"Stores in the US ran a $100 rebate on the X360 for months last autumn (way above the profit margin - if there is any)"
A year after launch as opposed to two months. And the Xbox 360 didn't have a price drop before the console even launched.
"(way above the profit margin - if there is any)"
Because game stores make their money on the games and accessories. The Xbox 360 now has a respectable library and more console sales means more potential game and accessory sales; more opportunities to recoup the losses. However, by most accounts, the game-to-console sale ratio for the PS3 is flirting with 1:1, which means each customer would have to buy Resistance 5 or 6 times for the store to ever see that money again.
"(they sell lots more than videogames)"
And yet only one particular type of one particular console is marked down. The store isn't offering a similar deal on the Wii, which was released at almost exactly the same time.
"the above facts don't fit well with the current anti-Sony groupthink"
There's a grand conspiracy out there to convince you not to spend $600? It's your money, I couldn't care less, but don't pretend it's a wise investment at this point.
If anything, it's the PS3 owners who have put their $600 down who have a vested interest to convince others to buy the console to attract more publishers.
"Or, you can check the non-biased original source and see that it was one chain as a special up-until Valentine's promotion."
A "promotion" on a brand-new piece of hardware sold by stores with next to zero margin to begin with? Forget Sony, the store itself will be losing $100 or so per PS3 it sells at that price. That argument is specious at best.
The store is never going to admit that it's just trying to get rid of them because then customers would wonder what is wrong with them and have second thoughts about buying.
Re:To the Retard who Posted this Story
on
New Ice Age Theory
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"The climate depends more on atmospheric composition than on any variation in the sun or even our proximity to it. That's why venus is hotter than mercury."
That's less "difference in atmospheric composition" and more "has an atmosphere or not."
"A $320 (after potential price drop for 20Gig model) next-gen console with Blu-Ray?"
Down from $500? You're dreaming. Sony dropped the price in Japan because they feel that Japan is more important than the larger North American market for some reason. With retailers in Japan effectively dropping the price a second time with nothing happening to the prices in North America, and with the European launch still months away, it won't be at least until 2008 before the price drops.
After all, its main competition, the Xbox 360, is still marked as $300/$400 after over a year.
As for BluRay, it depends on whether there are BluRay movies out that you can't live without and that you're willing to shell out more for than simply buying the DVD version.
"I was thinking of buying one just to run linux and to turn it into a MythTV "frontend" box with gaming capability..."
You could get a Mac mini for less. Read that again and let it sink it: it would be cheaper to run Linux on Apple hardware.
"but it does give users the ability to swap out harddrives. "
News to me.
"Plus it will play all my PS2 games without too much hassle."
So will your PS2.
At any rate, personally, I wouldn't buy a PS3 until Final Fantasy XIII, a meaningful price drop, and they pack in a new controller with rumble (ala the PS1 when the DualShock came out). I really don't see the current iteration of controller lasting long when both of their competitors do both wireless and rumble, and the wireless Wii controller actually adds more functionality than the SIXAXIS on top of rumble (speaker, pointing, etc.). Third-party developers are going to write for the greatest common denominator, and for the forseeable future that includes rumble.
All I'm seeing here right now are the same old, tired, rehashed posts over and over again. Other than the (dare I say it) on-topic references to the Ninth Amendment, there's the thousand and one posters dragging out the same old tired quote from Franklin (repeating it ad nauseam only weakens its impact, if it actually has any left any more), the anarcho-capitalists who find yet another tenuous reason to drag out gun rights (clue: guns or no guns, they have nukes, gas and germs), and the Democrats who think that a Congress, 95% of whom were around for Gonzales' (and Ashcroft's) confirmation to begin with, will actually take action.
It's going on six years since the USA PATRIOT Act. Can't somebody, somewhere, think of something new and original to post for once?
And is there any reason to believe anything short of the state legislatures forming a new constitutional convention would fix this?
"Seriously, politics should never be discussed on Slashdot as anyone who does not cling to a hard-left viewpoint on EVERY issue is labeled a troll automatically."
If the Ninth Amendment is "hard-left," call me a freakin' Bolshevik.
"Something I have seen commented on several times is that Nintendo has the most insightful and entertaining public speakers in the entire videogame industry."
"Still, I don't like having to choose a car based on which satellite radio service comes pre-installed, or considering whether I'd rather have Howard Stern or Oprah, because there is no practical way to get both."
One has ClearChannel (i. e. the reason you're looking to leave terrestrial radio broadcasts to begin with) and one doesn't. One would involve giving more money to ClearChannel, one wouldn't.
