Speaking from a practical perspective and not necessarily from a legal perspective, I think the big difference is the ease of "publishing" those digital copies.
When sharing music required a CD purchaser to fire up each copy instance manually, and each copy could only be made at 1x speed then it was pretty self-limiting. Also a given purchaser would generally only share a few of his CDs with a few of his closest friends.
Conversely, the P2P systems allow a person to share his entire CD collection simultaneously with anyone in the world who wants to download it. That makes it fundamentally different than the rights spelled out in the legislation mentioned earlier.
Having just appeared to defend the RIAA, I'll say that find them to be avariciously greedy. I am going to try to never purchase another music CD. I'm going to try to wait until there's a viable business model that distributes a higher percentage of the income to the artists and doesn't include crushing DRM.
Apparently you aren't very familiar with accident investigation. It's quite common in the early stages of an investigation for experts to have suspicions about the likelihood of a particular failure scenario. The good ones are open minded and don't rely very heavily on their initial gut feelings. They continue their analysis and definitively rule in or rule out the various possible failure modes.
That CBS news report is from three days after the incident. At that time, Dittemore's gut feeling was as he stated. I'm not going to take the time to look it up now, but I suspect he has publically stated on many occasions since then that the subsequent analysis and testing has convinced him that the foam was the primary cause of the damage to the wing.
In contrast to your intuitive insight, the engineering analysis on this isn't a close call. They're fuzzy on a very few of the precise details, but overall conclusion is about as clear-cut as is possible in this sort of thing. The evidence is consistent from several different engineering viewpoints (video analysis, telemetry during reentry, foam application methods, properties of the foam when subjected to cryogenic temperatures, properties of the foam in a supersonic slipstream, strike tests on the leading edge, etc) and all support the same conclusion:
The foam did it.
Anyone with an alternative theory has a *huge* burden of proof to overcome.
There was a redesign that substantially increased the voltage of some of the heater components. The switch that was controlled by the thermostat wasn't changed to match.
When the tank was removed from Apollo 10 it was dropped and a drain was bent slightly
A test was run where the tank was filled with liquid oxygen. When the time came to drain the tank, the bent drain prevented it from draining completely. The engineers determined that it would be safe to simply turn on the heater for awhile and boil off the excess LOX.
When the heater was turned on the switch fused in the on position. So the thermostat was incapable of turning the heater off. Also, the temp gauge had too narrow a range. Basically it pegged right at the redline. The engineers expected it hit redline during this procedure, so they weren't concerned. Later analysis determined that the tank probably reached several hundred degrees before they turned the heater off from the outside.
The heat cooked off the teflon insulation for the instrumentation and stirring motors built into the tank. When Swiggert turn on the stirring motor a spark jumped between two bare wires, and *boom*
No, the majority (all?) of the hand-applied foam that was the problem was located where the shuttle was mated to the tank. So essentially all of the foam that popped off of the upper part of the tank was at risk of striking the orbiter. The foam applied to the lower attachment points are, I think, low enough and far enough around the sides that they can't hit even the trailing edges of the wing nor body.
Read Linenger's Off the Planet for a little more on the "wussy" American concerns. There were two incidents that made the atmosphere questionable-to-dangerous.
One was the fire. Clearly if you have a 20-minute fire in an enclosed structure that vaporizes a large section of aluminum then the air is going to be very unhealth. Albeit the Russian space agency characterized it as a "small fire that was extinguished quickly."
The other was a glycol (was that it?) leak. The Russian ground staff blew it off as not dangerous. They were basing this on medical reports about very short-term exposure (usually minutes) at much lower levels than the Mir was experiencing. The Mir crew was living with the stuff for weeks.
And lets not forget, their "safety is a luxury" management style resulted in one near collision, a warning that they ignored, on their way to an actual collision that made the most modern module uninhabitable. A lot of science and engineering experiments were lost inside that module.
The Russians ignore reality in order to follow the party line. NASA is risk-averse. There's a happy medium somewhere in there.
"...that is the tradeoff when you sign a contract..."
