amen
I never bought the PS or PS2 for the same reasson you described above. I did however break down and buy a PSP. I thought, why not, cool games and I can watch movies on it. Well...since I bought it I have a grand total of 3 decent games (Dark Mirror, Ridge Racer and Lumines) As far as the movies, SONY, typical of it's pmpur self, refuses to bring the prices down. I can understand paying $10 for a movie i can watch on the little PSP screen, but $20? or $25?? I can buy a full fleged DVD for that much. And why does SONY not allow the PSP to connect to the TV? It has the capability of playing low movies and games at lower resolutions on tevevision screens, yet SONY has refused to make this happen.
I don't know if SONY's PS3 will do well, but I hope that their blu-ray fails. The DVD market is not ready for another disk format so soon. Realistically, we don't need another disc format at all. In the next few years HD treaming and hard disk capacity will be more than sufficient for HD content. I see blu-ray as another attempt by SONY to cram their own choice format down consumers throats, and I hope they fail misserably, just as they did with the mini-disk, just as they did with their pathetic excuse for a storage device they call the memory stick.
are those my only options?
How about a government with no cameras other than in places where the government has it's stuff that it choses to protect with cameras.
good point
One way to look at this is to have an emmidate knee jerk reaction and scream discrimination.
Another point of view would be to ask, why would a camera pick up blacks more than whites. Unless the camera is racist, it is far more likely that blacks are simply committing more crimes. Now if you say that you will again here the word discrimination since saying something like that amounts to a moral judgment of the black community. I disagree, what it amounts to is a failure of society to help a minority group. People who are content with their situation in life and who actively participate in society usually don't go out committing crimes.
By underpriced I take it you mean relative to the cost of manufacturing the player and the cost of other players. But keep in mind that I'm talking about the mainstream market.
The vast majority of people did not buy DVD players until they came down in price to the sub $200 price range. when DVD players were selling for $1,000 there was no mass market for the players.
Now maybe Sony is hoping that blu-ray will catch on like DVD players, thereby lowering the cost of producing them per unit, but my whole point on this issue is that I think that blu-ray won't catch on. it wont catch on b/c consumers are pretty happy with the currentgeneration of DVD's, and because many consumers have heavily invested themselves in the current format.
Af rar as pricing for consoles, the last console that was priced above $500 flopped. I'm not sure things have changed so much that this will be different. I'm not saying that Sony wont sell PS3, I just don't think they will dominate the industry like they did in the last consolee cycle.
waaaay back in the day I remember hearing a lot of people saying "information wants to be free", the "internet will give rise to a new, more free system of expression", etc, etc. Well? Now we have technology being used to censor things. Yes you can always get around the information blocks, but only if you know how. How many chinese that use the net would know or bother to figure out how to get around such filters? my guess is not many, of course i base this assumption on the american model, where most people eat up the BS that FOX, CNN and the rest of the networks feed the population on a regular basis.
I'm not a financial analyst, but who does Sony think it's going to be selling it's PS3 to?
Gamers will of course buy it, but they would buy it even if Sony had priced the machine at $1,000. The question is, how will a mainstream consumer respond? Sony is hoping a repeat of PS2 when consumers justified the then hefty $300 price tag because a DVD player was included with the machine. Now Sony wants to cram the new HD blue ray down consemers throats, only 6 years after DVD finally went mainstream. My feeling is, it's too soon. Consumers are not going to justify spending $600 on a machine when the only thing it offers in terms of movie playback, is a prittier picture. Take into account that most people don't have HD TV's, and that makes it even more likely that consumers wont swallow the price markup.
My point is, Sony seems to think that the higher price for the machine will be offset by the inclussion of the new DVD playback technology. However they are not likely to suceed this time because all the the inherent advantages of switching from VHS to DVD are not present this time. The only thing the new format offers is greater storage capacity, translating into a prittier picture.
A second concern, is that a lot of people simply won't be able to afford the new machine. how many parents would buy their teenage kids a game console for $600? Add in a couple of games, a second controller and other peripherals, and the price quickly exceeds $800. It's to much. You can get a laptop or a fully functional PC for less then that. Sony has over-shot, and i think the market is going to prove me right when their sales don't keep up with those of their previous machine.
I have a problem with these studies, mainly, that the method used to "test" a particular factor often does not take into account other factors. For example people with higher testosterone levels tend to have more square faces. Can this account for women being able to tell whether a man has higher levels of testosterone?