"It's not technically incorrect to use non-SI units, but if you're going to use SI units, you have to use them according to their definition."
Then it seems you have three options:
Replace your bathroom and kitchen scales with more cumbersome (and more expensive) beam balances that truly measure mass
Scour local stores until you find a bathroom scale and kitchen scale that instead read out dekanewtons and centinewtons, respectively
Refer to the output from your spring scales by its less ambiguous (and far less common) name: kilopond
And while you're at it, you should probably take it upon yourself to remind people not to use "seconds" (a base SI unit) to measure plane angles (esp. latitude and longitude).
"This might sound like some sort of lawyerly argument, but the whole point of any units is that they have a common definition that everyone adheres to."
"Should be" and "is" are two different things. This "should be" a contest between lb/lbf and kg/N, but in practice it's ultimately a contest between lb/lbf and kg/kgf, trading one set of ambiguities for another, with the added cost of the human adjustment itself. About the only ambiguity that would truly be cleared up if everybody used the same units is deciding whether one means 2 kilopounds or 1 megagram when one says "ton" (if one is even referring to mass to begin with), but the term "ton" shouldn't really be used to begin with.
A "pound" may be a mass or a force, but at least it's never a kilogram. And with SI or other metric units rarely used outside of technical fields or the classroom, I'd wager a greater percentage of the use of the term "kilogram" is more accurate in the United States than anywhere else on the planet.
"compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences."
Are you sure you don't want to not use a non-credit card account to not complete this transaction? Give us access to an account you can't issue a chargeback with and we'll give you a shiny raffle ticket!
Seriously, with a numeric majority of those polled saying they didn't have a positive experience with PayPal, just how hard can it be to top them?
Time, hm? I dind't realize that was a peer-reviewed scientific journal. How is this "mainstream media reports on scientific consensus" and not "mainstream media uses sensationallism to sell copy?"
"By the way, it snowed in Malibu yesterday."
Wow! Did the Time article rely on anecdotal evidence, too?
"Ironically, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the administration's insistence last year that they didn't need judicial overview contributed to the electoral frustration that cost the Republicans control of Congress."
Yeah, and AT&T is looking at chapter 11 after so many of its customers left them for going along with this program.
If the American people actually cared about this stuff, it likely wouldn't have happened to begin with.
"Same thing with including moles or amps (which are SI) and deriving "US-compatible" analogs of SI units."
With the mole specifically, you seem to be assuming that it did not exist before SI came along in 1960. As I'm sure you're aware, people were concerned with stoichiometric ratios well before then and measured the quantities involved in whichever mass system they were using; MKS people used kilogram-moles, CGS people used gram-moles (the one eventually adopted by SI, for some reason), and the pound/foot using world used pound-moles. The value of Avogradro's Constant varies with the units you choose to use with it.
This is not something I just decided to make up for the sake of this discussion, Google turns up over 13,000 results for the symbol lbmol. Countless steam engines have been built on math involving pound-moles of water heated to Rankine temperatures.
"That stuff is not part of the US system traditionally, and it represents a different way of doing things than the way things have been done traditionally. For example, 1.25 inches is not really correct, it would be 1 1/4 inches in traditional use."
You are arbitrarily deciding what "tradition" is. In the specific example of inches, when the US officially adopted the metric system in 1866, the official conversion factor as handed down by Congress was "1 m = 39.37 in," a fraction that obviously can't be simplified into a non-decimal ratio (unlike, say, 39.375). And in 1893 when the yard standard was officially abandoned, the ratio was maintained in the definition of "1 in == 100/3937 m." And this is well before industrialization reached the point where people discussed "thousandths of an inch."
Again, you seem to be confusing the act of defining a system of measurement with standardizing its usage. The only hard-and-fast rule with inches is "If you say 'inch' you must mean 0.0254 m, unless you're surveying." Rulers and tape measures that mark off tenths of an inch rather than sixteenths are uncommon but certainly not unheard of.
I've seen more than my share of property descriptions in the US. Sometimes surveyors use Gunter's measure, sometimes decimal yards, sometimes yards and decimal feet, sometimes feet and decimal inches, sometimes binary inches, and sometimes a reference to "lines" that are 1/12 of an inch (and this is only metes and bounds; PLSS is a whole other game). All the units used are nationally defined by specific ratios to the meter, and the decision of which specific ratios to the meter to use, much like the decision of which SI prefixes to use, is left to the user to decide based on the situation.
