True, we shouldn't go with the party that suspended the constitution, decides the rule of law is insignificant and doesn't apply to the executive branch (which enforces the rule of law), and goes to war preemptively to promote our goal of being a peace loving nation that is not a threat to global security.
We should avoid disasters as much as possible.
Sorry if someone already said this, the thread is getting long. But the high end market is never about share. If 3%, or 3 million, computers sold in a year are high end systems @ $2500, and 50% of the computers sold in a year, or 50 million, are $400 crap boxes, the market for servers is more than a third the size of crap volume systems ($7.5Bil vs $20Bil). It may not be quite so close, but you get the picture. Further, the $400 systems probably run on single digit margins whereas the high end is probably in the 15-20% range, so their profit is actually greater than the low end. Balmer knows that apple is out to take a significant ammount of the profit out of the pie even if the market share is very low, and even if he puts on a nice facade.
Calling that 1% of the market insignificant is like calling an atom bomb insignificant because there is only one of them. If MS was run as a business the way their rhetoric is brandished they would have gone out of business a long time ago. It is rather insulting to listen to people like this try to tell me I should be their customer with shallow statements that only an idiot could believe. So you are telling me I'm your kind of idiot, huh Steve?
I have no idea what other sorts of issues there might be. I switched over to an iMac and gave up building PC's partly to avoid dealing with Vista. OS X has it's own personality quirks, but none of the problems I have had with windows. I got an intel mac as soon as boot camp was released and I could run windows if there was an app I really, really needed that wasn't available for OS X. I boot into windows to update it once a month, and hardly use it any more. I used to for the occasional game, but now I play mostly console games when I have time (graduate studies leave little time for games, even when they are a part of my "research" for technology and culture, which is the subject of my interdisciplinary masters). I haven't worked in windows since I got this thing last May.
Final fantasy games are starting to become mini franchises, with at least 3 variations of XIII planned: the standard, epic XIII, VS XIII for MMORPG, and a portable called Agito (for phones at the moment). The whole thing is called Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy XIII. The VS title would most likely be for any thing that can handle it, including PC and possibly more consoles. The exclusivity may be just for VS, or perhaps if they are considering a port of VS they are starting to think about doing the same with the main title.
Video games can be art, just as films can be art. Video games integrate visual design, sound design, music, animation, and narrative into an interesting means of story telling. They offer an immense palate of artistic opportunities for people who have a philosophical or social point to make, just as any other artistic medium does. Like any other medium, however, the vast majority of output is artistic but not "art" at best, and tripe at worst. A few shining gems of true artwork are tarnished by the many trashy pieces, but so it is in film, literature, painting and sculpture; yet their stature as artistic media are not questioned.
The vast majority of people once argued that photographs were not art due to their being "taken" and not "made". Video games are similarly objected to on different grounds.
...And today I recieved an email from a family member that Fox News was running a story about a guy who could make energy from thin air. I went to the sight thinking it was some kind of low power generator running on wind current or atmospheric ions or something, but it was a "greater than unity" perpetual motion machine. And you cannot tell someone who watches Fox News that this is a sham, just like the whole media circus that tells them what to think. This country has outlived the founding principles, and has outlived the golden era of leading the world through a positive example. We will regress into a period of decline and a new power will take over and show us the way: the only options are the EU and China. And there is nothing we can do about it now.
We all know that paper is so easy to modify, so we need to go to chips. Chips are more secure, while harder to duplicate. Like game chips, which don't get coppied freely like paper products such as books. Books can also be "emulated" in pdf or e-text formats. Chips can't be emulated or falsely burned with someone elses data!
I have an intel iMac, with no problems (unless you consider 65W power consumption for day to day stuff and 2W sleep a problem). Notice the key here: it is a refresh of a product with a new motherboard. The macbooks are all new, and they discolor because it is probably an untested material from a new contractor. The macbook pro's are substantially new, the case is so small they cannot put a regular size optical drive in (hence the 4x speed). They may have a new outfit putting them together as well. The reason they have so many whines is probably because they have to jam a cooling system into a 3/4" opening in an aluminum sandwhich. It is a miracle the things work at all, especially with the heat of a Core vs the old G4's. They need to redesign the laptop lines (yeah, G1 is pretty much public beta), the desktops seem to be fine.
