StarWars:Episode 2 has broken $200M in only 12 days, which is faster than the pace set by number 4 all time US box office champ StarWars:Episode 1.
Spider-Man has yet to prove whether it can top or even come close to the $431M made by the last StarWars movie. Experts are guessing the film may gross over $400M and possibly as much as $450M, but it is still too early to be sure.
StarWars: Episode 2 is even more unpredictable at this point. It will be several more weeks before even the experts are willing to guess where it will land on the all time list.
Proclaiming Spider-Man the winner of the summer box office when the month of June has yet to begin seems more than a little premature.
If metroid is as good as the original or the super metroid version, I might have to blow $149 for the system and $50 or $60 for the game. Plus I'm curious about that Pikmin game. Zelda might be a plus as well. I haven't been into mario much since the days of the 8 bit nintendo.
Security In Web Services: An Evolving Threat Model
2002-05-20
Shannon Cochran
Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, apprised security researchers at the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy about attacks likely to become commonplace in the emerging era of large-scale, distributed web services. "The kind of attacks that we're seeing are not a traditional security attack," he warned. The threat to web services is not about something like root access; it's more about repeated violations and exploitations of the service -- small cheats and hacks that are individually insignificant, but a huge problem in the aggregate.
Spam is an example of this kind of hack. A web-based e-mail service does not suffer if one of its accounts is used for mass-mailing. When tens of thousands of accounts are abused in this way, the service can be brought to its knees. Manber calls this the "penny jar" effect, likening it to a thief who comes to a cash register and empties the penny dish every five minutes. The pennies are meant to be given away, and each instance of the loss is trivial; but if the theft continues unchecked, the service will be destroyed.
And money is far from the only target of attack. Buyer and seller ratings in auction sites are often forged, and so are rankings on game sites. "If you have any kind of rating, people go to all kinds of trouble to get that rating in an illegitimate way," Manber reported.
The more services are offered, the more vulnerable the provider becomes. "Someone can steal some money over here, go to Shopping and buy something, then go to Auction and sell it," said Manber. "This really happened."
Internationalization is a further weakness, because patches must be distributed over multiple systems around the world. Even one overlooked server leaves the provider vulnerable; but in a world of web services, the integrity of the network isn't nearly as valuable as the time and effort that skilled employees spend combating abuse. "I'm not even worried sometimes about the machines I buy," Manber clarified. "I'm worried about the time...There are more of them [attackers] than there are of me. They have a lot more time."
Interactivity poses a new set of risks. "Whenever we get content from users, it's a problem," said Manber. Advertisers will attempt to sneak their content into forums like the Personals, or go to the trouble of creating an informative site, only to change the content to advertising after the site is accepted into Yahoo's directory. Or they may add Yahoo redirects to their own sites in order to gain an appearance of legitimacy.
Services can also be stolen and resold. Yahoo found that the finance sites were plagued by screen scrapers running every few seconds to grab real-time stock quotes. Manber says that traffic on the finance sites dropped by 80% after the screen-scrapers were blocked. "You provide a premium service, people will sign up for it maybe once, put a proxy server up, steal the information, and bang! Now they provide the service."
Some of the exploits are darkly ingenious. During hotly contested auctions, some users will mount password attacks on other bidder's accounts an hour before the end of the auction -- not to actually gain access, but merely to trigger a security lockout, thereby ensuring that the legitimate user cannot place last-minute bids. Once Yahoo had to deal with a virus spread through a file download, with the twist that the virus would only become destructive if the file was removed from Yahoo's servers. And on the social engineering front, there's the list of instructions for "hacking a Yahoo account" that direct would-be hax0rs to send the e-mail address of the account they'd like to access, along with a gobbledegook string of code and their own account name and password, to a plausible-sounding address like passbot_return@yahoo.com.
"I've seen Ph.D. level cleverness," Manber admitted. In response, Yahoo has developed some sneaky countermeasures of its own. But although Manber provided examples of his algorithms, he asked attendees of the conference not to publicize them. The conflict between secrecy and openness is one that, as a former academic researcher, Manber feels keenly. On the one hand, he is fully aware that real progress in security comes through full disclosure and open, shared research. On the other hand, he knows that his company will suffer real and immediate damage if hackers learn the details of his methods.
