so he is predicting that the PS3 and wii will each sell about as many units in their second year as in their first year. it's pretty basic knowledge that consoles, games, albums, whatever, always sell a lot of units at the relative beginning of their release before the numbers dip, often dramatically.
Games sell a lot when they first come off, then drastically drop off over time.
Consoles sell to the early adopters first, then the sales totals increase over time as the price drops occur and the base of good games increases. The sales number peak about halfway to two thirds through the console's lifespan.
I've got my machine set to notify only, and it never installed it. I told it not to install it, and it asked if it wanted me to not be shown the update again. I said yes, and it stopped showing it. It only comes back in the update list if there's a new version of WGA - or at least every time it's reappeared, it happened to coincide with a Slashdot story saying MS changed something about WGA.
Oh yeah, and I seem to recall something about a shortage of XBox360s. Something about a chip company not making as many chips as they promised. Must've been the wifi card or something.
The rumor going around is that it was DDR3 RAM chips causing the shortage.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
The word going around on that was that Apple would submit conservative initial orders to IBM, and wait until sales started coming in to order more. The problem with that is IBM delivers orders 6 months after they are placed. Apple's problem was that IBM wouldn't rush their reorders. It had nothing to do with capacity, but rather Apple refused to change their procedure to deal with IBM's order policy. Apple was a small enough customer that IBM didn't consider their business worth the hassle of changing their procedures.
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
How can you claim dumping? All chips of a given processor line cost the same to make, regardless of speed. The final speed rating is determined at the very end of manufacturing, partly by chip capabilities and partly by market demand. A processor costs in the around $50 to produce (number pulled from memory of an article I read years ago, so not very accurate, but probably still close enough for this discussion). You still have a markup of at least 10x what the production costs are, so I don't think you can really argue that they're underpricing the chips.
N64 games were usually $60 new. A few really early titles were around $70 before Nintendo wised up and lowered the licensing fees, but that was only within the first few months after launch. The move to discs for GameCube resulted in a $10 price drop.
My memory is vague as I was young, but I'm pretty sure the average NES and SNES title was $50, but there were exceptions for games on large cartridges.
Re:HFS++ looking pretty sharp now eh?
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
For example, with FAT16, there's no way to get the file-changed notifications that Spotlight needs to know when to reindex a file.
That's entirely a Windows driver implementation problem, not a design problem.
Even GEOS running on top of DOS 15 years ago had file change notifications.
Re:Ok, I was interested before but now....
on
Wii-mote In Action
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Metroid Prime 3 demo had 2 sensitivity settings. Most people playing on the standard setting weren't very impressed, but those playing on the higher sensitivity loved it.
They talked about the PS1's power usage being so low they had trouble measuring it. Being cartridge based, the N64 probably used significantly less power than the PS1. Their tools probably wouldn't have been able to measure it.
Did anyone else read this and think 'Gee, go figure. A more powerful system needs more electricity.' Sounds like non-news to me.
No. Because its not obvious at all.
It seemed pretty obvious to me. The NES and SNES didn't even get hot. The N64 got a little hot if you played for a while. If you got a semi-transparent model, you saw that there's a pretty large heatsink in it. The GameCube has a fans that suck air in one side and blow hot air out the other. Just based on that, it seems pretty clear that the power usage was going up over time.
It's getting so bad that the more times Kutaragi shoots off his mouth, the more I think that he is purposely sabotaging the PS3 out of anger that he was not named CEO. I thought Nintendo requiring a $50 (?) upgrade to their $200 N64 was crazy. This is just ridiculous.
The N64 RAM upgrade was $30, and the N64 was around $120-$150 when it came out. The upgrade came bundled for free with Donkey Kong 64. It was required to play the 2nd N64 Zelda game, and Perfect Dark required it to play single player or to get more than 2 players in multiplayer. Those games all sold 4-5 million copies each, so the RAM upgrade was rather successful.
XM sounds great in a car, where there's lots of background noise. It can sound better than FM if your local FM stations suck at operating the equipment. Also, keep in mind a lot of radio stations nowadays are just broadcasting from MP3s, so they aren't the best quality either.
Hook up an XM radio to a halfway decent stereo, and you'll notice the sound is lacking. It's rather obvious that you're losing something.
Talk stations are really low quality. You notice it when you first get the radio, but after a few days you get used to it and don't notice it anymore.
That said, XM's quality is a little better than Sirius's, especially on the talk stations.
The original Zelda offers a lot that the newer games don't. The game very few restrictions compared to the newer ones. The levels are numbered, but there are very few you have to do in order to do the following levels. (Yes, I know in the later games you can get the item from a level, leave, and go to the next level, but that defeats the point of finishing levels out of order). Within the levels there is more flexibility in the path you take through it.