I like being on the cutting edge, but implanting a chip under your skin is idiotic. It gives no greater benefit then if you were to just carry a card with a chip on it, except now you can't leave the chip at home. Whats the point? Universal credit cards have never become mainstream despite the possibility of creating them has axisted for up to a decade now. Why? because every company wants your wallet to have it's advertizing. (ie the card itself is ultimately an ad) So having a chip under your skin wont make consumption any easier. And there is no way you need a chip to open a garage door (use the garage door opener in your car!....Anyway I degress, I just don't see any real benefit to an implant that can't be obtained by simply carrying a chip on a plastic card, or integrating a chip into a watch or bracelet.
yes I can, Mussawi was an american citizen, arrested in Chicago and put in a camp for 3 years w/o a trial in violation of the 14th amendment due process rights that are due to every american citizen.
The internet was built by users, it only makers sense that as the tools to create content become easier to use more and more ordinary people are likely to create their own content. for all their creativity, large companies cannot create anything other than a standardized product, individuals on the other hand create content that companies would never even think of making.
true. but changed business conditions mean that change has to occur. Look at what has happened to Ford and GM, they refused to take account of changing circumstances and consumer changes, and now they are deep in the hole. media companies can run into exactly the same problems if they don't change their business models to reflect the new reality.
the big media companies of today are like lumbering dinos. They don't realise that they are on the edge of extiction, and are trying to do things the old way instead of evolving.
The simple truth of the matter is that while content is expensive to produce, the cost of producing each additional copy of the finished product is almost nill. When it comes to files and downloads, it is at absolute zero. The problem is, the big media companies still think that they can control consumer behavior by producing a standard that the consumer must conform to in order to use a product. problem is, thats not the case anymore. maybe just as importantly, ordinary consumers are starting to realise that the cost of an extra copy really is nill, and they don't want to pay again and again for the same content just because they want to use it on another piece of hardware.
If media companies want to survive and make money in the new world of digital downlaods, they are going to have to do more than simply restrct user use. Doig so only breeds rebellion in the comsumer base. They are in effect going against the flow of consumer demand, which is to make their stuff run on all their hardware. ironaically enough even as hardware manufacturers are making their stuff ever more compatable with each other, the content providers are actively engaged in fighting the comsumers ability to use their honsestly purchased content on all of their hardware. As we have seen in many other fields 9auto makers anyone) when producers start fighting consumer prefrence, they inevitably lose.
if traditional media companies want to survive, they will have to drop their prices and allow people to copy and use their content on many devices. Who knows, maybe if content was fully integrated consumers would buy more of their content. it is a fact that there are many consumers who refuse to adopt technology because they feel that they are being taken for a rise by the content providers. And can you blame such people? when a company kills old standards just to sell more of the same it can only lead to consumer withdrawl. Sony and its PS, PS2 (and soon PS3) has proven at least with games, that when you allow backward compatability, you gorw your market and encourage people to buy content because consumers feel more confident that they will be able to enjoy that content for many years to come. if media companies did likewise for movies and music they may be surprised to learn that their sales will actually (gasp) increase, resulting in higher profits that will offset whatever hit they take by lowering prices. more importantly, lower prices also boost consumption, so lower prices will encourage more people to buy content, which will only further amplify content use and thereby help media companies make their profit. Big media companies can make a valid, perfectly working business model that can and will make them rich in the new digital world, but only if they pull their heads out of the sand and commit to the new technology and new methods of content distribution.
Eye candy in OS inevitably slows down a computers performance. Adding more and more features does likewise, so the question has to be asked, why incorporate 3d effects on an interface at all?
Microsoft no doubt wants people to believe that the new 3D engne it will use in its new Vista OS will make finding things on the computer easier, however it's not the eye candy that makes an OS better, its the data management system that is underneath the graphical interface.
So then, let's call call it as we see it, the only real reason to incoroprate increasingly more eye candy into an OS is for marketability purposes. Much like the endless widgets, gadgets, and other useless add-ons that are often included, but never used in programs like word (or mac OS), the makers of these programs have a need to make the consumer believe that he is getting more value for his puck. more importantly, they want to give the consumer some visual benefit that he recieves for upgrading to a new version. Take word for example, does adding 10 more bells and wistles to Word make it better? No, in fact it clutters the program, and makes it harder to manage, and yet, we have new "features" added all the time. or take a cell phone as an example, the vast majority of people use only a fraction of a cell phones features, and yet OS producers continue to add program in the belief that the consumer will chose their product over others because it offers more stuff (value). The same is true with a computer OS. The marketers say, we need eye candy to make this sucker sell, to give the cnsumer a reason to upgrade, and so the programmers accommidate. But does eye candy make the OS better? Not necessarely. Just like sometimes all you may want is a cell phone that makes calls (and nothing else), many people want an OS that can do email, word, excel, etc, just the basics and nothing more. Adding more flash does not make those tasks any easier or beter to do, what it does do however is introduce one omroe component to the OS that may cause it to crash, or slow down the opperation of the programs that DO actually matter. in my eyes at least, flashy eye candy is not the way to go. sometimes, simplicity is what counts.