Well, yes but...
I have no problem with a company setting up a deal to recoup their expenses. But there's an oft-recurring story of bands whithering away because some executive with no actual interest in music decides to stop backing the band, but refuses to release them from their contract. He won't put their already-produced music on the shelves, and he won't let them work with someone else to produce and release new music. He won't support them at their live events with management and promotional help. And in fact he actively tries to saddle those live performances with whatever additional expenses he can come up with to suck away what profit there might be. The band is left with nothing and no recourse.
It's just an illustration of where greed has crossed the line and become a detriment to society. That's what makes it infuriating for me.
There's no need for me here to reiterate all the underhanded practices and nickle-and-dime charges the record companies dump onto naive artists. That's been documented elsewhere often enough.
Thus, the uploader, provided they aren't the distribution house or
the artist, is committing a crime... emphasis added
That's one of the really sad/frustrating/infuriating parts about this whole thing. The artists themselves actually don't have the rights to distribute their songs, either. About the only rights they're "allowed" to retain is the right to perform their works. But they can't legally distribute their own CDs, nor post their own music for download.
When I first got my Palm 1000 about all I used it for was phone numbers. I put stuff in my To Do list, but rarely actually got any done. And my life was simple enough that I never needed to use the Schedule program.
Over time, I started finding more uses for it. I found a shopping program I liked (currently, Splashshopper.) When I first got it I never felt the need to schedule anything. More recently, I play a couple of different sports, and use Calendarscope (PC side, synchs with Scheduler) to keep track of and print schedules. It's also really useful for reminders of birthday and such with sufficient warning to do something about them. I have a password program, so I have all my passwords and other important info with me at all times. I also have found it's really nice to have a couple of two-player games on there, when waiting at a restaraunt or at a movie. Yahtzee and Backgammon are just about the right length of time. I used to use AvantGo for impromptu reading material.
All of these seem trivial, and none are strictly necessary. But it's surprising how useful they can be. For example, since I always have the thing with me, if I think of a grocery purchase or a computer purchase or an Home Labyrinth purchase, I can quickly jot it down in the appropriate category. And it stays there until I can deal with it. When I go on trips (not often) I copy&paste the itinerary from the email to a memo. When I get to the airport I add the parking lot info to it. Again, not essential, but very convenient.
I'm on my fourth device now. I went through a Palm 5000, Palm III, Visor Prism with Visorphone and just got a Treo 600. But I could justify the cost because I know I'm going to use the thing, and that I'm likely to keep it for at least a few years. For you, one of the entry level devices would be a much better choice. In addition to cost, there's now enough variety that it's impossible to recommend any particular model until you've tried one long enough to figure out which features are important to you.
Commercialization had very little to do with it. Get any large group of people together and there will be friction.
There are also many, many pockets of care-free fun on the net. Vast storehouses of knowledge. Many forums that engage in reasoned discourse.
This is a squeeky-wheel kind of thing. You notice all the shouting. And you're forgetting all of the quiet positives that exist right alongside the fights you see. It's a little regretable, but ultimately just part of being part of the human species.
Several years ago, a guy on a Compuserve forum listed the seven facets he prioritizes at the beginning of every project. (I no longer have the post, so I can't give proper attribution, and these will be from memory.) He suggested that they should be considered and rearranged for each project. On any given project there will be two or three that stand out as particularly important.
1) Time to market 2) Cost to develop 3) Maintenance 4) Correctness/reliability 5) Performance 6) Extendibility/architecture 7) Features (or can a subset be used for the initial release)
At the beginning of the project the decision makers need to sit down and order this list for that particular project. Whenever it comes time to make a decision or tradeoff, they should compare it to the priority order determined for the project. If the tradeoff violates one of the top priorities then it should be considered with great care.
Some examples:
- In a PC flight sim game, Time to market and Cost to develop are probably the top two, and Features, and Performance are a little lower. Since game engines tend to turn over so quickly Maintenance and Extendibility are less important. And Correctness, while nice, really is one of the least important priority items (above a minimum reliability, of course.)