"The kind of countermeasures that we're doing are pretty weak. If you compare it to cryptography we're a hundred years behind," he said. "Feedback is always a major issue for us. I always think about 'Should I do this? Will I tell them what I'm doing?...I'd rather see what they're doing. The way you win an arms race is not by building bigger and bigger weapons. Sometimes the best move is not to play the game.'"
One amusing example Manber gave is in the field of rate limiting -- Yahoo's attempt to throttle the rate at which users can sign up for new accounts. Although successful techniques to weed out bots have been developed -- like asking users to retype a random word displayed in an image designed to be impossible for OCR to process -- Manber has found that people are still registering for massive numbers of accounts. "As far as I can tell, they're just doing it by hand. They're sitting there all day doing it by hand," he said. So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
Number one on the list of open problems in web services security is the difficulty of differentiating users from bots. Though he called it "imperfect," he acknowledged that one solution would be to require an ID number or a credit card number. If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said. But even more than authentication, Manber wants reverse authentication: "I want a protocol that proves that someone is not a particular person."
He also wants obfuscated HTML, which is particularly ironic since, in his days in academia, Manber wrote one of the first screen-scrapers. He wants the ability to detect passive vulnerabilities in a system. And he wants better ways to fight back. "I have huge pipes," he laughed. "It's very easy for me to go after them. Unfortunately, it's not legal."
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
It seems really strange that I've read this article about 10 times on different sites today, and not once have I seen a frequency listed. The article mentions that it is faster than any silicon transistor, but how much faster exactly?
I loved Episode 2, but there were a few things that seemed a little too familiar...
Count Dooko's speech about "The Dark Lord" and his pleas of "Join me!" caused a little too much deja vu, since it has only been months since watching Lord of the Rings.
The clone factory on Kamino where 'humans are no longer born, they're grown' seemed to be borrowed directly from the matrix.
The gladiatorial style execution seemed to be inspired by another recent film. Besides that, the crab-like monster looked, sounded, and moved a lot like the aliens from Starship Troopers.
Yoda, Anakin, and the other Jedi borrowed quite a few martial arts moves from the characters in the matrix. They didn't fight that way in Episode One.
The cityscape of Corusant and the opening chase sequence was a little too reminiscent of the Fifth Element.
Just a few things I noticed! Hopefully $116M is just the beginning. It may be too optimistic to hope that it unseats Titanic as the box office record holder, but one can hope...
I'm guessing I've spent more time playing mmorpgs than you have spent with kids. I know lots of under 10 kids who much prefer a gamepad to a keyboard. Most of them grow into playing both, but the youngest once prefer the console.
I would think they would open up the market for MMORPGs quite a bit. It seems likely that more younger gamers would be likely to play on the console rather than the computer. Also there are a lot of not so technical people who still like to play games. It will be interesting to see how sucessful FFXI, and the other console online games fare.
Spider-Man's box office success was all about timing. Box office sales in general have been very good lately, even though there has been little of worth to watch since January or so. Spider-Man offered a little something for everyone, teen-angst exhibited by two good looking young stars, a film portayal of a wildly popular comic book character, dazzling CGI effects, a two time academy award nominated actor as the villian, and a spirit of patriotism. The combination would be successful at anytime, but it didn't hurt that there was no real competition and hadn't been for some time.
IMO, Star Wars: Ep 2 will have it's work cut out to beat the $114M mark, but I still wouldn't bet against it. All the midnight and evening May 16th shows are already sold out here in Austin, and many of the weekend shows as well.
if you are anything like the computer guys I know (myself included), you'd end up printing out portions of the text whenever you wanted to read them anyway!!!
TOKYO (Reuters) - Who says you can't teach an old robotic dog new tricks? As of next month, Sony Corp will offer free software kits for its plastic pet dog, called AIBO, which will give owners many more training options.
AIBO will even be able to meow rather than bark.
Up to now, most AIBO owners could only play with a pre-trained computerized pet whose behavior was largely defined by Sony's programming, but the new software kit will allow experienced users to teach the dog any amount of new tricks.
The release of the development kit, called OPEN-R SDK, is an about-face for the Japanese audiovisual electronics giant, which had tried to cage in independent developers who were hacking into the AIBO's electronic innards and making what Sony claimed were unauthorized modifications.