This is an old problem with science put forth by David Hume. In order for science to work the future must be like the past and the past must be like the present observations. Any "constants" found by observing a finite part of the universe and applying it to the whole may be problematic, yet we are willing to jump into the metaphysics of "and yet it MUST be so!" from our observations and ingenious models that seem to work so very well. Now, it does work very very well because you can build a remarkably functional rocket based on our laws of science, so on a pragmatic level science is an exceptionally solid epistemology. But the metaphysics are the problem, if you care to take metaphysics into the equation. The engineers designing a functional rocket don't. And I consider myself a pragmatist, so let them build a better mousetrap even if they mistakenly call them "laws".
}8^)>
There is a growing demand for quiet home computers, and this is going to be more commmon (especially for media center PC's). There are even people who are hoping for mobile graphics chipsets to find their way onto PCI-E cards to help with low power and silent operation. Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation, and they are becoming more and more popular. Desktops with a hybrid of laptop parts are always going to beat out mainstream desktop counterparts in noise and power consumption.
This is pretty bold and unacceptable. There is no reason why someone should be required to train someone taking their livelihood away from them, and there is no way that any ethical argument can be made in favor of this. This is plain and simple greed, and this is simply the way business is done.
The way to handle something like this is to hire people on as training consultants. The job is finished before any sort of training, and anyone wanting to stay to train the newcomers gets a raise and further severance. The fact that the jobs are going away at all is asinine, but if they are going to go the jobs left in America will be the training and management. Unfortunately, they will not create those jobs but rather heap those responsibilities on the lower ranked employees for no extra compensation, which is the American way. I can't believe anyone would accept a job from a company like that overseas anyway. I guess the exploitation by American companies is worth a wait in line now, in this country and others.
What a strange world we live in...
So, as long as any illegal activity conducted by the government is given a classified status, there can not be any discovery of the crime by the people the government (used to) works for. So, if the president kills 50 people for sport and it is classified, anyone who ever tries to publish it will be guilty of an information crime. This is exactly the sort of thing that created public support for the revolutionary war, and the second one will be coming very soon. Especially when it becomes a crime to own weapons, and public meetings to organize are banned, and a Christian state develops, etc. But at least we have the SS and the Gestapo to keep track of citizens thinking about a revolution, and to keep the citizenry "clean".
Keep in mind this was before the invention of beer and the razor, so there was no chemical assistance available, and therefore no exuses for the monkey f***ers! This was also before the evolution of human beings losing hair and facial structure similar to chimps. This is in fact during the early days of Australopithecus, so there wasn't that much difference between chimps and human ancestors at the time. Kind of like second cousins, really, so no excuses should be necessary, and they probably did in fact look good already without the aid of future inventions.
I remember going back to play Duke Nukem 3D many years ago (I stopped playing the game many, many years ago) and found it nearly impossible to play. Half Life is not unplayable, but boggy by todays standards. It is really remarkable how the physics rendering advances along with the graphics, and how important it is to game play.
Some day we'll see space mechanics, and they'll bid on the service contract for fixing old out of service equipment. Hopefully the civilian shops will be running soon before Hubble becomes completely useless. Perhaps people will try to buy this thing long into the future, and have to redesign new parts to refurbish it and get it back in working order.
Are we really entering an era where the only way to filter mail is to simply block incoming traffic so aggresively that we don't even get our mail? There does not seem to be much chance of filtering those hundreds of messages a day we get and still get the few we need. Viva la advertising!
One of the major problems in publishing, whether people like it or not, is the used book market. Stores pay students $4 for a formerly $12 new book, then sell it for $9. This price difference between new/used shelf price is almost exactly what the authors and other royalties get paid. That is why so many new editions come out, so the authors actually make a little money for their years of research and sobaticles put into the book. Everyone loses except the bookstore on used books. In order for prices to come down authors have to insist on new technology for distrobution, and students need to keep their books. An ebook for almost no money that is not recycled, that could be created and distributed by the proffessors and academics doing the research would be the end of tradtional publishing and make things cheaper for students. The academics need to get paid, not because they won't make it without the money but because there is so much work in producing a full textbook. Until a new system of payment is created we are stuck with paying for texts ourselves, and they will be modestly DRM'd. Right now textbooks make no money for the author, even if they cost $150 to the students who need them.
Apple pulled an end around on the media market. Sony bet on bluray for next gen home media, while M$ backs HD-DVD, simply because they believe that in the end download services for music and video will win out, and people will stream meadia from their PC to their xbox. Ironically, Apple is already their with their products and services, including the mac mini which may prove to be an important next gen "console", though it is not a gaming console. M$, seeking to cut the throat of the gaming empire, may have won the battle against sony (though I root for sony), but lost the war for the living room to apple. We'll see in 2 years, but I want to see Nintendo and Apple divide and conquer. I will probably be only half right...