- In contrast, in an FAA flight training sim Correctness is probably the most important followed closely by Performance (mostly as it applies to Correctness.) Maintenance and Extendibility would prolly be important to a company that's building sims for a family of aircraft. But it might be less important for a company that's building a sim for a one-off class of aircraft such as a fighter. (Albeit, the ability to add new weapons systems and threats might bump this up.) Time to market and Cost to develop end up having to just fall out from the higher priorities.
- For many business applications, Maintenance tends to dominate the cost of using an app. For mission critical apps Correctness probably rivals Maintenance for top spot. And the rest will depend on the particular project.
And so on. As I said, I may be mis-remembering one or two of those priorities. But the general idea is valid. A list like this can help a team spell out ahead of time what's imperative, against which they can measure their decisions.
but what about the nutcases that do - have videogames and movies made killing SO cool that it appeals more than anything else?
Was it in the '80s when Motley Crue got sued for causing a kid to commit suicide? I saw a show on that one time and one of the singers for the band had a great quote that I think applies here:
Paraphrased: "If a kid is that messed up then there's no telling what could make him snap. One day it might be our music. The next day maybe getting his burger order wrong at a fast food joint is what does it."
Videogames *probably* have some small effect. But labeling them as a cause is absurd.
For one thing, it would likely be at least 20 years from the launch of the mission until the asteroid showed up in orbit. So there would be a lot of time to address the effects on the various economies ahead of time. Also, it wouldn't all get dumped onto the market at once. It would still need to be refined. And, a good portion of it, maybe the majority, would remain in orbit, and thus not much affect the terrestrial economy directly.
Jerry Pournelle's science fact compilation A Step Farther Out suggests some possible uses for lunar and asteroid mining that don't necessarily include bringing the stuff back down to Earth. Solar powered satellites and space stations/colonies are the most obvious. Why bring the heavy stuff up from Earth when it's cheaper to fling it off the moon?
He also calculated that a one mile diameter asteroid would, on average, consist of enough useful minerals to be worth on the order of one trillion dollars in 1970 money. A mission to capture such an asteroid and put it in Earth orbit would cost on the order of the Apollo project and take 20 years, plus development time. That's a hell of a return on investment, methinks. (And, no, a one mile asteroid would not screw up the tides.)
Even with lunar mining, any such venture presupposes Cheap Access To Space. We really are at the point where we should be able to develop cheap realiable vehicles within the next 10 years or so. As some pundits have put it, the big question is, what language will those developers speak? Unfortunately for some of us, there's a strong possibility they won't be Americans.
Nobody seems to have answered any of these yet, so here goes.
The amounts of material that could wildly be projected to be removed from the moon is in the thousands or (complete fantasy) millions of tons. The mass of the moon (from memory) is on the order of a sextillion tons (a one followed by 21 zeros.) After removing a million tons it would still mass a-one-followed-by-21-zeros tons. The amount to be mined is trivial and won't affect the tides one teeny bit.
I suspect there's also some what-the-market-will-bear logic in the pricing structure.
The basic idea being, if a site is using a lot of bandwidth, then by definition it's popular. If a site is popular, then chances are somebody is trying to make money off of its popularity. If a site is generating revenue then it makes sense for the owner of that site to find a provider who can reliably provide the bandwidth the site needs and who will listen when the site needs something.
This affects a site who gets Slashdotted just accidentally. A hypothetical site can suddenly get reclassified from a hobbyist bandwidth bracket to a business generating bandwidth bracket, where the pricing rules are different.
I refuse to buy a cordless that doesn't have quick-change batteries and a charger in the base. When the current battery is run down I swap it with the one in the base. NiCads last a coupla years and then I replace them.
The big advantage is that the phone doesn't have to spend a lot of time on the base. The base can be out of the way and the phone where it's convenient.
My next cordless will likely be a Panasonic, which takes standard AA batteries. A coupla sets of NiMHi will be just as convenient and even easier to replace.
dougmc is basically correct, and his post can be summed up thus:
PC gaming and console gaming are different markets, albeit with similarities and some overlap.