``Sony wants to actively promote OPEN-R architecture for entertainment robots by highlighting its ability to modify the robot's functionality,'' it said in a statement, essentially admitting that open development would help widen the appeal of the robot.
Sony says the development kit, which allows AIBO movements to be written in the C++ programming language, is intended for noncommercial use. Sony will also create a Web site where developers can exchange their custom-made AIBO programs.
Hopefully the screenplay is well written and is more than just a reprisal of the characters with a bunch of kick ass special effects. If the sequel is half as thought provoking and original as the first movie, I'm sure I'll see it several times in the theater.
Who picked the games for the court to review? Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil? How about Final Fantasy X (or just about any other RPG)? Black and White and Medal of Honor were mentioned in the review, but there are tons of games with a lot more content than Mortal Kombat.
The most creative case I've seen was made out of one of those tupperware storage bins you can get at walmart. Holes were cut out for all the connectors as well as intake and exhaust vents.
I hope this means that one day I can have liposuction paid for by my insurance company. They can suck out my fat, use the stem cells to grow a complete set of new organs for me, and transplant the new and unrejectable organs. Poof! A skinner, brand new me!
He was considering making Fatal Defect required reading for the C programming course I took. From Amazon.com:
In Fatal Defects: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs, Ivars Peterson describes dozens and dozens of hoary computer bugs and gives biographical sketches of the bug detectives who located and fixed them. This book, which reads like a novel, is both entertaining and informative. Many of the bugs that Peterson discusses are not in computer programs per se but in the human systems that run and operate the computers. Very often the operator fails to understand what the computer program requires as input and types in an incorrect command. The computer then executes the command, with potentially disastrous results. Fatal Defects has important lessons for both those who design computers and those who use them.
He also insisted that we not call them bugs. "They are ERRORS, calling them bugs makes it sound like they are cute little accidental things that pop up when actually they are programming mistakes."
The likely reality of "human remote control", if it's done at all, is scarier: being rewarded through your pleasure centers until you want nothing more than to follow the commands. Your actions aren't involuntarily overriden, you are *eager* to follow any commands given.
This isn't really control. As long as the choice remains with the individual it's merely persuasion. There is little difference between stimulating my plesure centers if I behave a certain way and offering money or other incentive to do so. I can still refuse. Sure doing this at a chemical level is makes refusing essentially equivalent to fighting addiction, but resistance is still possible. People quit smoking after years and years, alcoholics go sober, and people controlled in this manner could simply choose the path of less stimulation to their pleasure centers.
I stand by my original comment. Check out the book, Donaldson describes the possibility far better than I can.
I recall reading about a similar study at least a few years back, but with roaches. I guess rats would be a pretty significant step up. The slippery slope arguement has at least some merit here, I think. For a really dark look at cyborgs take a look at Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Series books. The capacity for remote control of human beings is scary. Imagine having your actions involuntarily overriden by a remote source. Scary stuff...
I was using census 1990 data because it was the first that came up in my search. Since then Phoenix has grown at an impressive rate and Detroit has actually shrunk a lot. Perhaps I didn't give the growth rate enough consideration, but even the 2000 census numbers confirm that metro houston, detroit and philly are more populous than metro phoenix.
But what percentage of people already have a cable/dsl router. I'd guess the number who have more than one computer on the internet in their household is rather small (I'm not talking about the/. community here). Most people have a cable or DSL modem connected directly to their computer, often by a technician from the cable / phone company. For these people, going out and buying a cable/dsl modem, bringing it home and connecting both their computer and new console game system to it will not be a trivial task. But then again, I guess they could always multiplex manually between systems, unplugging the ethernet cable from the computer and plugging it into the console.
Slashdot Mirror
StarWars:Episode 2 has broken $200M in only 12 days, which is faster than the pace set by number 4 all time US box office champ StarWars:Episode 1.
Spider-Man has yet to prove whether it can top or even come close to the $431M made by the last StarWars movie. Experts are guessing the film may gross over $400M and possibly as much as $450M, but it is still too early to be sure.
StarWars: Episode 2 is even more unpredictable at this point. It will be several more weeks before even the experts are willing to guess where it will land on the all time list.
Proclaiming Spider-Man the winner of the summer box office when the month of June has yet to begin seems more than a little premature.