I guess this is one of the ways Apple was able to keep MS developing for them for the next few years. I wonder who designs Microsoft's labs, and how this compares to their PC development setup?
They must have a warehouse of PC's considering they have 150 mini's...
Doesn't AMD's growing market share hurt their case against Intel leveraging a monopoly? This case has probably been pushing forward for a long time, but I would think that the fact that AMD is making so many inroads would hurt their case that Intel is keeping them out through unfair competition practices.
I think in many ways his commentary is right on the money. We will continue to have technological advances, such as our lack of development in battery technology improving, but they will be for social reasons (no more petroleum and less pollution). The focus from now on will be on how we live and what technologies we incorporate, not new technologies to replace aspects of our life. People are starting to find ways to live like a human being again, thanks in no small part to the irony of ironies: technology demonstrating and, in many ways, striving to overcome the alienation created in industrial living.
Finally, I can read about the mysterious "breakthroughs" that will "shock the general population" that Bush is ranting about in his energy plan. I hope we have billions of dollars backing this up to go along with our war to get oil that makes us unsafe, as he also rants. This is better than solar or wind, thats for sure!
As you say, these numbers are very pessimistic. I read a story, it may have even been on slashdot, that it was shocking news that the blu-ray drive was going to cost $100 for sony, which is much more than an hd-dvd drive. They paid for the plant and were a partner in the R&D costs at IBM, and I would suspect they are paying half of the market price for finished processors. That brings the cost at day one to $600, and they lose $200 for the first 6 months, $100 for the rest of the year, break even at 18 months on market and laugh all the way to the bank for the last 3 years of the generation. They are not going to be paying $900 for the machine, but they will lose money for a little while. Most of the consoles will sell after the first year anyway, during the saturation period when everyone makes up their mind what they want to buy when there are actually games on the market. Of course, the problem is the 360 may have 100 titles long before the ps3 launches, and it will have what, 40 at launch? If they wait another 9 months they may have 150 for the 360, and people go where there are games to play. The 360 may hit saturation buying first. Who knows where we'll be in 12 months?
Slashdot Mirror
True, we shouldn't go with the party that suspended the constitution, decides the rule of law is insignificant and doesn't apply to the executive branch (which enforces the rule of law), and goes to war preemptively to promote our goal of being a peace loving nation that is not a threat to global security. We should avoid disasters as much as possible.
Sorry if someone already said this, the thread is getting long. But the high end market is never about share. If 3%, or 3 million, computers sold in a year are high end systems @ $2500, and 50% of the computers sold in a year, or 50 million, are $400 crap boxes, the market for servers is more than a third the size of crap volume systems ($7.5Bil vs $20Bil). It may not be quite so close, but you get the picture. Further, the $400 systems probably run on single digit margins whereas the high end is probably in the 15-20% range, so their profit is actually greater than the low end. Balmer knows that apple is out to take a significant ammount of the profit out of the pie even if the market share is very low, and even if he puts on a nice facade. Calling that 1% of the market insignificant is like calling an atom bomb insignificant because there is only one of them. If MS was run as a business the way their rhetoric is brandished they would have gone out of business a long time ago. It is rather insulting to listen to people like this try to tell me I should be their customer with shallow statements that only an idiot could believe. So you are telling me I'm your kind of idiot, huh Steve?
I have no idea what other sorts of issues there might be. I switched over to an iMac and gave up building PC's partly to avoid dealing with Vista. OS X has it's own personality quirks, but none of the problems I have had with windows. I got an intel mac as soon as boot camp was released and I could run windows if there was an app I really, really needed that wasn't available for OS X. I boot into windows to update it once a month, and hardly use it any more. I used to for the occasional game, but now I play mostly console games when I have time (graduate studies leave little time for games, even when they are a part of my "research" for technology and culture, which is the subject of my interdisciplinary masters). I haven't worked in windows since I got this thing last May.
Final fantasy games are starting to become mini franchises, with at least 3 variations of XIII planned: the standard, epic XIII, VS XIII for MMORPG, and a portable called Agito (for phones at the moment). The whole thing is called Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy XIII. The VS title would most likely be for any thing that can handle it, including PC and possibly more consoles. The exclusivity may be just for VS, or perhaps if they are considering a port of VS they are starting to think about doing the same with the main title.