My car's decimal odometer doesn't know what a furlong is any more than the gas pumps know what a quart is.
"I disagree that the presence of centimeters and angstroms really removes all of the advantages, and I have also pointed out a few other advantages."
Not so much the centimeter, because its use of an SI prefix tells you what fraction of a meter you're dealing with. But you must either be familiar with angstroms or have a reference handy to know what fraction of a meter it represents, and the same is true with knowing what multiple of a pascal a bar represents, what fraction of a cubic meter a liter represents, etc. For someone already familiar with "foot," "pound" and "gallon," it is easier to adopt the SI prefixes to those units than to expect them to learn what these new units represent.
But even with saying "1 cm" rather than "0.01 m," you must throw in an additional mathematical step before you can use the distance measured in equations that result in newtons, pascals, amperes, or any other SI unit involving length.
"No, bathroom scales measure force, then internally convert it to mass under the assumption of a given strength of gravity."
Yeah, and my yardstick measures meters and "internally converts" it to inches.
"For when large areas of major cities now have Spanish-language billboards, the locals only know the culture they see on Univision and miss out on traditional American references, and there's not even a need for one living there to learn English, then there's understandably a fear of balkanization."
These aren't new arguments. US cities have had non-English newspapers and the like in ciruclation for centuries (German, Polish, Russian, etc.). And Know-Nothings and their ilk were around to decry the lack of "Americanization" in these people.
Guess what: the Republic survived, and I'd wager that English is more prevalent in the United States today than it has ever been, despite hispanophobic FUD.
And "the culture they see on Univision?" Where exactly do people think Univision and Telemundo come from?
Slashdot Mirror
"Stores in the US ran a $100 rebate on the X360 for months last autumn (way above the profit margin - if there is any)"
A year after launch as opposed to two months. And the Xbox 360 didn't have a price drop before the console even launched.
"(way above the profit margin - if there is any)"
Because game stores make their money on the games and accessories. The Xbox 360 now has a respectable library and more console sales means more potential game and accessory sales; more opportunities to recoup the losses. However, by most accounts, the game-to-console sale ratio for the PS3 is flirting with 1:1, which means each customer would have to buy Resistance 5 or 6 times for the store to ever see that money again.
"(they sell lots more than videogames)"
And yet only one particular type of one particular console is marked down. The store isn't offering a similar deal on the Wii, which was released at almost exactly the same time.
"the above facts don't fit well with the current anti-Sony groupthink"
There's a grand conspiracy out there to convince you not to spend $600? It's your money, I couldn't care less, but don't pretend it's a wise investment at this point.
If anything, it's the PS3 owners who have put their $600 down who have a vested interest to convince others to buy the console to attract more publishers.
If someone is being harassed, why aren't the police involved?
"Or, you can check the non-biased original source and see that it was one chain as a special up-until Valentine's promotion."
A "promotion" on a brand-new piece of hardware sold by stores with next to zero margin to begin with? Forget Sony, the store itself will be losing $100 or so per PS3 it sells at that price. That argument is specious at best.
The store is never going to admit that it's just trying to get rid of them because then customers would wonder what is wrong with them and have second thoughts about buying.
They have nothing on iOwa.
"The climate depends more on atmospheric composition than on any variation in the sun or even our proximity to it. That's why venus is hotter than mercury."
That's less "difference in atmospheric composition" and more "has an atmosphere or not."
"A $320 (after potential price drop for 20Gig model) next-gen console with Blu-Ray?"
Down from $500? You're dreaming. Sony dropped the price in Japan because they feel that Japan is more important than the larger North American market for some reason. With retailers in Japan effectively dropping the price a second time with nothing happening to the prices in North America, and with the European launch still months away, it won't be at least until 2008 before the price drops.
After all, its main competition, the Xbox 360, is still marked as $300/$400 after over a year.
As for BluRay, it depends on whether there are BluRay movies out that you can't live without and that you're willing to shell out more for than simply buying the DVD version.
"I was thinking of buying one just to run linux and to turn it into a MythTV "frontend" box with gaming capability..."
You could get a Mac mini for less. Read that again and let it sink it: it would be cheaper to run Linux on Apple hardware.
"but it does give users the ability to swap out harddrives. "
News to me.
"Plus it will play all my PS2 games without too much hassle."
So will your PS2.