I'm not sure if this is on topic, but the article above mentioned the life expectancy of the PS1 ans being 12 years, and I have heard in the past that Sony wants PS2 to last at least as long, and for the PS3 to have somewhere around 15 year lifespan. This is interesting when you consider the Microsoft strategy of actually shortening the linfespan of their hardware. Now granted, Microsoft is trying to leapfrog Sony by having shorter life-cycles on the hardware, but that brings up an interesting question. Is the sony strategy of continuing support for the older hardwarte and making all their hardware backward compatable a better strategy then the mocrosoft strategy of killing a console after 4 years and releasing new hardware thats not fully backwards compatable?
Could the low sales of xbox360 in japan be indicative of people's apprehension of the prospect of having hardware that costs $400 and has support for only 4 years?
In Tort law there were historicaly 3 standards. First there was the strict locality rule that existed in the early part of the 20th century. This rule basically said that if a doctor is sued for negligence, the issue of whether he was negligent (ie took reasonable care) would be measured by the standard of care n his locality. The justification for the strict locality rule was that doctors are not equal everywhere. As time went on, a 2nd standard called the similar-locality rule emerged that said that we would measure breach of duty for negligence in medical malpractice cases by looking at a similar locality. So if you lived in a rich area with many competent doctors, you would have to measure due care for a similar area. Today, the standard of care is usually measured the National Standard of care. What changed? Doctors became accredited, education for doctors became standardized, and it was recognized by the courts that all doctors, regardless of where they were, now had access to knowledge via books/journals/internet to know what a reasonable national standard was.
The reason that I am talking about negligence and tort law here, is because it's a very analagous situation. The courts applied a local standard to a duty of care in an age where information was compartamentalized, and where the standard of care varied from region to region, and state to state. information and standardization changed all that. Here we have a similar case with Obscenity laws. In an age when culture and values are becoming increasingly national (and global), the standard changes. 50 years ago there was no MTV, 50 years ago there was no internet. 50 years ago, local communities were very much cut off from the rest of the world. Today that is not the case. So the question becomes, if we live a society with a truelly single national culture that shares most, if not all fundamental values, and in a society where almost all cultural information is available to anyone, anywhere, can a strict local standard really continue to exist? I guess the supreme court does not want to venture to answer that question, but it is definately true that today that question is much harder to answer then it was 50 years ago.
Just ate a sandwich with 4 hot peppers...and I KNOW I will be sorry in the morning. But at least I can thank the gods for the health benefits while I'm agonizing:)
you forget that DVD's allow for plenty of storage to the typical user anyway.
i know a lof of users here will have 200GB or more, but the typical user will probably have only a few gigs worth of pictures and files that he/she would consider worth saving. And as far as video, most people save those on DVD's anyway. So the benefit of this enormous storage seems to be predominantly for hardcore users who have a lof of data. For anyone else, DVD's are more then enough. Then there is the new HD and bluray disks that will store anywhere from 30-100GB on a dingle disk. I would be very surprised if that is is not enough for your typical user.
Is being a hardware company really a strength for sony?
There are a lot of people in business that will disagree with the statement that having integrated opperations is a possitive thing. having your own plants to manufacture all the components may sound like a nice idea, but its not always so. having all of your componenets manufacture within the company means you dont have to rely on a shaky supplier, but it also means that you are not specialising, that you may be manufacturing components that are not as good as the ones you could buy on the open market, etc. having your own company manufacture all the components also means that you have HUGE overhead costs, which don't shrink when demand falls.
Think of Dell computer and its success. Dell does not manufacture any of it's products, it outsources all of the production to third parties, and does nothing but actually assemble the already produced parts. this gives them enormous flexibility in the market, and keeps prices for the goods very competitive (low). All thats needed is a really solid supply chain management. Sony may not have good supply management, in which case a decision to manufacture the parts themselves may actually be an indicatin that Sony has serious problems.
The internet is like any other technology in that untimately it's installment rate must slow, and eventually stall. just as there are people in the US who do not own cel phones or have television, there will inevitably be people who will not use the internet.
At the beggining of a new market, the main barrier to entry is the kinks in the technology. The people called innovators typically don't care what it costs to get ahold of a new technology because they enjoy the technology for it's own sake. These people are about 5% of the market, and sometimes less.
The next set of about 20% of the market are the early adopters who buy into new technology/market because they see a new use for a product or technology. In gaming these are the people we call "hardcore" gamers. To the early adopters the main barrier to entry cost. The minute cost comes down and the kinks in the technology are worked out, allowing for easier user interface, these people jump all over the new product.