Video games can be art, just as films can be art. Video games integrate visual design, sound design, music, animation, and narrative into an interesting means of story telling. They offer an immense palate of artistic opportunities for people who have a philosophical or social point to make, just as any other artistic medium does. Like any other medium, however, the vast majority of output is artistic but not "art" at best, and tripe at worst. A few shining gems of true artwork are tarnished by the many trashy pieces, but so it is in film, literature, painting and sculpture; yet their stature as artistic media are not questioned. The vast majority of people once argued that photographs were not art due to their being "taken" and not "made". Video games are similarly objected to on different grounds.
...And today I recieved an email from a family member that Fox News was running a story about a guy who could make energy from thin air. I went to the sight thinking it was some kind of low power generator running on wind current or atmospheric ions or something, but it was a "greater than unity" perpetual motion machine. And you cannot tell someone who watches Fox News that this is a sham, just like the whole media circus that tells them what to think. This country has outlived the founding principles, and has outlived the golden era of leading the world through a positive example. We will regress into a period of decline and a new power will take over and show us the way: the only options are the EU and China. And there is nothing we can do about it now.
We all know that paper is so easy to modify, so we need to go to chips. Chips are more secure, while harder to duplicate. Like game chips, which don't get coppied freely like paper products such as books. Books can also be "emulated" in pdf or e-text formats. Chips can't be emulated or falsely burned with someone elses data!
I have an intel iMac, with no problems (unless you consider 65W power consumption for day to day stuff and 2W sleep a problem). Notice the key here: it is a refresh of a product with a new motherboard. The macbooks are all new, and they discolor because it is probably an untested material from a new contractor. The macbook pro's are substantially new, the case is so small they cannot put a regular size optical drive in (hence the 4x speed). They may have a new outfit putting them together as well. The reason they have so many whines is probably because they have to jam a cooling system into a 3/4" opening in an aluminum sandwhich. It is a miracle the things work at all, especially with the heat of a Core vs the old G4's. They need to redesign the laptop lines (yeah, G1 is pretty much public beta), the desktops seem to be fine.
This is an old problem with science put forth by David Hume. In order for science to work the future must be like the past and the past must be like the present observations. Any "constants" found by observing a finite part of the universe and applying it to the whole may be problematic, yet we are willing to jump into the metaphysics of "and yet it MUST be so!" from our observations and ingenious models that seem to work so very well. Now, it does work very very well because you can build a remarkably functional rocket based on our laws of science, so on a pragmatic level science is an exceptionally solid epistemology. But the metaphysics are the problem, if you care to take metaphysics into the equation. The engineers designing a functional rocket don't. And I consider myself a pragmatist, so let them build a better mousetrap even if they mistakenly call them "laws". }8^)>
There is a growing demand for quiet home computers, and this is going to be more commmon (especially for media center PC's). There are even people who are hoping for mobile graphics chipsets to find their way onto PCI-E cards to help with low power and silent operation. Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation, and they are becoming more and more popular. Desktops with a hybrid of laptop parts are always going to beat out mainstream desktop counterparts in noise and power consumption.
I'm buying a wii. God I love me the classic games. They don't make em like they used to!
This is pretty bold and unacceptable. There is no reason why someone should be required to train someone taking their livelihood away from them, and there is no way that any ethical argument can be made in favor of this. This is plain and simple greed, and this is simply the way business is done. The way to handle something like this is to hire people on as training consultants. The job is finished before any sort of training, and anyone wanting to stay to train the newcomers gets a raise and further severance. The fact that the jobs are going away at all is asinine, but if they are going to go the jobs left in America will be the training and management. Unfortunately, they will not create those jobs but rather heap those responsibilities on the lower ranked employees for no extra compensation, which is the American way. I can't believe anyone would accept a job from a company like that overseas anyway. I guess the exploitation by American companies is worth a wait in line now, in this country and others. What a strange world we live in...
So, as long as any illegal activity conducted by the government is given a classified status, there can not be any discovery of the crime by the people the government (used to) works for. So, if the president kills 50 people for sport and it is classified, anyone who ever tries to publish it will be guilty of an information crime. This is exactly the sort of thing that created public support for the revolutionary war, and the second one will be coming very soon. Especially when it becomes a crime to own weapons, and public meetings to organize are banned, and a Christian state develops, etc. But at least we have the SS and the Gestapo to keep track of citizens thinking about a revolution, and to keep the citizenry "clean".
