I was at Eidos headquarters about two months ago and they showed me Tomb Raider on iPaq. I was blown away. (And trust me, I've seen/played a lot of video games.) The quality (FPS, etc.) was better than the original PSX.
As someone already commented, the controls were... interesting... but nothing that you couldn't get used to after a little bit of practice.
Anyway, for anyone who cares, here is a link I saw about iPAQ TR:
http://www.pocketgamer.org/archives/00000314.sht ml
Is if this kind of technology was used for a new kind of music chart:
Top 100 pirated songs!
It would be doubly interesting to see if the same songs which were top of the 'real' charts, were also the top of the Gnutella charts. Maybe we could catch the record companies that buy their own records to boost their positions in the charts red-handed.
That's a little beside the point. In Europe, some operators make (Telia, Sonera, Orange UK) make more than 10% of cellular revenues from SMS. (Short Messaging Service, the GSM IM solution.)
Because SMS is a store-and-forward technology it is bandwidth unintensive (or at least, can be fitted around other network traffic). And at 15c a message, it is pretty lucrative.
Find the European cellular operator that makes less money from SMS than other data revenues. Right now instant messaging is the only data application that is remotely profitable.
One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.
Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.
Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.
And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.
Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.
So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)
So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?
Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)
Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.
OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.
Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.
Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.
There is a terrible tendency to take 'face' costs as real costs. If the article is right, then there is virtually no reason to buy a Windows system, either in a college or for a manufacturing business.
Which leads to one of two conclusions:
(a) Most CIOs and boards are stupid (or at least very conservative). They adhere to the old 'Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM' mantra. Substitute 'Microsoft' for 'IBM'. (And I know, it's shocking that IBM ever actually used that as a marketing slogan.)
(b) Going for the Unix/Linux solution incurs costs that are not captured in the analysis.
And although I am by nature an open source guy, I do believe the author misses some costs associated with *nix.
In particular:
Training. The majority of users are already familiar with Office/Windows. Retraining people is not just the cost of a course, or support but the cost of their lost productivity while they get up to speed on how exactly the system works.
Staff. Like it or not, Windows systems admins are no problem to find, with easily checkable references and a qualification (MCSE) that is well understood.
Appeal. In the case of the school, the board of governors must decide what skills make their pupils most employable - becuase parents will use this when deciding where their children should study. In most cases this means the Windows/Office combination. Imagine two schools opposite each other: one promises skills that will be useful if their children want to become Unix gurus; the other offers experience in the same applications seen day-in/day-out in the workplace.
Of course, if (a variant of) *nix became the dominant operating system, these arguments would be turned round. But near term, they offer a significant reason to choose Microsoft over competitors.
I don't mean to be nasty or anything, but your idea is flawed because it doesn't appreciate how Sony makes money out of the PlayStation.
In 1998, an astonishing 40% of Sony's profits came from its PSX division. And they made next to no money on the hardware. The company makes money because publishing a PSX game requires Sony's approval. Oh, that and a $5-7 fee (per unit) to Sony.
Going to a Linux distribution with a DVD player would mean ANYONE could make a PS3 game. Good news for PS3 owners, bad news for Sony. Why would anyone pay Sony money when they could sell the games for 'free'.
While Sony would love to be 'free' of Microsoft, that does not mean they would like to make the creation of games free. Going to an open-source/Linux architecture would mean ANYONE could write games.
I can't imagine Sony senior management would go for that.
Anyone who has spent $100,000+ on a piece of software knows that is NOT the real cost. What you pay Lawson, Oracle or SAP is a mere fraction of the total cost.
An SAP salesman told me that the ratio of license to total cost was 1:8. That's right, they paid $8 in services (implementation/integration) and customisation for every $1 in licenses.
And that's why 'subscriptions' don't work. So, you pay Oracle a fee each year. Great. Changing the system is still prohibitively expensive because implementing a new system is far more expensive than just paying a new subscription fee.
Nor does open source help. (Much). Software that automates business processes is generally designed by people that work (and know) the relevent industries really well. It is a business not a technical issue. These people generally don't want to share their knowledge with their competitors. Or at least not without stock options .