After them follows the mainstream market which is the bulk of the consumers. people who are not technologically inclined, or particularly interested in anything new. these are the people who bought DVD players 5 years after the technologies release. These are also the people who started going on the net around the time AOL become "popular". To the mass market, cost and practicality are the main issues. the lower the cost, the more of the mass market you can capture, but it is here that the saturation point starts to appear.
the late adopters are the end of the road. these are the people who finally bought a VCR when DVD came out and the people who bought their first CD player when MP3 players came out. They are almost always one step behind everyone else, and they need any and all products to be VERY easy to use.
Once a company/technology has the mass market, the only consumers left to fight for are the late adopters, who are hard if not impossible to reach. Once you are trying to get these people to use a technology, you know that the market has hit a wall.
it appears to me that at least in North America, we have probably reached that point. The older generation of americans who are not already online are very unlikely to get online anytime soon, and the people who just refuse to use technology (late adopters) are so small in number, that even if you get them on the bandwagon, you would still not grow your market by much.
So in terms of the current technology it looks like we have hit the wall in the number of users. But that does not mean that this is the limit. New technologies that allow people to connect to the internet indirectly, or through divices other than PC's will expand the nets user-base anyway.
Thats the point isn't it? You will buy whichever system has the games you want to play. For the vast majority of people, the console they buy does not depend on which system packs in more pixels or has the faster processor, but which console has the games they want to play. A lot of people bought the original xbox to play Halo and Halo 2. a lot of PS2 people bought the Sony console to play MGS and FF. To the average customer, the spect don't matter very much.
As far as blu-ray, I am not sure if having it inside the PS3 is such a huge advantage. adsk yourself, do you have a standalone progressive scan DVD player? The answer is probably yes, and it's obvious why that should be the case. Even though the PS2 came out with DVD playback, rogressive scan and other improvements in the technology quickly made it more useful to just buy a stand-alone player. To the people who buy the PS3 at release, it would be a good bet that they will get the standalone players anyway being the techies/gamers that they are. As for the average customer, that guy (or gal) won't catch on to blu-ray for antoher 3 years.
There are also quite a few people talking about the 1080P vs 1080i when comparing PS3 to X360. I have an HDTV, and I have seen the difference between the two settings, and I could not tell the difference. And before you say that I'm blind as a bat, I will have you know my vision is 15/20. More to the point, most people will not have 1080p. 1080p sets are only now becommingg remotely affordable, and of the HDTVs bought so far, the vast majority are 1080i. The other issue is of course whether game makers will even make games at those resolutions. The original xbox had 720 capability, but as far as I know only a few games were released with the higher resolution. The only game I had with the high resolution was Soul Calibur 2 (out of 40 games).
The printing press displaced the technology of callography. Now, the press is being dispaced by newer "print' technologies, primarily the internet. A lot of the recent articles in the news make a big deal of the new technologies (cell phones, intenet sites, etc) displacing print news, but this is a trend that started over 50 years ago when people began to tune into nightly news instead of reading the paper, and even earlier than that when people used the radio to listen to the news. so will these new technologies put the final nail in the coffin of print media? My guess is no. Why? because older technologies have not killed print. People thought that video would kill the radio, but it didn't. People thought video-recorders would kill movie theatures, but it didn't. Similarly, allthough the traditional print media market may shrink, it is unlikely to die anytime soon.
Is there any real value to root memorization anymore when almost any and all information is avalable to anyone 24/7?
Today, if you have a question, you just pull out your laptop, do a search, and find your answer, so to the extent that this can be done amost instantaneously, the internet is expanding our ability to retain knowledge (without actualy having to memorise it). So is there any real value in root memorization? if you need a split second answer, then yes, but if you can afford to wait about 3 minutes for me to get my laptop out, then the answer should be a resounding NO.
I don't think anyone disputes that the writers of these articles are smart guys. the question is, are they right is ringning the bells and screaming fire? history is full of brilliant people who thought that a new technology wa going to lead to the end of the world. Nuclear power in the last century is just one example. My point is, Ray, et al may be smart guys, but they may also be overstating the dangers of these technologies. We humans are pretty smart at harnessing new technology for the betterment of mankind, we should not let the fear that the technology may be misused guide our thinking. otherwise cars would never have been invented for fear of mechanized warfare, etc.
Its easy.
You are a big company lobbyist. You go give your favorate senator a "donation", and he discovers the importance of keeping your companies dirty secrets, secret. All of the sudden, your company is protected for national security reasons. presto.
yes, people don't pay attention to...um...what were we talking about again?
But can you blame people? Turn on CNN or FOX and all you see is a bunch of idiots screaming at each other. Then there is the coverage, which incudes important national issues such as Brittany Spears driving with a baby in the front seat, and the latest rapper getting arrested for shooting someone in the ass.
Bottom line is that our "news" is nothing more than infotainment, and such being the casethe important topics are never covered in depth, nevermind followed up later to see if anything was actually done about the problem. And the thing is, people are not fooled, they know thats exactly what it is, so they stop paying attention, and whats left is this percieved lack of attention.