If metroid is as good as the original or the super metroid version, I might have to blow $149 for the system and $50 or $60 for the game. Plus I'm curious about that Pikmin game. Zelda might be a plus as well. I haven't been into mario much since the days of the 8 bit nintendo.
Oops! They couldn't do it again.
Security In Web Services: An Evolving Threat Model 2002-05-20
Shannon Cochran
Udi Manber, chief scientist at Yahoo!, apprised security researchers at the IEEE's Symposium on Security and Privacy about attacks likely to become commonplace in the emerging era of large-scale, distributed web services. "The kind of attacks that we're seeing are not a traditional security attack," he warned. The threat to web services is not about something like root access; it's more about repeated violations and exploitations of the service -- small cheats and hacks that are individually insignificant, but a huge problem in the aggregate. Spam is an example of this kind of hack. A web-based e-mail service does not suffer if one of its accounts is used for mass-mailing. When tens of thousands of accounts are abused in this way, the service can be brought to its knees. Manber calls this the "penny jar" effect, likening it to a thief who comes to a cash register and empties the penny dish every five minutes. The pennies are meant to be given away, and each instance of the loss is trivial; but if the theft continues unchecked, the service will be destroyed.
And money is far from the only target of attack. Buyer and seller ratings in auction sites are often forged, and so are rankings on game sites. "If you have any kind of rating, people go to all kinds of trouble to get that rating in an illegitimate way," Manber reported.
The more services are offered, the more vulnerable the provider becomes. "Someone can steal some money over here, go to Shopping and buy something, then go to Auction and sell it," said Manber. "This really happened."
Internationalization is a further weakness, because patches must be distributed over multiple systems around the world. Even one overlooked server leaves the provider vulnerable; but in a world of web services, the integrity of the network isn't nearly as valuable as the time and effort that skilled employees spend combating abuse. "I'm not even worried sometimes about the machines I buy," Manber clarified. "I'm worried about the time...There are more of them [attackers] than there are of me. They have a lot more time."
Interactivity poses a new set of risks. "Whenever we get content from users, it's a problem," said Manber. Advertisers will attempt to sneak their content into forums like the Personals, or go to the trouble of creating an informative site, only to change the content to advertising after the site is accepted into Yahoo's directory. Or they may add Yahoo redirects to their own sites in order to gain an appearance of legitimacy.
Services can also be stolen and resold. Yahoo found that the finance sites were plagued by screen scrapers running every few seconds to grab real-time stock quotes. Manber says that traffic on the finance sites dropped by 80% after the screen-scrapers were blocked. "You provide a premium service, people will sign up for it maybe once, put a proxy server up, steal the information, and bang! Now they provide the service."
Some of the exploits are darkly ingenious. During hotly contested auctions, some users will mount password attacks on other bidder's accounts an hour before the end of the auction -- not to actually gain access, but merely to trigger a security lockout, thereby ensuring that the legitimate user cannot place last-minute bids. Once Yahoo had to deal with a virus spread through a file download, with the twist that the virus would only become destructive if the file was removed from Yahoo's servers. And on the social engineering front, there's the list of instructions for "hacking a Yahoo account" that direct would-be hax0rs to send the e-mail address of the account they'd like to access, along with a gobbledegook string of code and their own account name and password, to a plausible-sounding address like passbot_return@yahoo.com.
"I've seen Ph.D. level cleverness," Manber admitted. In response, Yahoo has developed some sneaky countermeasures of its own. But although Manber provided examples of his algorithms, he asked attendees of the conference not to publicize them. The conflict between secrecy and openness is one that, as a former academic researcher, Manber feels keenly. On the one hand, he is fully aware that real progress in security comes through full disclosure and open, shared research. On the other hand, he knows that his company will suffer real and immediate damage if hackers learn the details of his methods.
"The kind of countermeasures that we're doing are pretty weak. If you compare it to cryptography we're a hundred years behind," he said. "Feedback is always a major issue for us. I always think about 'Should I do this? Will I tell them what I'm doing?...I'd rather see what they're doing. The way you win an arms race is not by building bigger and bigger weapons. Sometimes the best move is not to play the game.'"