CIOs and the like need to concentrate on:
(a) Getting software vendors to take some degree of responsibility for systems. (Success fees are a good idea.)
(b) Defining exact needs from the start. How many software projects start with... 'i think i know what i want but i'm sure i'll work it out as the project goes on'?
The way I look at it, it's more a case of 'telcos make less money out of broadband than out of dial-up access'. Cetainly this is true of European telcos who charge for local calls by the minute.
If you charge (say) 2c a minute for an Internet dial-up call, then you pay $1.20 for an hour. An hour a day on-line and you have $35 a month of calls for very limited expense. (56k modems means your backbone connection can be pretty low relative to your number of users; and access equipment is pretty cheap - c. $18-20 per user).
Contrast this with ADSL. Even contesting at 20-1, you need lots of backbone bandwidth. This is expensive for a telco. And worse, you need to set up this backbone bandwidth from every switching office (CO) where you have a DSL connection - even if there is only one in the area. DSLAMs at the CO plus routers at the customer premises are expensive. And then you need a 'truck roll' where an engineer goes and installs the equipment. These are costed internally at $100-$150 by telcos.
So, on the one hand (dial-up) the telco has minimal expenditure and a good income stream. On the other (DSL), there is potentially LESS revenue and a much greater cost base.
That is why I am sceptical of the current business case for ADSL.
OK. 'ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service.'
From whence came that gem of wisdom.
In the UK the largest ISP, Demon, owned by Thus, is unprofitable. BT charges all DSL ISPs an astonishing $60 a month for use of their copper. ISPs can only charge a small mark-up (c. $10). Would you like to run a broadband ISP on $10 per month? To make things worse, BT then limits the number of sign-up to 10 a week. That's right - you can only sign up 10 customers a week and only have $10 a month to maintain your equipment, rent your bandwidth and hire your support staff. British broadband ISPs are losing money hand-over-fist and when the VC money runs out will need to merge.
In Germany, T Online, the largest broadband ISP is signing up lots of customers. Germany has the largest ISDN user base in the world and is the process of converting them to ADSL. Unfortunately T Online isn't making money out of broadband either, as customers are paying less per month for ADSL than they did for ISDN and T Online has to buy expensive equipment and do lots of costly installations.
I'm not saying broadband is dead. Of course it isn't. Technology pundits should be banned from making ridiculous statements. But is true that there is no viable business model for providing ADSL right now.
Excuse my ignorance, I'm British after all. But isn't this an inevitable result of the blanket email/fax/letter writing efforts of lobbyists.
It's astonishing the number of 'pressure groups' that contain pre-written letters, buttons to 'fax your representative' here, or emails requests where you merely have to enter your email address. (Reading what is sent is strictly optional.)
Given the deluge of (often identical) mail the average politican recieves, are we surprised.
That said, I'm not sure hand-written letters are that much better. It's equivilant to attaching a note to your letter saying 'I can't afford a computer to type my response'. (And we all know how politicans feel about people who can't afford to contribute to their campaign;-))
Perhaps we ought to think harder about what we want our representatives to be.
It seems that discussions veer between retaliation and appeasement.
Neither is perfect.
Retaliation will injure innocents - just as the attack on the WTC injured innocents. The families of those innocents will demand vengence against the US. Just as the families of those killed in New York care not about the sufferings of the Palestinians (caused by the US or not), those killed by the US's retaliations will see the US as their enemy. Result, like it or not, is a spiral of hatred and violence.
Appeasement is no better. White flag... bull. Tell those with grievences, real or imaginary, they can get what they want with a few pounds of semtex and the US faces terrorism for years to come.
Violence begets violence.
Anyone who has read George Orwell's 1984 knows the most effective answer lies capturing the guilty, while not making them martyrs. In 1984 the 'enemies of the state', when captured and convicted, go on television to profess their guilt and repeat 'ad nauseaum' the error of their ways.
Impossible? Sure.