Slashdot Mirror
amen I never bought the PS or PS2 for the same reasson you described above. I did however break down and buy a PSP. I thought, why not, cool games and I can watch movies on it. Well...since I bought it I have a grand total of 3 decent games (Dark Mirror, Ridge Racer and Lumines) As far as the movies, SONY, typical of it's pmpur self, refuses to bring the prices down. I can understand paying $10 for a movie i can watch on the little PSP screen, but $20? or $25?? I can buy a full fleged DVD for that much. And why does SONY not allow the PSP to connect to the TV? It has the capability of playing low movies and games at lower resolutions on tevevision screens, yet SONY has refused to make this happen. I don't know if SONY's PS3 will do well, but I hope that their blu-ray fails. The DVD market is not ready for another disk format so soon. Realistically, we don't need another disc format at all. In the next few years HD treaming and hard disk capacity will be more than sufficient for HD content. I see blu-ray as another attempt by SONY to cram their own choice format down consumers throats, and I hope they fail misserably, just as they did with the mini-disk, just as they did with their pathetic excuse for a storage device they call the memory stick.
are those my only options? How about a government with no cameras other than in places where the government has it's stuff that it choses to protect with cameras.
good point One way to look at this is to have an emmidate knee jerk reaction and scream discrimination. Another point of view would be to ask, why would a camera pick up blacks more than whites. Unless the camera is racist, it is far more likely that blacks are simply committing more crimes. Now if you say that you will again here the word discrimination since saying something like that amounts to a moral judgment of the black community. I disagree, what it amounts to is a failure of society to help a minority group. People who are content with their situation in life and who actively participate in society usually don't go out committing crimes.
By underpriced I take it you mean relative to the cost of manufacturing the player and the cost of other players. But keep in mind that I'm talking about the mainstream market. The vast majority of people did not buy DVD players until they came down in price to the sub $200 price range. when DVD players were selling for $1,000 there was no mass market for the players. Now maybe Sony is hoping that blu-ray will catch on like DVD players, thereby lowering the cost of producing them per unit, but my whole point on this issue is that I think that blu-ray won't catch on. it wont catch on b/c consumers are pretty happy with the currentgeneration of DVD's, and because many consumers have heavily invested themselves in the current format. Af rar as pricing for consoles, the last console that was priced above $500 flopped. I'm not sure things have changed so much that this will be different. I'm not saying that Sony wont sell PS3, I just don't think they will dominate the industry like they did in the last consolee cycle.
waaaay back in the day I remember hearing a lot of people saying "information wants to be free", the "internet will give rise to a new, more free system of expression", etc, etc. Well? Now we have technology being used to censor things. Yes you can always get around the information blocks, but only if you know how. How many chinese that use the net would know or bother to figure out how to get around such filters? my guess is not many, of course i base this assumption on the american model, where most people eat up the BS that FOX, CNN and the rest of the networks feed the population on a regular basis.
I'm not a financial analyst, but who does Sony think it's going to be selling it's PS3 to? Gamers will of course buy it, but they would buy it even if Sony had priced the machine at $1,000. The question is, how will a mainstream consumer respond? Sony is hoping a repeat of PS2 when consumers justified the then hefty $300 price tag because a DVD player was included with the machine. Now Sony wants to cram the new HD blue ray down consemers throats, only 6 years after DVD finally went mainstream. My feeling is, it's too soon. Consumers are not going to justify spending $600 on a machine when the only thing it offers in terms of movie playback, is a prittier picture. Take into account that most people don't have HD TV's, and that makes it even more likely that consumers wont swallow the price markup. My point is, Sony seems to think that the higher price for the machine will be offset by the inclussion of the new DVD playback technology. However they are not likely to suceed this time because all the the inherent advantages of switching from VHS to DVD are not present this time. The only thing the new format offers is greater storage capacity, translating into a prittier picture. A second concern, is that a lot of people simply won't be able to afford the new machine. how many parents would buy their teenage kids a game console for $600? Add in a couple of games, a second controller and other peripherals, and the price quickly exceeds $800. It's to much. You can get a laptop or a fully functional PC for less then that. Sony has over-shot, and i think the market is going to prove me right when their sales don't keep up with those of their previous machine.
I have a problem with these studies, mainly, that the method used to "test" a particular factor often does not take into account other factors. For example people with higher testosterone levels tend to have more square faces. Can this account for women being able to tell whether a man has higher levels of testosterone?