One amusing example Manber gave is in the field of rate limiting -- Yahoo's attempt to throttle the rate at which users can sign up for new accounts. Although successful techniques to weed out bots have been developed -- like asking users to retype a random word displayed in an image designed to be impossible for OCR to process -- Manber has found that people are still registering for massive numbers of accounts. "As far as I can tell, they're just doing it by hand. They're sitting there all day doing it by hand," he said. So he's considering changing the registration test to a simple arithmetic problem. It won't stop the mass registrations, but he might be able to get the abusers to perform distributed computing tasks for him.
Number one on the list of open problems in web services security is the difficulty of differentiating users from bots. Though he called it "imperfect," he acknowledged that one solution would be to require an ID number or a credit card number. If anonymity disappeared from the web, "a lot of the problems would go away," he said. But even more than authentication, Manber wants reverse authentication: "I want a protocol that proves that someone is not a particular person."
He also wants obfuscated HTML, which is particularly ironic since, in his days in academia, Manber wrote one of the first screen-scrapers. He wants the ability to detect passive vulnerabilities in a system. And he wants better ways to fight back. "I have huge pipes," he laughed. "It's very easy for me to go after them. Unfortunately, it's not legal."
But he dismissed legal solutions altogether, saying that measures like anti-spam legislation are completely ineffective. "This has to be solved technically, not legally," he warned. "If we can't solve these problems, we'll see less and less services."
It seems really strange that I've read this article about 10 times on different sites today, and not once have I seen a frequency listed. The article mentions that it is faster than any silicon transistor, but how much faster exactly?
The good news:
Most of us could write all the contents of our hard drives to disk and wouldn't fill one of these up.
The bad news:
A current 24x CD burner writes at 3600 KB/sec. Writing one of these disks at that speed would take 7.7 hours.
I loved Episode 2, but there were a few things that seemed a little too familiar...
Count Dooko's speech about "The Dark Lord" and his pleas of "Join me!" caused a little too much deja vu, since it has only been months since watching Lord of the Rings.
The clone factory on Kamino where 'humans are no longer born, they're grown' seemed to be borrowed directly from the matrix.
The gladiatorial style execution seemed to be inspired by another recent film. Besides that, the crab-like monster looked, sounded, and moved a lot like the aliens from Starship Troopers.
Yoda, Anakin, and the other Jedi borrowed quite a few martial arts moves from the characters in the matrix. They didn't fight that way in Episode One.
The cityscape of Corusant and the opening chase sequence was a little too reminiscent of the Fifth Element.
Just a few things I noticed! Hopefully $116M is just the beginning. It may be too optimistic to hope that it unseats Titanic as the box office record holder, but one can hope...
All your moonbase are belong to us!
I'm guessing I've spent more time playing mmorpgs than you have spent with kids. I know lots of under 10 kids who much prefer a gamepad to a keyboard. Most of them grow into playing both, but the youngest once prefer the console.
I would think they would open up the market for MMORPGs quite a bit. It seems likely that more younger gamers would be likely to play on the console rather than the computer. Also there are a lot of not so technical people who still like to play games. It will be interesting to see how sucessful FFXI, and the other console online games fare.
Spider-Man's box office success was all about timing. Box office sales in general have been very good lately, even though there has been little of worth to watch since January or so. Spider-Man offered a little something for everyone, teen-angst exhibited by two good looking young stars, a film portayal of a wildly popular comic book character, dazzling CGI effects, a two time academy award nominated actor as the villian, and a spirit of patriotism. The combination would be successful at anytime, but it didn't hurt that there was no real competition and hadn't been for some time.
IMO, Star Wars: Ep 2 will have it's work cut out to beat the $114M mark, but I still wouldn't bet against it. All the midnight and evening May 16th shows are already sold out here in Austin, and many of the weekend shows as well.
if you are anything like the computer guys I know (myself included), you'd end up printing out
portions of the text whenever you wanted to read them anyway!!!
Sony Loosens Leash on AIBO Robot Dog
By REUTERS
Filed at 11:22 a.m. ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - Who says you can't teach an old robotic dog new tricks? As of next month, Sony Corp will offer free software kits for its plastic pet dog, called AIBO, which will give owners many more training options.
AIBO will even be able to meow rather than bark.
Up to now, most AIBO owners could only play with a pre-trained computerized pet whose behavior was largely defined by Sony's programming, but the new software kit will allow experienced users to teach the dog any amount of new tricks.