But it may be the only way to stop a spiral of violence.
My heart and tears go out to the victims, their families and friends.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at Eidos headquarters about two months ago and they showed me Tomb Raider on iPaq. I was blown away. (And trust me, I've seen/played a lot of video games.) The quality (FPS, etc.) was better than the original PSX.
t ml
As someone already commented, the controls were... interesting... but nothing that you couldn't get used to after a little bit of practice.
Anyway, for anyone who cares, here is a link I saw about iPAQ TR:
http://www.pocketgamer.org/archives/00000314.sh
Is if this kind of technology was used for a new kind of music chart:
Top 100 pirated songs!
It would be doubly interesting to see if the same songs which were top of the 'real' charts, were also the top of the Gnutella charts. Maybe we could catch the record companies that buy their own records to boost their positions in the charts red-handed.
*r
That's a little beside the point. In Europe, some operators make (Telia, Sonera, Orange UK) make more than 10% of cellular revenues from SMS. (Short Messaging Service, the GSM IM solution.)
Because SMS is a store-and-forward technology it is bandwidth unintensive (or at least, can be fitted around other network traffic). And at 15c a message, it is pretty lucrative.
Find the European cellular operator that makes less money from SMS than other data revenues. Right now instant messaging is the only data application that is remotely profitable.
One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.
Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.
Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.
And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.
Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.
So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)
So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?
Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)
Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.
OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.
Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.
Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.
*r
Which leads to one of two conclusions:
(a) Most CIOs and boards are stupid (or at least very conservative). They adhere to the old 'Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM' mantra. Substitute 'Microsoft' for 'IBM'. (And I know, it's shocking that IBM ever actually used that as a marketing slogan.)
(b) Going for the Unix/Linux solution incurs costs that are not captured in the analysis.
And although I am by nature an open source guy, I do believe the author misses some costs associated with *nix.
In particular:
Training. The majority of users are already familiar with Office/Windows. Retraining people is not just the cost of a course, or support but the cost of their lost productivity while they get up to speed on how exactly the system works.
Staff. Like it or not, Windows systems admins are no problem to find, with easily checkable references and a qualification (MCSE) that is well understood.
Appeal. In the case of the school, the board of governors must decide what skills make their pupils most employable - becuase parents will use this when deciding where their children should study. In most cases this means the Windows/Office combination. Imagine two schools opposite each other: one promises skills that will be useful if their children want to become Unix gurus; the other offers experience in the same applications seen day-in/day-out in the workplace.
Of course, if (a variant of) *nix became the dominant operating system, these arguments would be turned round. But near term, they offer a significant reason to choose Microsoft over competitors.
Responses, please!
I don't mean to be nasty or anything, but your idea is flawed because it doesn't appreciate how Sony makes money out of the PlayStation.
In 1998, an astonishing 40% of Sony's profits came from its PSX division. And they made next to no money on the hardware. The company makes money because publishing a PSX game requires Sony's approval. Oh, that and a $5-7 fee (per unit) to Sony.
Going to a Linux distribution with a DVD player would mean ANYONE could make a PS3 game. Good news for PS3 owners, bad news for Sony. Why would anyone pay Sony money when they could sell the games for 'free'.
While Sony would love to be 'free' of Microsoft, that does not mean they would like to make the creation of games free. Going to an open-source/Linux architecture would mean ANYONE could write games.
I can't imagine Sony senior management would go for that.
Just my ha'penny's worth.
An SAP salesman told me that the ratio of license to total cost was 1:8. That's right, they paid $8 in services (implementation/integration) and customisation for every $1 in licenses.
And that's why 'subscriptions' don't work. So, you pay Oracle a fee each year. Great. Changing the system is still prohibitively expensive because implementing a new system is far more expensive than just paying a new subscription fee.
Nor does open source help. (Much). Software that automates business processes is generally designed by people that work (and know) the relevent industries really well. It is a business not a technical issue. These people generally don't want to share their knowledge with their competitors. Or at least not without stock options .