I like being on the cutting edge, but implanting a chip under your skin is idiotic. It gives no greater benefit then if you were to just carry a card with a chip on it, except now you can't leave the chip at home. Whats the point? Universal credit cards have never become mainstream despite the possibility of creating them has axisted for up to a decade now. Why? because every company wants your wallet to have it's advertizing. (ie the card itself is ultimately an ad) So having a chip under your skin wont make consumption any easier. And there is no way you need a chip to open a garage door (use the garage door opener in your car! ....Anyway I degress, I just don't see any real benefit to an implant that can't be obtained by simply carrying a chip on a plastic card, or integrating a chip into a watch or bracelet.
yes I can, Mussawi was an american citizen, arrested in Chicago and put in a camp for 3 years w/o a trial in violation of the 14th amendment due process rights that are due to every american citizen.
The internet was built by users, it only makers sense that as the tools to create content become easier to use more and more ordinary people are likely to create their own content. for all their creativity, large companies cannot create anything other than a standardized product, individuals on the other hand create content that companies would never even think of making.
true. but changed business conditions mean that change has to occur. Look at what has happened to Ford and GM, they refused to take account of changing circumstances and consumer changes, and now they are deep in the hole. media companies can run into exactly the same problems if they don't change their business models to reflect the new reality.
the big media companies of today are like lumbering dinos. They don't realise that they are on the edge of extiction, and are trying to do things the old way instead of evolving. The simple truth of the matter is that while content is expensive to produce, the cost of producing each additional copy of the finished product is almost nill. When it comes to files and downloads, it is at absolute zero. The problem is, the big media companies still think that they can control consumer behavior by producing a standard that the consumer must conform to in order to use a product. problem is, thats not the case anymore. maybe just as importantly, ordinary consumers are starting to realise that the cost of an extra copy really is nill, and they don't want to pay again and again for the same content just because they want to use it on another piece of hardware. If media companies want to survive and make money in the new world of digital downlaods, they are going to have to do more than simply restrct user use. Doig so only breeds rebellion in the comsumer base. They are in effect going against the flow of consumer demand, which is to make their stuff run on all their hardware. ironaically enough even as hardware manufacturers are making their stuff ever more compatable with each other, the content providers are actively engaged in fighting the comsumers ability to use their honsestly purchased content on all of their hardware. As we have seen in many other fields 9auto makers anyone) when producers start fighting consumer prefrence, they inevitably lose. if traditional media companies want to survive, they will have to drop their prices and allow people to copy and use their content on many devices. Who knows, maybe if content was fully integrated consumers would buy more of their content. it is a fact that there are many consumers who refuse to adopt technology because they feel that they are being taken for a rise by the content providers. And can you blame such people? when a company kills old standards just to sell more of the same it can only lead to consumer withdrawl. Sony and its PS, PS2 (and soon PS3) has proven at least with games, that when you allow backward compatability, you gorw your market and encourage people to buy content because consumers feel more confident that they will be able to enjoy that content for many years to come. if media companies did likewise for movies and music they may be surprised to learn that their sales will actually (gasp) increase, resulting in higher profits that will offset whatever hit they take by lowering prices. more importantly, lower prices also boost consumption, so lower prices will encourage more people to buy content, which will only further amplify content use and thereby help media companies make their profit. Big media companies can make a valid, perfectly working business model that can and will make them rich in the new digital world, but only if they pull their heads out of the sand and commit to the new technology and new methods of content distribution.
Eye candy in OS inevitably slows down a computers performance. Adding more and more features does likewise, so the question has to be asked, why incorporate 3d effects on an interface at all? Microsoft no doubt wants people to believe that the new 3D engne it will use in its new Vista OS will make finding things on the computer easier, however it's not the eye candy that makes an OS better, its the data management system that is underneath the graphical interface. So then, let's call call it as we see it, the only real reason to incoroprate increasingly more eye candy into an OS is for marketability purposes. Much like the endless widgets, gadgets, and other useless add-ons that are often included, but never used in programs like word (or mac OS), the makers of these programs have a need to make the consumer believe that he is getting more value for his puck. more importantly, they want to give the consumer some visual benefit that he recieves for upgrading to a new version. Take word for example, does adding 10 more bells and wistles to Word make it better? No, in fact it clutters the program, and makes it harder to manage, and yet, we have new "features" added all the time. or take a cell phone as an example, the vast majority of people use only a fraction of a cell phones features, and yet OS producers continue to add program in the belief that the consumer will chose their product over others because it offers more stuff (value). The same is true with a computer OS. The marketers say, we need eye candy to make this sucker sell, to give the cnsumer a reason to upgrade, and so the programmers accommidate. But does eye candy make the OS better? Not necessarely. Just like sometimes all you may want is a cell phone that makes calls (and nothing else), many people want an OS that can do email, word, excel, etc, just the basics and nothing more. Adding more flash does not make those tasks any easier or beter to do, what it does do however is introduce one omroe component to the OS that may cause it to crash, or slow down the opperation of the programs that DO actually matter. in my eyes at least, flashy eye candy is not the way to go. sometimes, simplicity is what counts.
