I must be one of the rare Slashdotters who both LOVED Firefly/Serinity (got the comic too!) AND watches American Idol. I don't see why people hate that show so much. It's way better than shows like Survivor, Trading Spouses, Bachellor or all the other reality show crap where you see people cutthroating each other and backstabbing.
Idol is actually one of the finer reality show. You need to have talent to be in it. They have auditions, pick the best, have people vote, create a pop-star. The people who hate that show normally
A) don't like the kind of music it promotes or B) are bitter because they don't have a chance to go on that show and be on TV. C) all of the above.
So, maybe they're are creating instant celebrities, and it's unfair to little bands who work really hard and don't get in the business because their stuff is not commercial enough (or at all). Well boohoo. It's simple law of economics. When Black Metal becomes mainstream (like that will ever happen!), you'll have your Metal Idol. Until then, just don't tune in and stop complaining. And even if you don't like the concept of creating an instant celebrity, you have to admire the show for what it also is, which is a celebration of the greatest music from the United States in the last 50 years.
That's why I can using numbers from the pre-360 launch. I know the loss has been inflated somewhat from the R&D done on the 360 during the original Xbox life span, but 3.5billion losses / 30 million consoles sold means that these 30 million people or so who bought the original Xbox bought games and peripherals and Microsoft managed to STILL lose about 116$ per console.
I totally agree with you and that's the problem. If they are making a lot of money on games and hardware, how come the average loss per console is STILL over a hundred dollars? That was what I was trying to say in my post. Are they selling the console at such a big loss, like 300$?
There's something wrong tough about the amount of money lost by Microsoft over this whole endeavor. I mean, they were about 4 billion in the hole before the 360 shipped (let's say 3.5, I think they just hit 4). And they sold about 30 million Xboxes. So that's 3.5 billion / 30 million, that's 116.67$ per console lost.
The thing I don't get is : with all the games and peripherals they sold, there was still a 116.67$ lost per console. What the hell? I know R&D and marketting costs money, but still. There's something weird about all of this. Anybody can shed light on this issue?
Can we also have a ripeness sticker for politicians as well? The sticker could monitor the amount of bullshit instead of the amount of ethylene coming out of them.
Ironic that I received that message as I was reading this story, and about to post that automatic update will only download IE7, but will give the users a choice of whether or not to install it. Kind of like the message I just received for Firefox.
Funny, I was looking to see if someone already made that comment because the EXACT same thing just happened to me. I don't even remember setting Firefox to download updates automatically. I always assumed that updates were on demand only, since there is this "Check for Updates" in the Help menu. I never bothered looking at the Advanced/Update in the Firefox options, but yeah, it seems I'm getting all sorts of updates by default. Joe Six-pack is probably not going to bother with this either, so the IE scheme will be exactly the same as Firefox. In fact, I'd say IE's scheme is better in fact, because you can always refuse a Windows Update. The Firefox thing just got forced on me. Not that I'd complain tough. I trust the Firefox team to have made non disruptive changes that make the browser better. The day they start doing bad design choices is the day I'll simply change to another browser.
Microsoft is a platform driven company. Their business is around controlling platforms. WHat Sony and Apple and all these other companies like Google or the Linux movement are all proposing platforms where Microsoft has no control. They simply want their platform to be the standard.
Well, you might argue that it may be used to prevent people from pre-ordering too many of them. I mean, if you wanted to make a lot of money easily, you could have pre-orderd 20 PS3's at 5UKP for 100UKP and resell them twice the full price. Now, preordering at 150UKP nets you an investment of 3000UKP, which not a lot of people are willing to dump right now on something that is shipping only 5 months from now. That may be what they're thinking.
But then, the problem with this theory is that this situation wouldn't even happen with a 5UKP preorder, simply because you still have to pay the balance on launch day, which 20 PS3 is going to cost you a lot of money.
And he actually makes a cool Lex Luthor. I never liked the movie Lexes. They always felt corny. I think the guy who played Lex in Lois and Clark was pretty good too (tough I haven't seen this show in years, it may be that my childhood memories are better than what they actually were)
I agree with you that you should always fix the cause of the anger and not channel it through something else, as you'll probably end up in a bad shape if you don't do anything to fix it.
Obviously, if you are being bullied at school, made fun of, harrassed at work, you obviously have to fix this issue or it will consume you or make you a very misserable person regardless you take out that anger in games or not.