At any rate, personally, I wouldn't buy a PS3 until Final Fantasy XIII, a meaningful price drop, and they pack in a new controller with rumble (ala the PS1 when the DualShock came out). I really don't see the current iteration of controller lasting long when both of their competitors do both wireless and rumble, and the wireless Wii controller actually adds more functionality than the SIXAXIS on top of rumble (speaker, pointing, etc.). Third-party developers are going to write for the greatest common denominator, and for the forseeable future that includes rumble.
"Help with some of Sony's problems selling the console."
$500 PS3 versus $130 PS2. I think I know which one I'd buy.
Of course, I already have the PS2, so I'll take the $0 option.
IBM finally released a successor to the Personal System/2. MCA Express slots for everyone!
All I'm seeing here right now are the same old, tired, rehashed posts over and over again. Other than the (dare I say it) on-topic references to the Ninth Amendment, there's the thousand and one posters dragging out the same old tired quote from Franklin (repeating it ad nauseam only weakens its impact, if it actually has any left any more), the anarcho-capitalists who find yet another tenuous reason to drag out gun rights (clue: guns or no guns, they have nukes, gas and germs), and the Democrats who think that a Congress, 95% of whom were around for Gonzales' (and Ashcroft's) confirmation to begin with, will actually take action.
It's going on six years since the USA PATRIOT Act. Can't somebody, somewhere, think of something new and original to post for once?
And is there any reason to believe anything short of the state legislatures forming a new constitutional convention would fix this?
"Seriously, politics should never be discussed on Slashdot as anyone who does not cling to a hard-left viewpoint on EVERY issue is labeled a troll automatically."
If the Ninth Amendment is "hard-left," call me a freakin' Bolshevik.
"Japanese bulletin board 2chan reports that this at other Don Quijotes as well"
OK, yeah, it's technically spelled correctly, but that's just... wrong. It's like saying "Mejico" or "Tejas."
"Meanwhile, the same gent that teased us with the next StarCraft game has tossed out this bone as well: Blizzard's next MMOG 'won't be another WoW'."
This is not WarCraft in space! It's much more sophisticated! I know it's not 3-D
"Something I have seen commented on several times is that Nintendo has the most insightful and entertaining public speakers in the entire videogame industry."
I miss Yamauchi.
"Still, I don't like having to choose a car based on which satellite radio service comes pre-installed, or considering whether I'd rather have Howard Stern or Oprah, because there is no practical way to get both."
One has ClearChannel (i. e. the reason you're looking to leave terrestrial radio broadcasts to begin with) and one doesn't. One would involve giving more money to ClearChannel, one wouldn't.
Then it seems you have three options:
- Replace your bathroom and kitchen scales with more cumbersome (and more expensive) beam balances that truly measure mass
- Scour local stores until you find a bathroom scale and kitchen scale that instead read out dekanewtons and centinewtons, respectively
- Refer to the output from your spring scales by its less ambiguous (and far less common) name: kilopond
And while you're at it, you should probably take it upon yourself to remind people not to use "seconds" (a base SI unit) to measure plane angles (esp. latitude and longitude)."This might sound like some sort of lawyerly argument, but the whole point of any units is that they have a common definition that everyone adheres to."
"Should be" and "is" are two different things. This "should be" a contest between lb/lbf and kg/N, but in practice it's ultimately a contest between lb/lbf and kg/kgf, trading one set of ambiguities for another, with the added cost of the human adjustment itself. About the only ambiguity that would truly be cleared up if everybody used the same units is deciding whether one means 2 kilopounds or 1 megagram when one says "ton" (if one is even referring to mass to begin with), but the term "ton" shouldn't really be used to begin with.
A "pound" may be a mass or a force, but at least it's never a kilogram. And with SI or other metric units rarely used outside of technical fields or the classroom, I'd wager a greater percentage of the use of the term "kilogram" is more accurate in the United States than anywhere else on the planet.
"On when they would do a full hand-count, if needed: "Our plan was to regroup after Christmas and just work through it.""
Translation: "Our plan was to regroup after the presidential electors had already cast their votes on December 13 and just go through the motions."
"compared to PayPal's 44.2 percent reporting good experiences."
Are you sure you don't want to not use a non-credit card account to not complete this transaction? Give us access to an account you can't issue a chargeback with and we'll give you a shiny raffle ticket!
Seriously, with a numeric majority of those polled saying they didn't have a positive experience with PayPal, just how hard can it be to top them?
"It was featurd in time magazine"
Time, hm? I dind't realize that was a peer-reviewed scientific journal. How is this "mainstream media reports on scientific consensus" and not "mainstream media uses sensationallism to sell copy?"
"By the way, it snowed in Malibu yesterday."
Wow! Did the Time article rely on anecdotal evidence, too?