Keep in mind this was before the invention of beer and the razor, so there was no chemical assistance available, and therefore no exuses for the monkey f***ers! This was also before the evolution of human beings losing hair and facial structure similar to chimps. This is in fact during the early days of Australopithecus, so there wasn't that much difference between chimps and human ancestors at the time. Kind of like second cousins, really, so no excuses should be necessary, and they probably did in fact look good already without the aid of future inventions.
I remember going back to play Duke Nukem 3D many years ago (I stopped playing the game many, many years ago) and found it nearly impossible to play. Half Life is not unplayable, but boggy by todays standards. It is really remarkable how the physics rendering advances along with the graphics, and how important it is to game play.
Some day we'll see space mechanics, and they'll bid on the service contract for fixing old out of service equipment. Hopefully the civilian shops will be running soon before Hubble becomes completely useless. Perhaps people will try to buy this thing long into the future, and have to redesign new parts to refurbish it and get it back in working order.
Are we really entering an era where the only way to filter mail is to simply block incoming traffic so aggresively that we don't even get our mail? There does not seem to be much chance of filtering those hundreds of messages a day we get and still get the few we need. Viva la advertising!
One of the major problems in publishing, whether people like it or not, is the used book market. Stores pay students $4 for a formerly $12 new book, then sell it for $9. This price difference between new/used shelf price is almost exactly what the authors and other royalties get paid. That is why so many new editions come out, so the authors actually make a little money for their years of research and sobaticles put into the book. Everyone loses except the bookstore on used books. In order for prices to come down authors have to insist on new technology for distrobution, and students need to keep their books. An ebook for almost no money that is not recycled, that could be created and distributed by the proffessors and academics doing the research would be the end of tradtional publishing and make things cheaper for students. The academics need to get paid, not because they won't make it without the money but because there is so much work in producing a full textbook. Until a new system of payment is created we are stuck with paying for texts ourselves, and they will be modestly DRM'd. Right now textbooks make no money for the author, even if they cost $150 to the students who need them.
Apple pulled an end around on the media market. Sony bet on bluray for next gen home media, while M$ backs HD-DVD, simply because they believe that in the end download services for music and video will win out, and people will stream meadia from their PC to their xbox. Ironically, Apple is already their with their products and services, including the mac mini which may prove to be an important next gen "console", though it is not a gaming console. M$, seeking to cut the throat of the gaming empire, may have won the battle against sony (though I root for sony), but lost the war for the living room to apple. We'll see in 2 years, but I want to see Nintendo and Apple divide and conquer. I will probably be only half right...
I guess this is one of the ways Apple was able to keep MS developing for them for the next few years. I wonder who designs Microsoft's labs, and how this compares to their PC development setup? They must have a warehouse of PC's considering they have 150 mini's...
Doesn't AMD's growing market share hurt their case against Intel leveraging a monopoly? This case has probably been pushing forward for a long time, but I would think that the fact that AMD is making so many inroads would hurt their case that Intel is keeping them out through unfair competition practices.
... don't forget their recent partnership with Apple, the only large software competitor to M$ that can damage them.
I think in many ways his commentary is right on the money. We will continue to have technological advances, such as our lack of development in battery technology improving, but they will be for social reasons (no more petroleum and less pollution). The focus from now on will be on how we live and what technologies we incorporate, not new technologies to replace aspects of our life. People are starting to find ways to live like a human being again, thanks in no small part to the irony of ironies: technology demonstrating and, in many ways, striving to overcome the alienation created in industrial living.
Finally, I can read about the mysterious "breakthroughs" that will "shock the general population" that Bush is ranting about in his energy plan. I hope we have billions of dollars backing this up to go along with our war to get oil that makes us unsafe, as he also rants. This is better than solar or wind, thats for sure!
As you say, these numbers are very pessimistic. I read a story, it may have even been on slashdot, that it was shocking news that the blu-ray drive was going to cost $100 for sony, which is much more than an hd-dvd drive. They paid for the plant and were a partner in the R&D costs at IBM, and I would suspect they are paying half of the market price for finished processors. That brings the cost at day one to $600, and they lose $200 for the first 6 months, $100 for the rest of the year, break even at 18 months on market and laugh all the way to the bank for the last 3 years of the generation. They are not going to be paying $900 for the machine, but they will lose money for a little while. Most of the consoles will sell after the first year anyway, during the saturation period when everyone makes up their mind what they want to buy when there are actually games on the market. Of course, the problem is the 360 may have 100 titles long before the ps3 launches, and it will have what, 40 at launch? If they wait another 9 months they may have 150 for the 360, and people go where there are games to play. The 360 may hit saturation buying first. Who knows where we'll be in 12 months?