statement so obvious it adds nothing to the arguement.
there is a distinct difference. It was derivative of the NT core but was created to be a succesor to win 95/98/me. 95/98/me was likely the worst of it's generation but XP was a significant improvement. The signigance is most home users had a improvement in stability and less deeply fatal errors. Since the majority has 95/98/me. 2k/NT has a difference price, market, feature set and only shared kernel code with XP, it tought to say it was the succesor. Even in that comparison 2k/nt had better security and stability but the most obvious improvement of XP over them (drivers for everything) is often what caused XP to crash. Bad drivers and spyware are the primary reason for XP to crash.
But why compare XP to 95/98? If you want to know whether it is different from the OS that preceeded it compare it to 2K.
And discover that it's almost identical (as an OS, the UI has changed a bit).
Because 95/98 was what proceeded it. It's based of the NT kernell but was aimed at the same market as 95/98. Why did XP becoem huge? it wasn't just because it was based off the NT kernel. It's because it had a wide range of supported devices, ran almost everythign 96/98 had and was more stable. It was aimed at the same market as 2000/NT because it lacked any of the security features. Why then compare it to 2k?
Curtiss JN-4Bs crashed a whole lot less than 4As as well, but they're recognisably the same plane and worked pretty much the same otherwise.
Failing to crash eventually became an expectation rather than a hope in aircraft. One day that may also be true with consumer operating systems.
And thats completely irrelavent to what I was saying. There was a claim win xp wasn't better then what rpoceeded it. That claim is obviously false. Regaurdless of what standard you hold OS's to XP was better then 95/98. Thats a tautology. No dispute.
Maybe XP is "a pretty good OS", the trouble is, it's not significantly different from the OSs that preceded it, and that's because the Windows monopoly is acting as a huge roadblock across progress in the field.
are you on crack or did you never use win95/98. XP is a massive improvement. Crashes are few and far between and there is a lot less "format/reinstall" problems. Before 1 bad driver and you have to format. Now, you have options.
I lived in 3 different towns in NJ and one in CA and I think the landline has gone down like once in 25+ years. I've never had a landline to landline call dropped, ever. I didn't even think that was possible.
I have had the cable drop off dozens of times though as have most people I know. I'd rely on Verizon for VOIP in a second but I would trust Cablevision to deliver my email. If what they are saying is actually true on a national scale then I'm shocked.
Landlines in most areas are regulated. If their dropped calls/ 1000 rise above a certain level they get fines. Most areas are about 9-15 / 1000 before fines come into play. POTS are rarely fined.
It's +5 Funny, but true. I was just in Beijing in July, and it is crazy how much knockoff stuff you can buy. There's an indoor market called Ya Show (Ya Xiao), it is 6 stories I believe. One floor is dedicated to nothing but Nike, Gucci, etc. brands that may or may not be legit. Another floor is dedicated to electronics like iPod nano ripoffs (rather nice ones, actually) and GBA cartridges loaded with NES and SNES roms.
My last day, I decided to haggle with a street vendor and buy a "genuine Rolex." I ended up buying two for $4 USD, and they are actually fairly nice. Sure, the seconds hand "ticks" (which a real Rolex doesn't), but the watch looks pretty decent overall. If you don't look really close, it rivals my nice $180 watch that I bought in Denmark.
I shopped there as well as soem large markets in Ghoung Zhou and I came back with 5 designer purses that my label whore GF could not distinguish between the real thing.
Heh, China is going to endure the India Effect, which happened when the US outsourced to Indian firms. All we need to do now is pull the rug out and shift it to China. Indian workers are now forever comfortable with that nice plush salary, yet unsupportable after foreign companies pull out. Lather rinse and repeat in China. That leaves for unrestive local populations that demand more. If it's not more $$$ it will be more freedoms. Something will break.
You say the US would never pull out of these places? Another bubble burst would do it. POP! Then watch massive Indian and Chinese offices get closed overnight. Then what?
India had service contracts. There was a noticable disparity betweenn the product they offered (indian customer service) to Us product (American customer service). Thus it wasn't cash only that led the decision to pull those service contracts. There is a backlash over the indian product and companies had a greater competative advantage dumping the indian service and migrating back to more familiar services.
China has products. Often these products are indistinguisshabel from products produced elsewhere (a lot of top end fashion is produced in china, as is a lot of electronics). Since there isn't a significant difference any effort to pull those contracts are based purely on nationalistic reasons. It gets hard. Not many countries will sacrafice the bottom line for queen and country these days.
And I am not talking a 2001-like recession. I am talking about a 1930s depression, which will put China back another few decades at least. Then once their government finally loses its grip on its population, its a fall just like Russia in the 80s. Just look how good Russia is doing even 20 years after its collapse.
On what basis are you making this grand prediction? The 1930's depression was caused partly by a massive stock crash and partly a deeply unsound financial system and a deficiency in the basics of the US economy. China does not have the same problems in it's financial system. They may face a recession similiar to japans due to their fiasco with their banking system but a 1930's style depression is unlikely.
Russia is a whole other animal. They collapsed partly due to following the advice of the Americans and almost completely privatized their indutries leadign to a halving of their GDP. China has obstinantly dismissed most US advise and has roughly doubled their GDP. Russia has a much higher level of corruption and the fundementals of their economy is shot to pieces due to mistakes made during the transition to a market economy and the rampant corruption and the deterance of foreign investment due to this corruption and crime.
Quiz time. Match the statement with the country:
1-"Everyone said I was crazy. I said F* everybody and I tried it anyway. Now I am a millionaire and everyone is trying to copy me."
A. United States
B. China
1-"Everyone said I was crazy. I said F* everybody and I tried it anyway. Now I am in a re-education camp having my personality broken down and rebuilt into one more suitable to the party."
A. United States
B. China
1- b - Liu Yongxing
2- a - Abu Zubaydah
Here in the States, tech isn't government-mandated and government-controlled, we don't fix our currency rate, and, above all else, it's possible to become very, very, VERY rich if you're successful in tech.
You can also grow very very very rich in china too. It a different game but the essentials are the same. Connections, hard work, a bit of luck, a few bribes, and exploiting those below you. Same in the US as in China. There are apartments in beijing with a lease price of 500,000+ yuan (~90,000+ US) per mo. It's a sign of wealth when you have such sky high realistate.
I don't agree a media player or a web browser but I do beleive security should be part of the kernel.
Different kind of fighters, different kind fo war. To those people, propaganda is just as effective a weapon as gullets. It's an effective recruiting tool as well.
I remember beign hti bya gullet.. My god blood evrywhere.
...government agency to get involved in another product! I can see it now as a new advertising come on:
Now! New MacBook Pro - EPA approved! Improved catalytic converter design! Larger, more efficient muffler! Meets EPA SPMML standards! (Seconds per micro-milliliter)
With a body kit, cold air intake, stiffer suspecnsion and racing stripes.