Many games that do well on one don't do well on the other. The technical and logistic differences dougmc mentioned lend themselves to different types of games. Many of the people who play a lot of games on one do not play much at all on the other. The average age of gamers on PCs is about five to ten years higher than on consoles.
The console market is, I think, a bigger market. So it has bigger money behind it. The hits there tend to be larger than the hits in PC games. All that leads to pulling talent away from PCs and to the consoles, where there's more money to be made. That brain drain has accelerated in the last two years, which may be why there's a relative dearth of hot titles out on the PC the last year when compared to the consoles. The dip might be an anomoly that could balance itself out some in the next couple of years.
Each time a console comes out it looks like a great bang for the buck its first few months. But each console has a life expectancy of three to five years. Long before that the progress of the PC makes the previous generations of consoles look pretty blah.
Consoles will never kill PCs as gaming machines. They're different markets with different economics driving them. As long as there are PCs people will be playing games on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking from a practical perspective and not necessarily from a legal perspective, I think the big difference is the ease of "publishing" those digital copies.
When sharing music required a CD purchaser to fire up each copy instance manually, and each copy could only be made at 1x speed then it was pretty self-limiting. Also a given purchaser would generally only share a few of his CDs with a few of his closest friends.
Conversely, the P2P systems allow a person to share his entire CD collection simultaneously with anyone in the world who wants to download it. That makes it fundamentally different than the rights spelled out in the legislation mentioned earlier.
Having just appeared to defend the RIAA, I'll say that find them to be avariciously greedy. I am going to try to never purchase another music CD. I'm going to try to wait until there's a viable business model that distributes a higher percentage of the income to the artists and doesn't include crushing DRM.
Apparently you aren't very familiar with accident investigation. It's quite common in the early stages of an investigation for experts to have suspicions about the likelihood of a particular failure scenario. The good ones are open minded and don't rely very heavily on their initial gut feelings. They continue their analysis and definitively rule in or rule out the various possible failure modes.
That CBS news report is from three days after the incident. At that time, Dittemore's gut feeling was as he stated. I'm not going to take the time to look it up now, but I suspect he has publically stated on many occasions since then that the subsequent analysis and testing has convinced him that the foam was the primary cause of the damage to the wing.
In contrast to your intuitive insight, the engineering analysis on this isn't a close call. They're fuzzy on a very few of the precise details, but overall conclusion is about as clear-cut as is possible in this sort of thing. The evidence is consistent from several different engineering viewpoints (video analysis, telemetry during reentry, foam application methods, properties of the foam when subjected to cryogenic temperatures, properties of the foam in a supersonic slipstream, strike tests on the leading edge, etc) and all support the same conclusion:
The foam did it.
Anyone with an alternative theory has a *huge* burden of proof to overcome.
As I remember it from Lost Moon
There was a redesign that substantially increased the voltage of some of the heater components. The switch that was controlled by the thermostat wasn't changed to match.
When the tank was removed from Apollo 10 it was dropped and a drain was bent slightly
A test was run where the tank was filled with liquid oxygen. When the time came to drain the tank, the bent drain prevented it from draining completely. The engineers determined that it would be safe to simply turn on the heater for awhile and boil off the excess LOX.
When the heater was turned on the switch fused in the on position. So the thermostat was incapable of turning the heater off. Also, the temp gauge had too narrow a range. Basically it pegged right at the redline. The engineers expected it hit redline during this procedure, so they weren't concerned. Later analysis determined that the tank probably reached several hundred degrees before they turned the heater off from the outside.
The heat cooked off the teflon insulation for the instrumentation and stirring motors built into the tank. When Swiggert turn on the stirring motor a spark jumped between two bare wires, and *boom*
No, the majority (all?) of the hand-applied foam that was the problem was located where the shuttle was mated to the tank. So essentially all of the foam that popped off of the upper part of the tank was at risk of striking the orbiter. The foam applied to the lower attachment points are, I think, low enough and far enough around the sides that they can't hit even the trailing edges of the wing nor body.