I think I'm starting to get your point, where I wasn't maybe clear enough in my case. If I understand correctly, you meant that playing games like let's say GTA or Manhunt or whatever which encourage you to act in a repressive manner to relieve anger is bad because you are virtually inflincting pain in a socially unnacceptable manner to reduce your stress level.
I have a harder time believing that playing righteously is bad for your mental health. I mean, I've been playing games for years where the goal of the game was a noble goal and I certainly haven't turned into a sociopath. It can of course be bad for some people, but it's not the norm.
Compared to games, I think there's a lot more to fear from religion. Hundred of thousands of people in history have been convinced that their book was more righteous than others. While it brings enlightenment to millions of people, there are always those would will be seduced by a reinpretation of it (just like games) and will commit bad acts in it's name.
Any entertainment, (be it books, games, movies), religion or sport activity is going to somehow rewire our brain. Are games more dangerous than these other form of entertainment? I think that so far, the benifit of the doubt is in favor of games and not against them.
Don't be too righteous here. I mean, how many poeple roleplayed in dungeon and dragons, vampire or medieval outdoors activities?
Fact is, I understand that the actions I am doing in game are bad. I'd be more concerned about the millions who play GTA where bad behaviour is encouraged, while a game like KOTOR clearly shows the drawback of your evil actions (even tough you do end up ruling the galaxy in the end:p). But when playing a game, I always enjoy more the good guy role than the bad guy role. Oblivion is also a fine example : while the Dark Brotherhood offer interesting gameplay challenges, there's nothing more satisfying as a gamer to saving a man from a certain death, closing hell's gate or simply helping a poor old man catch fish.
Besides, there is a fine difference between playing a bad character and enjoying the acts of violence he/she visits upon people. I never enjoyed the acts themselves. But they did make interresting drama. If you have a problem against drama, then I suggest you banish pretty much any movie or book ever released. And we should also prevent Stephen King for writing books. This book writing stuff is pretty interactive, he is rewiring his neurons, he might actually turn into a psycho.
Never forget that pastimes that allow you to channel your anger at something else than another person is always A Good Thing.
about being dark/evil and the appropriate skills just seem to follow
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but that's exactly how I felt. Using my powers to trick two families into killing each other, slaughtering my whole crew, killing people coming for my help. That's pretty much playing in character. That was really hard at first. As good as I felt when I helped people on my first way through the game, I had that feeling that I didn't like that character on screen when I was playing my secnd time through as an evil character. The only thing that made it worthwhile was all the drama that came with it. There was some really nice story telling in this game.
... when killing off people in Knighs of the Old Republic when you decide to play dark side, I think tha qualfies pretty much. I had really hard time playing nasty at first. I felt bad for the lives I was ruining, even though they are artificial lives.
Really? I thought that they would only have saved a couple of parameters on disk for a tree and then the software would procedurally create the tree based on those numbers... If this is the real way SpeedTree works, it's kinda disappointing.
How about hockey? I mean, in a hockey game, there's a lot of passing around, so all players get to handle the puck. Everyone gets a chance to do something worthwile and exciting. After all, there are some defensemen who scored more goals in the NHL then some centers or wings in some teams. While having a specific role (defensemen, goaler, wing or center), everyone can have a meaningfull involvement in the game.
Playing the goaler sounds pretty boring tough. Unless you make it some sort of behind the shoulder thing and different stick directions mean blocking at different places.
Heck, make the whole game first person. That would be pretty cool, no? Or at least 3rd person with the camera just above the shoulder like RE4.
I think that would be pretty cool. Anyone from EA or 2K Sports reading this?
well, except the Too Human demo, which apparently debuted to lackluster results on the XBox/360Actually, the game had a great reception at E3, except for the obvious frame rate issues. People just picked up the controller and started playing immediately because the controls are so intuitive. The frame rate issue, while unfortunate at E3, is something that will likely be fixed before release and will make one hell of a game, based on footage I saw. There's no date tagged to the product, so there's hope it won't be rushed. Anyway, if the game has been in development for as long as 1997 as someone else pointed out, postponing the game a few more months to fix this issue is probably not a big concern to those guys.
I don't know if Discovery Channel in the States has it right now, but two weeks ago Discovery Channel Canada had a documentary called The Science of Superman and went through the details on how the powers from the man of steel actually worked. Most of them were plausible, namely the super strengh as well as the cold-breath. It was really interresting how his powers could be explained through physics. The fact that Krypton was super dense really made scientific sense for Duperman's powers when he got to earth.