MS has always had the strategy of selling OS upgrades by artifically requiring them - hell, they've done this since DOS version 5 and "setver". That they would make something Vista-only purely to drive Vista sales is par for the course.
Setver did the opposite. A lot of software was hardcoded to expect certain DOS versions, often because it hooked into DOS internals, or made assumptions that were not guarenteed to be correct in different versions of DOS. Setver was an MS utility that came with DOS to let you get around those limits.
If it's owned by Nintendo, it essentially is Nintendo and is first party.
Retro is now owned 100% by Nintendo, and is a 1st party developer. They aren't really any different than Nintendo's EAD or NST divisions.
Nintendo owned 49% of Rare, with the founders owning 51%. Nintendo had a large say in what Rare did, but ultimately did not call the shots there. Rare was a second party because they had exclusivity contracts with Nintendo.
Luigi's Mansion was fun, but it felt closer to a glorified demo than to a real game. It was just too short to justify the $50 price. It certainly wasn't the kind of game you buy a system for.
1st party = Console maker 2nd party = Developers with exclusivity contracts to make games only for one console. Usually the console maker has a financial stake in the company, but not enough to control the company. 3rd party = Independant developers
Unicode isn't a character encoding, it's a character set. According to this unicode faq, there are 13 different encodings for Unicode. Switching to Unicode doesn't help the problem of character encodings.
A lot of CDs don't have the CD logo on them even if they are compliant. Usually the more effort that was put into designing the cover art, the less likely it is that the CD logo is present. Sometimes the more artistic ones have the logo inside the case, but not always. I haven't spent more than a few seconds looking at copy protected CDs, so I have no idea if they really do withhold the CD logo from them.
35% isn't nearly the worst they've done. The Yankees regularly have $5 ticket nights. I bought 3 tickets to a recent one off Ticketmaster, and it came out to $29 - almost 100% markup. I chose to have them mail me the tickets, which for some reason is several dollars cheaper than printing tickets yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, this machine is SP2. IIRC SP2 was already on the disc used to install the machine.
so he is predicting that the PS3 and wii will each sell about as many units in their second year as in their first year. it's pretty basic knowledge that consoles, games, albums, whatever, always sell a lot of units at the relative beginning of their release before the numbers dip, often dramatically.
Games sell a lot when they first come off, then drastically drop off over time.
Consoles sell to the early adopters first, then the sales totals increase over time as the price drops occur and the base of good games increases. The sales number peak about halfway to two thirds through the console's lifespan.
Either way, we lose. I think I'd rather have the lawyers win than Microsoft win.
I've got my machine set to notify only, and it never installed it. I told it not to install it, and it asked if it wanted me to not be shown the update again. I said yes, and it stopped showing it. It only comes back in the update list if there's a new version of WGA - or at least every time it's reappeared, it happened to coincide with a Slashdot story saying MS changed something about WGA.
Oh yeah, and I seem to recall something about a shortage of XBox360s. Something about a chip company not making as many chips as they promised. Must've been the wifi card or something.
The rumor going around is that it was DDR3 RAM chips causing the shortage.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
The word going around on that was that Apple would submit conservative initial orders to IBM, and wait until sales started coming in to order more. The problem with that is IBM delivers orders 6 months after they are placed. Apple's problem was that IBM wouldn't rush their reorders. It had nothing to do with capacity, but rather Apple refused to change their procedure to deal with IBM's order policy. Apple was a small enough customer that IBM didn't consider their business worth the hassle of changing their procedures.
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
How can you claim dumping? All chips of a given processor line cost the same to make, regardless of speed. The final speed rating is determined at the very end of manufacturing, partly by chip capabilities and partly by market demand. A processor costs in the around $50 to produce (number pulled from memory of an article I read years ago, so not very accurate, but probably still close enough for this discussion). You still have a markup of at least 10x what the production costs are, so I don't think you can really argue that they're underpricing the chips.
N64 games were usually $60 new. A few really early titles were around $70 before Nintendo wised up and lowered the licensing fees, but that was only within the first few months after launch. The move to discs for GameCube resulted in a $10 price drop.
My memory is vague as I was young, but I'm pretty sure the average NES and SNES title was $50, but there were exceptions for games on large cartridges.
For example, with FAT16, there's no way to get the file-changed notifications that Spotlight needs to know when to reindex a file.
That's entirely a Windows driver implementation problem, not a design problem.
Even GEOS running on top of DOS 15 years ago had file change notifications.