CIOs and the like need to concentrate on:
(a) Getting software vendors to take some degree of responsibility for systems. (Success fees are a good idea.)
(b) Defining exact needs from the start. How many software projects start with... 'i think i know what i want but i'm sure i'll work it out as the project goes on'?
*r
The way I look at it, it's more a case of 'telcos make less money out of broadband than out of dial-up access'. Cetainly this is true of European telcos who charge for local calls by the minute.
If you charge (say) 2c a minute for an Internet dial-up call, then you pay $1.20 for an hour. An hour a day on-line and you have $35 a month of calls for very limited expense. (56k modems means your backbone connection can be pretty low relative to your number of users; and access equipment is pretty cheap - c. $18-20 per user).
Contrast this with ADSL. Even contesting at 20-1, you need lots of backbone bandwidth. This is expensive for a telco. And worse, you need to set up this backbone bandwidth from every switching office (CO) where you have a DSL connection - even if there is only one in the area. DSLAMs at the CO plus routers at the customer premises are expensive. And then you need a 'truck roll' where an engineer goes and installs the equipment. These are costed internally at $100-$150 by telcos.
So, on the one hand (dial-up) the telco has minimal expenditure and a good income stream. On the other (DSL), there is potentially LESS revenue and a much greater cost base.
That is why I am sceptical of the current business case for ADSL.
OK. 'ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service.'
From whence came that gem of wisdom.
In the UK the largest ISP, Demon, owned by Thus, is unprofitable. BT charges all DSL ISPs an astonishing $60 a month for use of their copper. ISPs can only charge a small mark-up (c. $10). Would you like to run a broadband ISP on $10 per month? To make things worse, BT then limits the number of sign-up to 10 a week. That's right - you can only sign up 10 customers a week and only have $10 a month to maintain your equipment, rent your bandwidth and hire your support staff. British broadband ISPs are losing money hand-over-fist and when the VC money runs out will need to merge.
In Germany, T Online, the largest broadband ISP is signing up lots of customers. Germany has the largest ISDN user base in the world and is the process of converting them to ADSL. Unfortunately T Online isn't making money out of broadband either, as customers are paying less per month for ADSL than they did for ISDN and T Online has to buy expensive equipment and do lots of costly installations.
I'm not saying broadband is dead. Of course it isn't. Technology pundits should be banned from making ridiculous statements. But is true that there is no viable business model for providing ADSL right now.
Excuse my ignorance, I'm British after all. But isn't this an inevitable result of the blanket email/fax/letter writing efforts of lobbyists.
;-))
It's astonishing the number of 'pressure groups' that contain pre-written letters, buttons to 'fax your representative' here, or emails requests where you merely have to enter your email address. (Reading what is sent is strictly optional.)
Given the deluge of (often identical) mail the average politican recieves, are we surprised.
That said, I'm not sure hand-written letters are that much better. It's equivilant to attaching a note to your letter saying 'I can't afford a computer to type my response'. (And we all know how politicans feel about people who can't afford to contribute to their campaign
Perhaps we ought to think harder about what we want our representatives to be.
Thanks,
Robert
It seems that discussions veer between retaliation and appeasement.
Neither is perfect.
Retaliation will injure innocents - just as the attack on the WTC injured innocents. The families of those innocents will demand vengence against the US. Just as the families of those killed in New York care not about the sufferings of the Palestinians (caused by the US or not), those killed by the US's retaliations will see the US as their enemy. Result, like it or not, is a spiral of hatred and violence.
Appeasement is no better. White flag... bull. Tell those with grievences, real or imaginary, they can get what they want with a few pounds of semtex and the US faces terrorism for years to come.
Violence begets violence.
Anyone who has read George Orwell's 1984 knows the most effective answer lies capturing the guilty, while not making them martyrs. In 1984 the 'enemies of the state', when captured and convicted, go on television to profess their guilt and repeat 'ad nauseaum' the error of their ways.
Impossible? Sure.
But it may be the only way to stop a spiral of violence.
My heart and tears go out to the victims, their families and friends.
Robert