I'm not sure I can agree with your logic here. I would be pissed if the stuff I bought couldn't play anymore because I bought an iRiver to replace my iPod. It's not like being pissed because I can't play 8 tracks anymore, I bought those decades ago. We're speaking of something I bought a couple of months back. People are going to keep buying iPods to not lose the songs. Steve Jobs says that only to give himself a good concience. It is a lock-in.
What they mean is that music from iTunes is playable only on iPods and a given number of computers. That's a lock-in.
It's funny, because music companies have pushed for years to have DRMed music and put a lot of wieght in Apple and iTunes, to have it backfire against them, because now Apple has a near monopoly on the business and nobody can dislodge them!
I dunno. I played the Prey demo the other day and it seemed like a pretty decent shooter. The gravity platforms were pretty cool and were a refreshing kind of puzzle.
I don't know if the 360 is the best console ever owned, but I think it might be the 2nd best console I ever owned. The best would be the original GameBoy (I can just remember that horrible Sega had that talked about the greenish colors and one kid took a bite off a frog, with green ooze dripping everywhere). I skipped a lot of generations (parent wouldn't buy them, but I can't say I blame them). I had a NES, GB and then an Xbox and now the 360.
I found out that I loved GRAW and Oblivion, which are both available on the PC. But to me, the 360 is just the perfect console experience to me. You pick up that wireless controller just like you pick a TV remote, turn the thing on wirelessly, boot directly to the dashboard (or whatever they call it on the 360), look for a bunch of new downloads like game trailers or demos, queue up the stuff, then play your game while the stuff downloads. Then, go back to the dashboard when you are done playing and play a game of Geometry Wars, Astropop, Mutant Reloaded, WIK, or whatever.
You can do all of this on a PC of course. But I do it from my couch, confortably with the controller in my hand. Just like any other console. Except I get to enjoy features that have been part of the PC world for years. While I don't approve the patching of games on the 360 (DOA and Oblivion did that... ugh...), face it, this is something that will also be done on the PS3 and Wii.
Is the 360 the best console ever? To me, it probably is. I finally get to enjoy PC features on a 500CAN$ piece of hardware. And it's still going to run great games 5 years down the road. Can't wait for Crackdown, Dead Rising, Enchanted Arms and obviously, Halo 3 (howdo the second was a step backwards in term of gameplay) and the awesome looking Gears of Wars. And 4 of these are coming in the next six month. Whether they are good or not tough is something that history will judge. But hey, who has never been looking forward to games coming out 6 months to a year for now? Some may end up like dissapointments (Ninety Nine Nights on the 360 has apparently a buggy colision detection system, but hopefullyy that will be fixed before the worldwide release. Poor Japanese gameR (emphasis on the lack of an S:p) who bought it), but some of them end up great.
I've heard from a couple of places that Sony is inflating the price of Blu Ray stand alone players because they want the PS3 to be the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market once it's released.
Except that this theory doesn't work because if I'm not mistaken Samsung already has released a Blu-Ray player and other companies are soon following suit, including LG who is rumored to be coming with dual HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player. These companies will be pissed if their 1000$ player can't sell because Sony is flooding the market with cheap BR players.
Based on this, I can see only two way this will pan out.
1) There will be major price slashing when the PS3 comes out of B-R players to be competitive, lowering the price in the HD-DVD range.
2) At 500$-600$, Sony is either losing a TON of money because the B-R costs them a lot to include, or the B-R player inside the PS3 is of so poor quality that it renders it useless to watch movies on an HD TV set (which is the point anyway, people who will buy Blu-Ray movies are going to expect quality since they have an HD-set capable of playing them at native-res)
And the worst part is, the scenario that would make the most sense would be the first one. Which means Samsung is making a bundle on each player sold right now. Is B-R so technologically superior that the player has to cost almost twice as more than HD-DVD players? Considering the quality of the PS2 DVD player (hook it up to a GOOD TV and you'll know what I mean), I suppose scenario 2 has more credibility tough.
Plus, how much do you bet that Sony is using a single Cell inside their Blu-Ray standalone player and THAT is the reason why the device was pushed from June to August to late October? After all, it's not as if they shouldn't be able to fix the quirks of building the B-R drive, after all, Samsung already has their player selling.
Slashdot Mirror
I must be one of the rare Slashdotters who both LOVED Firefly/Serinity (got the comic too!) AND watches American Idol. I don't see why people hate that show so much. It's way better than shows like Survivor, Trading Spouses, Bachellor or all the other reality show crap where you see people cutthroating each other and backstabbing.