I'm not sure if this is on topic, but the article above mentioned the life expectancy of the PS1 ans being 12 years, and I have heard in the past that Sony wants PS2 to last at least as long, and for the PS3 to have somewhere around 15 year lifespan. This is interesting when you consider the Microsoft strategy of actually shortening the linfespan of their hardware. Now granted, Microsoft is trying to leapfrog Sony by having shorter life-cycles on the hardware, but that brings up an interesting question. Is the sony strategy of continuing support for the older hardwarte and making all their hardware backward compatable a better strategy then the mocrosoft strategy of killing a console after 4 years and releasing new hardware thats not fully backwards compatable? Could the low sales of xbox360 in japan be indicative of people's apprehension of the prospect of having hardware that costs $400 and has support for only 4 years?
In Tort law there were historicaly 3 standards. First there was the strict locality rule that existed in the early part of the 20th century. This rule basically said that if a doctor is sued for negligence, the issue of whether he was negligent (ie took reasonable care) would be measured by the standard of care n his locality. The justification for the strict locality rule was that doctors are not equal everywhere. As time went on, a 2nd standard called the similar-locality rule emerged that said that we would measure breach of duty for negligence in medical malpractice cases by looking at a similar locality. So if you lived in a rich area with many competent doctors, you would have to measure due care for a similar area. Today, the standard of care is usually measured the National Standard of care. What changed? Doctors became accredited, education for doctors became standardized, and it was recognized by the courts that all doctors, regardless of where they were, now had access to knowledge via books/journals/internet to know what a reasonable national standard was. The reason that I am talking about negligence and tort law here, is because it's a very analagous situation. The courts applied a local standard to a duty of care in an age where information was compartamentalized, and where the standard of care varied from region to region, and state to state. information and standardization changed all that. Here we have a similar case with Obscenity laws. In an age when culture and values are becoming increasingly national (and global), the standard changes. 50 years ago there was no MTV, 50 years ago there was no internet. 50 years ago, local communities were very much cut off from the rest of the world. Today that is not the case. So the question becomes, if we live a society with a truelly single national culture that shares most, if not all fundamental values, and in a society where almost all cultural information is available to anyone, anywhere, can a strict local standard really continue to exist? I guess the supreme court does not want to venture to answer that question, but it is definately true that today that question is much harder to answer then it was 50 years ago.
Just ate a sandwich with 4 hot peppers...and I KNOW I will be sorry in the morning. But at least I can thank the gods for the health benefits while I'm agonizing :)
you forget that DVD's allow for plenty of storage to the typical user anyway. i know a lof of users here will have 200GB or more, but the typical user will probably have only a few gigs worth of pictures and files that he/she would consider worth saving. And as far as video, most people save those on DVD's anyway. So the benefit of this enormous storage seems to be predominantly for hardcore users who have a lof of data. For anyone else, DVD's are more then enough. Then there is the new HD and bluray disks that will store anywhere from 30-100GB on a dingle disk. I would be very surprised if that is is not enough for your typical user.
Is being a hardware company really a strength for sony? There are a lot of people in business that will disagree with the statement that having integrated opperations is a possitive thing. having your own plants to manufacture all the components may sound like a nice idea, but its not always so. having all of your componenets manufacture within the company means you dont have to rely on a shaky supplier, but it also means that you are not specialising, that you may be manufacturing components that are not as good as the ones you could buy on the open market, etc. having your own company manufacture all the components also means that you have HUGE overhead costs, which don't shrink when demand falls. Think of Dell computer and its success. Dell does not manufacture any of it's products, it outsources all of the production to third parties, and does nothing but actually assemble the already produced parts. this gives them enormous flexibility in the market, and keeps prices for the goods very competitive (low). All thats needed is a really solid supply chain management. Sony may not have good supply management, in which case a decision to manufacture the parts themselves may actually be an indicatin that Sony has serious problems.
The internet is like any other technology in that untimately it's installment rate must slow, and eventually stall. just as there are people in the US who do not own cel phones or have television, there will inevitably be people who will not use the internet. At the beggining of a new market, the main barrier to entry is the kinks in the technology. The people called innovators typically don't care what it costs to get ahold of a new technology because they enjoy the technology for it's own sake. These people are about 5% of the market, and sometimes less. The next set of about 20% of the market are the early adopters who buy into new technology/market because they see a new use for a product or technology. In gaming these are the people we call "hardcore" gamers. To the early adopters the main barrier to entry cost. The minute cost comes down and the kinks in the technology are worked out, allowing for easier user interface, these people jump all over the new product. After them follows the mainstream market which is the bulk of the consumers. people who are not technologically inclined, or particularly interested in anything new. these are the people who bought DVD players 5 years after the technologies release. These are also the people who started going on the net around the time AOL become "popular". To the mass market, cost and practicality are the main issues. the lower the cost, the more of the mass market you can capture, but it is here that the saturation point starts to appear. the late adopters are the end of the road. these are the people who finally bought a VCR when DVD came out and the people who bought their first CD player when MP3 players came out. They are almost always one step behind everyone else, and they need any and all products to be VERY easy to use. Once a company/technology has the mass market, the only consumers left to fight for are the late adopters, who are hard if not impossible to reach. Once you are trying to get these people to use a technology, you know that the market has hit a wall. it appears to me that at least in North America, we have probably reached that point. The older generation of americans who are not already online are very unlikely to get online anytime soon, and the people who just refuse to use technology (late adopters) are so small in number, that even if you get them on the bandwagon, you would still not grow your market by much. So in terms of the current technology it looks like we have hit the wall in the number of users. But that does not mean that this is the limit. New technologies that allow people to connect to the internet indirectly, or through divices other than PC's will expand the nets user-base anyway.