The price tag for Sealand is reported in the $1 billion range
Appropriately enough, that's in sea-dollars, which are really just Polaroids of Prince Roy with a denomination written on it with a Sharpie.
"Ironically, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the administration's insistence last year that they didn't need judicial overview contributed to the electoral frustration that cost the Republicans control of Congress."
Yeah, and AT&T is looking at chapter 11 after so many of its customers left them for going along with this program.
If the American people actually cared about this stuff, it likely wouldn't have happened to begin with.
"Same thing with including moles or amps (which are SI) and deriving "US-compatible" analogs of SI units."
With the mole specifically, you seem to be assuming that it did not exist before SI came along in 1960. As I'm sure you're aware, people were concerned with stoichiometric ratios well before then and measured the quantities involved in whichever mass system they were using; MKS people used kilogram-moles, CGS people used gram-moles (the one eventually adopted by SI, for some reason), and the pound/foot using world used pound-moles. The value of Avogradro's Constant varies with the units you choose to use with it.
This is not something I just decided to make up for the sake of this discussion, Google turns up over 13,000 results for the symbol lbmol. Countless steam engines have been built on math involving pound-moles of water heated to Rankine temperatures.
"That stuff is not part of the US system traditionally, and it represents a different way of doing things than the way things have been done traditionally. For example, 1.25 inches is not really correct, it would be 1 1/4 inches in traditional use."
You are arbitrarily deciding what "tradition" is. In the specific example of inches, when the US officially adopted the metric system in 1866, the official conversion factor as handed down by Congress was "1 m = 39.37 in," a fraction that obviously can't be simplified into a non-decimal ratio (unlike, say, 39.375). And in 1893 when the yard standard was officially abandoned, the ratio was maintained in the definition of "1 in == 100/3937 m." And this is well before industrialization reached the point where people discussed "thousandths of an inch."
Again, you seem to be confusing the act of defining a system of measurement with standardizing its usage. The only hard-and-fast rule with inches is "If you say 'inch' you must mean 0.0254 m, unless you're surveying." Rulers and tape measures that mark off tenths of an inch rather than sixteenths are uncommon but certainly not unheard of.
I've seen more than my share of property descriptions in the US. Sometimes surveyors use Gunter's measure, sometimes decimal yards, sometimes yards and decimal feet, sometimes feet and decimal inches, sometimes binary inches, and sometimes a reference to "lines" that are 1/12 of an inch (and this is only metes and bounds; PLSS is a whole other game). All the units used are nationally defined by specific ratios to the meter, and the decision of which specific ratios to the meter to use, much like the decision of which SI prefixes to use, is left to the user to decide based on the situation.
My car's decimal odometer doesn't know what a furlong is any more than the gas pumps know what a quart is.
"I disagree that the presence of centimeters and angstroms really removes all of the advantages, and I have also pointed out a few other advantages."
Not so much the centimeter, because its use of an SI prefix tells you what fraction of a meter you're dealing with. But you must either be familiar with angstroms or have a reference handy to know what fraction of a meter it represents, and the same is true with knowing what multiple of a pascal a bar represents, what fraction of a cubic meter a liter represents, etc. For someone already familiar with "foot," "pound" and "gallon," it is easier to adopt the SI prefixes to those units than to expect them to learn what these new units represent.
But even with saying "1 cm" rather than "0.01 m," you must throw in an additional mathematical step before you can use the distance measured in equations that result in newtons, pascals, amperes, or any other SI unit involving length.
"No, bathroom scales measure force, then internally convert it to mass under the assumption of a given strength of gravity."
Yeah, and my yardstick measures meters and "internally converts" it to inches.
A spring scale does one function only: m
I thought that was supposed to be the book's job.
"Serious Games, as they're known, attempt to do more than just entertain."
Back in the day, they were called "edutainment," but as I recall they all died of cholera.
Don't cross the nunchuks!
"For when large areas of major cities now have Spanish-language billboards, the locals only know the culture they see on Univision and miss out on traditional American references, and there's not even a need for one living there to learn English, then there's understandably a fear of balkanization."
These aren't new arguments. US cities have had non-English newspapers and the like in ciruclation for centuries (German, Polish, Russian, etc.). And Know-Nothings and their ilk were around to decry the lack of "Americanization" in these people.
Guess what: the Republic survived, and I'd wager that English is more prevalent in the United States today than it has ever been, despite hispanophobic FUD.
And "the culture they see on Univision?" Where exactly do people think Univision and Telemundo come from?