Idol is actually one of the finer reality show. You need to have talent to be in it. They have auditions, pick the best, have people vote, create a pop-star. The people who hate that show normally
A) don't like the kind of music it promotes or
B) are bitter because they don't have a chance to go on that show and be on TV.
C) all of the above.
So, maybe they're are creating instant celebrities, and it's unfair to little bands who work really hard and don't get in the business because their stuff is not commercial enough (or at all). Well boohoo. It's simple law of economics. When Black Metal becomes mainstream (like that will ever happen!), you'll have your Metal Idol. Until then, just don't tune in and stop complaining. And even if you don't like the concept of creating an instant celebrity, you have to admire the show for what it also is, which is a celebration of the greatest music from the United States in the last 50 years.
That's why I can using numbers from the pre-360 launch. I know the loss has been inflated somewhat from the R&D done on the 360 during the original Xbox life span, but 3.5billion losses / 30 million consoles sold means that these 30 million people or so who bought the original Xbox bought games and peripherals and Microsoft managed to STILL lose about 116$ per console.
I totally agree with you and that's the problem. If they are making a lot of money on games and hardware, how come the average loss per console is STILL over a hundred dollars? That was what I was trying to say in my post. Are they selling the console at such a big loss, like 300$?
There's something wrong tough about the amount of money lost by Microsoft over this whole endeavor. I mean, they were about 4 billion in the hole before the 360 shipped (let's say 3.5, I think they just hit 4). And they sold about 30 million Xboxes. So that's 3.5 billion / 30 million, that's 116.67$ per console lost.
The thing I don't get is : with all the games and peripherals they sold, there was still a 116.67$ lost per console. What the hell? I know R&D and marketting costs money, but still. There's something weird about all of this. Anybody can shed light on this issue?
Can we also have a ripeness sticker for politicians as well? The sticker could monitor the amount of bullshit instead of the amount of ethylene coming out of them.
Ironic that I received that message as I was reading this story, and about to post that automatic update will only download IE7, but will give the users a choice of whether or not to install it. Kind of like the message I just received for Firefox.
Funny, I was looking to see if someone already made that comment because the EXACT same thing just happened to me. I don't even remember setting Firefox to download updates automatically. I always assumed that updates were on demand only, since there is this "Check for Updates" in the Help menu. I never bothered looking at the Advanced/Update in the Firefox options, but yeah, it seems I'm getting all sorts of updates by default. Joe Six-pack is probably not going to bother with this either, so the IE scheme will be exactly the same as Firefox. In fact, I'd say IE's scheme is better in fact, because you can always refuse a Windows Update. The Firefox thing just got forced on me. Not that I'd complain tough. I trust the Firefox team to have made non disruptive changes that make the browser better. The day they start doing bad design choices is the day I'll simply change to another browser.
(ps2's still outsell xbox360's week by week now).
That barely means anything : the PS1 sold more than the PS2 months after the PS2 launch.
Microsoft is a platform driven company. Their business is around controlling platforms. WHat Sony and Apple and all these other companies like Google or the Linux movement are all proposing platforms where Microsoft has no control. They simply want their platform to be the standard.
Well, you might argue that it may be used to prevent people from pre-ordering too many of them. I mean, if you wanted to make a lot of money easily, you could have pre-orderd 20 PS3's at 5UKP for 100UKP and resell them twice the full price. Now, preordering at 150UKP nets you an investment of 3000UKP, which not a lot of people are willing to dump right now on something that is shipping only 5 months from now. That may be what they're thinking.
But then, the problem with this theory is that this situation wouldn't even happen with a 5UKP preorder, simply because you still have to pay the balance on launch day, which 20 PS3 is going to cost you a lot of money.
And he actually makes a cool Lex Luthor. I never liked the movie Lexes. They always felt corny. I think the guy who played Lex in Lois and Clark was pretty good too (tough I haven't seen this show in years, it may be that my childhood memories are better than what they actually were)
I agree with you that you should always fix the cause of the anger and not channel it through something else, as you'll probably end up in a bad shape if you don't do anything to fix it.
Obviously, if you are being bullied at school, made fun of, harrassed at work, you obviously have to fix this issue or it will consume you or make you a very misserable person regardless you take out that anger in games or not.
I think I'm starting to get your point, where I wasn't maybe clear enough in my case. If I understand correctly, you meant that playing games like let's say GTA or Manhunt or whatever which encourage you to act in a repressive manner to relieve anger is bad because you are virtually inflincting pain in a socially unnacceptable manner to reduce your stress level.