Thats the point isn't it? You will buy whichever system has the games you want to play. For the vast majority of people, the console they buy does not depend on which system packs in more pixels or has the faster processor, but which console has the games they want to play. A lot of people bought the original xbox to play Halo and Halo 2. a lot of PS2 people bought the Sony console to play MGS and FF. To the average customer, the spect don't matter very much. As far as blu-ray, I am not sure if having it inside the PS3 is such a huge advantage. adsk yourself, do you have a standalone progressive scan DVD player? The answer is probably yes, and it's obvious why that should be the case. Even though the PS2 came out with DVD playback, rogressive scan and other improvements in the technology quickly made it more useful to just buy a stand-alone player. To the people who buy the PS3 at release, it would be a good bet that they will get the standalone players anyway being the techies/gamers that they are. As for the average customer, that guy (or gal) won't catch on to blu-ray for antoher 3 years. There are also quite a few people talking about the 1080P vs 1080i when comparing PS3 to X360. I have an HDTV, and I have seen the difference between the two settings, and I could not tell the difference. And before you say that I'm blind as a bat, I will have you know my vision is 15/20. More to the point, most people will not have 1080p. 1080p sets are only now becommingg remotely affordable, and of the HDTVs bought so far, the vast majority are 1080i. The other issue is of course whether game makers will even make games at those resolutions. The original xbox had 720 capability, but as far as I know only a few games were released with the higher resolution. The only game I had with the high resolution was Soul Calibur 2 (out of 40 games).
The printing press displaced the technology of callography. Now, the press is being dispaced by newer "print' technologies, primarily the internet. A lot of the recent articles in the news make a big deal of the new technologies (cell phones, intenet sites, etc) displacing print news, but this is a trend that started over 50 years ago when people began to tune into nightly news instead of reading the paper, and even earlier than that when people used the radio to listen to the news. so will these new technologies put the final nail in the coffin of print media? My guess is no. Why? because older technologies have not killed print. People thought that video would kill the radio, but it didn't. People thought video-recorders would kill movie theatures, but it didn't. Similarly, allthough the traditional print media market may shrink, it is unlikely to die anytime soon.
Is there any real value to root memorization anymore when almost any and all information is avalable to anyone 24/7? Today, if you have a question, you just pull out your laptop, do a search, and find your answer, so to the extent that this can be done amost instantaneously, the internet is expanding our ability to retain knowledge (without actualy having to memorise it). So is there any real value in root memorization? if you need a split second answer, then yes, but if you can afford to wait about 3 minutes for me to get my laptop out, then the answer should be a resounding NO.
I don't think anyone disputes that the writers of these articles are smart guys. the question is, are they right is ringning the bells and screaming fire? history is full of brilliant people who thought that a new technology wa going to lead to the end of the world. Nuclear power in the last century is just one example. My point is, Ray, et al may be smart guys, but they may also be overstating the dangers of these technologies. We humans are pretty smart at harnessing new technology for the betterment of mankind, we should not let the fear that the technology may be misused guide our thinking. otherwise cars would never have been invented for fear of mechanized warfare, etc.
Its easy. You are a big company lobbyist. You go give your favorate senator a "donation", and he discovers the importance of keeping your companies dirty secrets, secret. All of the sudden, your company is protected for national security reasons. presto.
yes, people don't pay attention to...um...what were we talking about again? But can you blame people? Turn on CNN or FOX and all you see is a bunch of idiots screaming at each other. Then there is the coverage, which incudes important national issues such as Brittany Spears driving with a baby in the front seat, and the latest rapper getting arrested for shooting someone in the ass. Bottom line is that our "news" is nothing more than infotainment, and such being the casethe important topics are never covered in depth, nevermind followed up later to see if anything was actually done about the problem. And the thing is, people are not fooled, they know thats exactly what it is, so they stop paying attention, and whats left is this percieved lack of attention.