Read Linenger's Off the Planet for a little more on the "wussy" American concerns. There were two incidents that made the atmosphere questionable-to-dangerous.
One was the fire. Clearly if you have a 20-minute fire in an enclosed structure that vaporizes a large section of aluminum then the air is going to be very unhealth. Albeit the Russian space agency characterized it as a "small fire that was extinguished quickly."
The other was a glycol (was that it?) leak. The Russian ground staff blew it off as not dangerous. They were basing this on medical reports about very short-term exposure (usually minutes) at much lower levels than the Mir was experiencing. The Mir crew was living with the stuff for weeks.
And lets not forget, their "safety is a luxury" management style resulted in one near collision, a warning that they ignored, on their way to an actual collision that made the most modern module uninhabitable. A lot of science and engineering experiments were lost inside that module.
The Russians ignore reality in order to follow the party line. NASA is risk-averse. There's a happy medium somewhere in there.
"...that is the tradeoff when you sign a contract..."
Well, yes but...
I have no problem with a company setting up a deal to recoup their expenses. But there's an oft-recurring story of bands whithering away because some executive with no actual interest in music decides to stop backing the band, but refuses to release them from their contract. He won't put their already-produced music on the shelves, and he won't let them work with someone else to produce and release new music. He won't support them at their live events with management and promotional help. And in fact he actively tries to saddle those live performances with whatever additional expenses he can come up with to suck away what profit there might be. The band is left with nothing and no recourse.
It's just an illustration of where greed has crossed the line and become a detriment to society. That's what makes it infuriating for me.
There's no need for me here to reiterate all the underhanded practices and nickle-and-dime charges the record companies dump onto naive artists. That's been documented elsewhere often enough.
That's one of the really sad/frustrating/infuriating parts about this whole thing. The artists themselves actually don't have the rights to distribute their songs, either. About the only rights they're "allowed" to retain is the right to perform their works. But they can't legally distribute their own CDs, nor post their own music for download.
IANAL
It's one of those things that grows on you.
When I first got my Palm 1000 about all I used it for was phone numbers. I put stuff in my To Do list, but rarely actually got any done. And my life was simple enough that I never needed to use the Schedule program.
Over time, I started finding more uses for it. I found a shopping program I liked (currently, Splashshopper.) When I first got it I never felt the need to schedule anything. More recently, I play a couple of different sports, and use Calendarscope (PC side, synchs with Scheduler) to keep track of and print schedules. It's also really useful for reminders of birthday and such with sufficient warning to do something about them. I have a password program, so I have all my passwords and other important info with me at all times. I also have found it's really nice to have a couple of two-player games on there, when waiting at a restaraunt or at a movie. Yahtzee and Backgammon are just about the right length of time. I used to use AvantGo for impromptu reading material.
All of these seem trivial, and none are strictly necessary. But it's surprising how useful they can be. For example, since I always have the thing with me, if I think of a grocery purchase or a computer purchase or an Home Labyrinth purchase, I can quickly jot it down in the appropriate category. And it stays there until I can deal with it. When I go on trips (not often) I copy&paste the itinerary from the email to a memo. When I get to the airport I add the parking lot info to it. Again, not essential, but very convenient.
I'm on my fourth device now. I went through a Palm 5000, Palm III, Visor Prism with Visorphone and just got a Treo 600. But I could justify the cost because I know I'm going to use the thing, and that I'm likely to keep it for at least a few years. For you, one of the entry level devices would be a much better choice. In addition to cost, there's now enough variety that it's impossible to recommend any particular model until you've tried one long enough to figure out which features are important to you.
Commercialization had very little to do with it. Get any large group of people together and there will be friction.
There are also many, many pockets of care-free fun on the net. Vast storehouses of knowledge. Many forums that engage in reasoned discourse.
This is a squeeky-wheel kind of thing. You notice all the shouting. And you're forgetting all of the quiet positives that exist right alongside the fights you see. It's a little regretable, but ultimately just part of being part of the human species.