The release of the development kit, called OPEN-R SDK, is an about-face for the Japanese audiovisual electronics giant, which had tried to cage in independent developers who were hacking into the AIBO's electronic innards and making what Sony claimed were unauthorized modifications.
``Sony wants to actively promote OPEN-R architecture for entertainment robots by highlighting its ability to modify the robot's functionality,'' it said in a statement, essentially admitting that open development would help widen the appeal of the robot.
Sony says the development kit, which allows AIBO movements to be written in the C++ programming language, is intended for noncommercial use. Sony will also create a Web site where developers can exchange their custom-made AIBO programs.
Maybe then my computer would be smart enough to realize how much they piss me off and stop displaying them?
Hopefully the screenplay is well written and is more than just a reprisal of the characters with a bunch of kick ass special effects. If the sequel is half as thought provoking and original as the first movie, I'm sure I'll see it several times in the theater.
It's ultra light and portable for one, and the BBS has been running fine for several weeks with no discernable problems from RF interference.
Who picked the games for the court to review? Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil? How about Final Fantasy X (or just about any other RPG)? Black and White and Medal of Honor were mentioned in the review, but there are tons of games with a lot more content than Mortal Kombat.
The most creative case I've seen was made out of one of those tupperware storage bins you can get at walmart. Holes were cut out for all the connectors as well as intake and exhaust vents.
Take a look!
Go here
I hope this means that one day I can have liposuction paid for by my insurance company. They can suck out my fat, use the stem cells to grow a complete set of new organs for me, and transplant the new and unrejectable organs. Poof! A skinner, brand new me!
He was considering making Fatal Defect required reading for the C programming course I took. From Amazon.com:
In Fatal Defects: Chasing Killer Computer Bugs, Ivars Peterson describes dozens and dozens of hoary computer bugs and gives biographical sketches of the bug detectives who located and fixed them. This book, which reads like a novel, is both entertaining and informative. Many of the bugs that Peterson discusses are not in computer programs per se but in the human systems that run and operate the computers. Very often the operator fails to understand what the computer program requires as input and types in an incorrect command. The computer then executes the command, with potentially disastrous results. Fatal Defects has important lessons for both those who design computers and those who use them.
He also insisted that we not call them bugs. "They are ERRORS, calling them bugs makes it sound like they are cute little accidental things that pop up when actually they are programming mistakes."
The likely reality of "human remote control", if it's done at all, is scarier: being rewarded through your pleasure centers until you want nothing more than to follow the commands. Your actions aren't involuntarily overriden, you are *eager* to follow any commands given.
This isn't really control. As long as the choice remains with the individual it's merely persuasion. There is little difference between stimulating my plesure centers if I behave a certain way and offering money or other incentive to do so. I can still refuse. Sure doing this at a chemical level is makes refusing essentially equivalent to fighting addiction, but resistance is still possible. People quit smoking after years and years, alcoholics go sober, and people controlled in this manner could simply choose the path of less stimulation to their pleasure centers.
I stand by my original comment. Check out the book, Donaldson describes the possibility far better than I can.
I recall reading about a similar study at least a few years back, but with roaches. I guess rats would be a pretty significant step up. The slippery slope arguement has at least some merit here, I think. For a really dark look at cyborgs take a look at Stephen R. Donaldson's Gap Series books. The capacity for remote control of human beings is scary. Imagine having your actions involuntarily overriden by a remote source. Scary stuff...
I guess somebody better break the news to Make a Shorter Link that they are going outta business!
I was using census 1990 data because it was the first that came up in my search. Since then Phoenix has grown at an impressive rate and Detroit has actually shrunk a lot. Perhaps I didn't give the growth rate enough consideration, but even the 2000 census numbers confirm that metro houston, detroit and philly are more populous than metro phoenix.
2 a.htm
http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa01010
Philly 6.1M
Detroit 5.4M
Houston 4.6M
Phoenix 3.2M
But what percentage of people already have a cable/dsl router. I'd guess the number who have more than one computer on the internet in their household is rather small (I'm not talking about the /. community here). Most people have a cable or DSL modem connected directly to their computer, often by a technician from the cable / phone company. For these people, going out and buying a cable/dsl modem, bringing it home and connecting both their computer and new console game system to it will not be a trivial task. But then again, I guess they could always multiplex manually between systems, unplugging the ethernet cable from the computer and plugging it into the console.