I have a harder time believing that playing righteously is bad for your mental health. I mean, I've been playing games for years where the goal of the game was a noble goal and I certainly haven't turned into a sociopath. It can of course be bad for some people, but it's not the norm.
Compared to games, I think there's a lot more to fear from religion. Hundred of thousands of people in history have been convinced that their book was more righteous than others. While it brings enlightenment to millions of people, there are always those would will be seduced by a reinpretation of it (just like games) and will commit bad acts in it's name.
Any entertainment, (be it books, games, movies), religion or sport activity is going to somehow rewire our brain. Are games more dangerous than these other form of entertainment? I think that so far, the benifit of the doubt is in favor of games and not against them.
Don't be too righteous here. I mean, how many poeple roleplayed in dungeon and dragons, vampire or medieval outdoors activities?
:p). But when playing a game, I always enjoy more the good guy role than the bad guy role. Oblivion is also a fine example : while the Dark Brotherhood offer interesting gameplay challenges, there's nothing more satisfying as a gamer to saving a man from a certain death, closing hell's gate or simply helping a poor old man catch fish.
Fact is, I understand that the actions I am doing in game are bad. I'd be more concerned about the millions who play GTA where bad behaviour is encouraged, while a game like KOTOR clearly shows the drawback of your evil actions (even tough you do end up ruling the galaxy in the end
Besides, there is a fine difference between playing a bad character and enjoying the acts of violence he/she visits upon people. I never enjoyed the acts themselves. But they did make interresting drama. If you have a problem against drama, then I suggest you banish pretty much any movie or book ever released. And we should also prevent Stephen King for writing books. This book writing stuff is pretty interactive, he is rewiring his neurons, he might actually turn into a psycho.
Never forget that pastimes that allow you to channel your anger at something else than another person is always A Good Thing.
about being dark/evil and the appropriate skills just seem to follow
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but that's exactly how I felt. Using my powers to trick two families into killing each other, slaughtering my whole crew, killing people coming for my help. That's pretty much playing in character. That was really hard at first. As good as I felt when I helped people on my first way through the game, I had that feeling that I didn't like that character on screen when I was playing my secnd time through as an evil character. The only thing that made it worthwhile was all the drama that came with it. There was some really nice story telling in this game.
... when killing off people in Knighs of the Old Republic when you decide to play dark side, I think tha qualfies pretty much. I had really hard time playing nasty at first. I felt bad for the lives I was ruining, even though they are artificial lives.
Really? I thought that they would only have saved a couple of parameters on disk for a tree and then the software would procedurally create the tree based on those numbers... If this is the real way SpeedTree works, it's kinda disappointing.
How about hockey? I mean, in a hockey game, there's a lot of passing around, so all players get to handle the puck. Everyone gets a chance to do something worthwile and exciting. After all, there are some defensemen who scored more goals in the NHL then some centers or wings in some teams. While having a specific role (defensemen, goaler, wing or center), everyone can have a meaningfull involvement in the game.
Playing the goaler sounds pretty boring tough. Unless you make it some sort of behind the shoulder thing and different stick directions mean blocking at different places.
Heck, make the whole game first person. That would be pretty cool, no? Or at least 3rd person with the camera just above the shoulder like RE4.
I think that would be pretty cool. Anyone from EA or 2K Sports reading this?
well, except the Too Human demo, which apparently debuted to lackluster results on the XBox/360Actually, the game had a great reception at E3, except for the obvious frame rate issues. People just picked up the controller and started playing immediately because the controls are so intuitive. The frame rate issue, while unfortunate at E3, is something that will likely be fixed before release and will make one hell of a game, based on footage I saw. There's no date tagged to the product, so there's hope it won't be rushed. Anyway, if the game has been in development for as long as 1997 as someone else pointed out, postponing the game a few more months to fix this issue is probably not a big concern to those guys.
I don't know if Discovery Channel in the States has it right now, but two weeks ago Discovery Channel Canada had a documentary called The Science of Superman and went through the details on how the powers from the man of steel actually worked. Most of them were plausible, namely the super strengh as well as the cold-breath. It was really interresting how his powers could be explained through physics. The fact that Krypton was super dense really made scientific sense for Duperman's powers when he got to earth.