The Metroid Prime 3 demo had 2 sensitivity settings. Most people playing on the standard setting weren't very impressed, but those playing on the higher sensitivity loved it.
They talked about the PS1's power usage being so low they had trouble measuring it. Being cartridge based, the N64 probably used significantly less power than the PS1. Their tools probably wouldn't have been able to measure it.
Did anyone else read this and think 'Gee, go figure. A more powerful system needs more electricity.' Sounds like non-news to me.
No. Because its not obvious at all.
It seemed pretty obvious to me. The NES and SNES didn't even get hot. The N64 got a little hot if you played for a while. If you got a semi-transparent model, you saw that there's a pretty large heatsink in it. The GameCube has a fans that suck air in one side and blow hot air out the other. Just based on that, it seems pretty clear that the power usage was going up over time.
It's getting so bad that the more times Kutaragi shoots off his mouth, the more I think that he is purposely sabotaging the PS3 out of anger that he was not named CEO. I thought Nintendo requiring a $50 (?) upgrade to their $200 N64 was crazy. This is just ridiculous.
The N64 RAM upgrade was $30, and the N64 was around $120-$150 when it came out. The upgrade came bundled for free with Donkey Kong 64. It was required to play the 2nd N64 Zelda game, and Perfect Dark required it to play single player or to get more than 2 players in multiplayer. Those games all sold 4-5 million copies each, so the RAM upgrade was rather successful.
Clear Channel owns a very small percentage of XM. Small enough to be meaningless. In the beginning they owned more, but sold off most of it years ago.
XM sounds great in a car, where there's lots of background noise. It can sound better than FM if your local FM stations suck at operating the equipment. Also, keep in mind a lot of radio stations nowadays are just broadcasting from MP3s, so they aren't the best quality either.
Hook up an XM radio to a halfway decent stereo, and you'll notice the sound is lacking. It's rather obvious that you're losing something.
Talk stations are really low quality. You notice it when you first get the radio, but after a few days you get used to it and don't notice it anymore.
That said, XM's quality is a little better than Sirius's, especially on the talk stations.
The original Zelda offers a lot that the newer games don't. The game very few restrictions compared to the newer ones. The levels are numbered, but there are very few you have to do in order to do the following levels. (Yes, I know in the later games you can get the item from a level, leave, and go to the next level, but that defeats the point of finishing levels out of order). Within the levels there is more flexibility in the path you take through it.
MS has always had the strategy of selling OS upgrades by artifically requiring them - hell, they've done this since DOS version 5 and "setver". That they would make something Vista-only purely to drive Vista sales is par for the course.
Setver did the opposite. A lot of software was hardcoded to expect certain DOS versions, often because it hooked into DOS internals, or made assumptions that were not guarenteed to be correct in different versions of DOS. Setver was an MS utility that came with DOS to let you get around those limits.
According to Microsoft, DirectX 9.0b works with Win98.
I'd say Halo 3 being #10 on the list is rather impressive. Japanese gamers don't like FPS games in general, and they don't like the Xbox.
Rush essentially got probation and a small fine, and did not even have to plead guilty. Not exactly much of a punishment there.
If it's owned by Nintendo, it essentially is Nintendo and is first party.
Retro is now owned 100% by Nintendo, and is a 1st party developer. They aren't really any different than Nintendo's EAD or NST divisions.
Nintendo owned 49% of Rare, with the founders owning 51%. Nintendo had a large say in what Rare did, but ultimately did not call the shots there. Rare was a second party because they had exclusivity contracts with Nintendo.
Luigi's Mansion was fun, but it felt closer to a glorified demo than to a real game. It was just too short to justify the $50 price. It certainly wasn't the kind of game you buy a system for.
1st party = Console maker
2nd party = Developers with exclusivity contracts to make games only for one console. Usually the console maker has a financial stake in the company, but not enough to control the company.
3rd party = Independant developers
Unicode isn't a character encoding, it's a character set. According to this unicode faq, there are 13 different encodings for Unicode. Switching to Unicode doesn't help the problem of character encodings.
A lot of CDs don't have the CD logo on them even if they are compliant. Usually the more effort that was put into designing the cover art, the less likely it is that the CD logo is present. Sometimes the more artistic ones have the logo inside the case, but not always. I haven't spent more than a few seconds looking at copy protected CDs, so I have no idea if they really do withhold the CD logo from them.
35% isn't nearly the worst they've done. The Yankees regularly have $5 ticket nights. I bought 3 tickets to a recent one off Ticketmaster, and it came out to $29 - almost 100% markup. I chose to have them mail me the tickets, which for some reason is several dollars cheaper than printing tickets yourself.