I'm not sure I can agree with your logic here. I would be pissed if the stuff I bought couldn't play anymore because I bought an iRiver to replace my iPod. It's not like being pissed because I can't play 8 tracks anymore, I bought those decades ago. We're speaking of something I bought a couple of months back. People are going to keep buying iPods to not lose the songs. Steve Jobs says that only to give himself a good concience. It is a lock-in.
What they mean is that music from iTunes is playable only on iPods and a given number of computers. That's a lock-in.
It's funny, because music companies have pushed for years to have DRMed music and put a lot of wieght in Apple and iTunes, to have it backfire against them, because now Apple has a near monopoly on the business and nobody can dislodge them!
It's partly the lack of market share.
This Ctrl-Alt-Del comic strip put it nicely.
I dunno. I played the Prey demo the other day and it seemed like a pretty decent shooter. The gravity platforms were pretty cool and were a refreshing kind of puzzle.
I don't know if the 360 is the best console ever owned, but I think it might be the 2nd best console I ever owned. The best would be the original GameBoy (I can just remember that horrible Sega had that talked about the greenish colors and one kid took a bite off a frog, with green ooze dripping everywhere).
:p) who bought it), but some of them end up great.
I skipped a lot of generations (parent wouldn't buy them, but I can't say I blame them). I had a NES, GB and then an Xbox and now the 360.
I found out that I loved GRAW and Oblivion, which are both available on the PC. But to me, the 360 is just the perfect console experience to me. You pick up that wireless controller just like you pick a TV remote, turn the thing on wirelessly, boot directly to the dashboard (or whatever they call it on the 360), look for a bunch of new downloads like game trailers or demos, queue up the stuff, then play your game while the stuff downloads. Then, go back to the dashboard when you are done playing and play a game of Geometry Wars, Astropop, Mutant Reloaded, WIK, or whatever.
You can do all of this on a PC of course. But I do it from my couch, confortably with the controller in my hand. Just like any other console. Except I get to enjoy features that have been part of the PC world for years. While I don't approve the patching of games on the 360 (DOA and Oblivion did that... ugh...), face it, this is something that will also be done on the PS3 and Wii.
Is the 360 the best console ever? To me, it probably is. I finally get to enjoy PC features on a 500CAN$ piece of hardware. And it's still going to run great games 5 years down the road. Can't wait for Crackdown, Dead Rising, Enchanted Arms and obviously, Halo 3 (howdo the second was a step backwards in term of gameplay) and the awesome looking Gears of Wars. And 4 of these are coming in the next six month. Whether they are good or not tough is something that history will judge. But hey, who has never been looking forward to games coming out 6 months to a year for now? Some may end up like dissapointments (Ninety Nine Nights on the 360 has apparently a buggy colision detection system, but hopefullyy that will be fixed before the worldwide release. Poor Japanese gameR (emphasis on the lack of an S
I think people taking their own time to make something they want to play would at least be worth a look at.
3 words : Duke Nukem Forever.
Can't wait to see what a 10 year in the making game looks like.
I've heard from a couple of places that Sony is inflating the price of Blu Ray stand alone players because they want the PS3 to be the cheapest Blu Ray player on the market once it's released.
Except that this theory doesn't work because if I'm not mistaken Samsung already has released a Blu-Ray player and other companies are soon following suit, including LG who is rumored to be coming with dual HD-DVD/Blu-Ray player. These companies will be pissed if their 1000$ player can't sell because Sony is flooding the market with cheap BR players.
Based on this, I can see only two way this will pan out.
1) There will be major price slashing when the PS3 comes out of B-R players to be competitive, lowering the price in the HD-DVD range.
2) At 500$-600$, Sony is either losing a TON of money because the B-R costs them a lot to include, or the B-R player inside the PS3 is of so poor quality that it renders it useless to watch movies on an HD TV set (which is the point anyway, people who will buy Blu-Ray movies are going to expect quality since they have an HD-set capable of playing them at native-res)
And the worst part is, the scenario that would make the most sense would be the first one. Which means Samsung is making a bundle on each player sold right now. Is B-R so technologically superior that the player has to cost almost twice as more than HD-DVD players? Considering the quality of the PS2 DVD player (hook it up to a GOOD TV and you'll know what I mean), I suppose scenario 2 has more credibility tough.
Plus, how much do you bet that Sony is using a single Cell inside their Blu-Ray standalone player and THAT is the reason why the device was pushed from June to August to late October? After all, it's not as if they shouldn't be able to fix the quirks of building the B-R drive, after all, Samsung already has their player selling.