Several years ago, a guy on a Compuserve forum listed the seven facets he prioritizes at the beginning of every project. (I no longer have the post, so I can't give proper attribution, and these will be from memory.) He suggested that they should be considered and rearranged for each project. On any given project there will be two or three that stand out as particularly important.
1) Time to market
2) Cost to develop
3) Maintenance
4) Correctness/reliability
5) Performance
6) Extendibility/architecture
7) Features (or can a subset be used for the initial release)
At the beginning of the project the decision makers need to sit down and order this list for that particular project. Whenever it comes time to make a decision or tradeoff, they should compare it to the priority order determined for the project. If the tradeoff violates one of the top priorities then it should be considered with great care.
Some examples:
- In a PC flight sim game, Time to market and Cost to develop are probably the top two, and Features, and Performance are a little lower. Since game engines tend to turn over so quickly Maintenance and Extendibility are less important. And Correctness, while nice, really is one of the least important priority items (above a minimum reliability, of course.)
- In contrast, in an FAA flight training sim Correctness is probably the most important followed closely by Performance (mostly as it applies to Correctness.) Maintenance and Extendibility would prolly be important to a company that's building sims for a family of aircraft. But it might be less important for a company that's building a sim for a one-off class of aircraft such as a fighter. (Albeit, the ability to add new weapons systems and threats might bump this up.) Time to market and Cost to develop end up having to just fall out from the higher priorities.
- For many business applications, Maintenance tends to dominate the cost of using an app. For mission critical apps Correctness probably rivals Maintenance for top spot. And the rest will depend on the particular project.
And so on. As I said, I may be mis-remembering one or two of those priorities. But the general idea is valid. A list like this can help a team spell out ahead of time what's imperative, against which they can measure their decisions.
Paraphrased: "If a kid is that messed up then there's no telling what could make him snap. One day it might be our music. The next day maybe getting his burger order wrong at a fast food joint is what does it."
Videogames *probably* have some small effect. But labeling them as a cause is absurd.
The SETI@Home users stat page shows over 600,000 distinct users have returned at least one result in the last four weeks.
I'd say it's still pretty popular.
Well, it's not quite that simple.
For one thing, it would likely be at least 20 years from the launch of the mission until the asteroid showed up in orbit. So there would be a lot of time to address the effects on the various economies ahead of time. Also, it wouldn't all get dumped onto the market at once. It would still need to be refined. And, a good portion of it, maybe the majority, would remain in orbit, and thus not much affect the terrestrial economy directly.
Jerry Pournelle's science fact compilation A Step Farther Out suggests some possible uses for lunar and asteroid mining that don't necessarily include bringing the stuff back down to Earth. Solar powered satellites and space stations/colonies are the most obvious. Why bring the heavy stuff up from Earth when it's cheaper to fling it off the moon?
He also calculated that a one mile diameter asteroid would, on average, consist of enough useful minerals to be worth on the order of one trillion dollars in 1970 money. A mission to capture such an asteroid and put it in Earth orbit would cost on the order of the Apollo project and take 20 years, plus development time. That's a hell of a return on investment, methinks. (And, no, a one mile asteroid would not screw up the tides.)
Even with lunar mining, any such venture presupposes Cheap Access To Space. We really are at the point where we should be able to develop cheap realiable vehicles within the next 10 years or so. As some pundits have put it, the big question is, what language will those developers speak? Unfortunately for some of us, there's a strong possibility they won't be Americans.
Nobody seems to have answered any of these yet, so here goes.
The amounts of material that could wildly be projected to be removed from the moon is in the thousands or (complete fantasy) millions of tons. The mass of the moon (from memory) is on the order of a sextillion tons (a one followed by 21 zeros.) After removing a million tons it would still mass a-one-followed-by-21-zeros tons. The amount to be mined is trivial and won't affect the tides one teeny bit.
I suspect there's also some what-the-market-will-bear logic in the pricing structure.
The basic idea being, if a site is using a lot of bandwidth, then by definition it's popular. If a site is popular, then chances are somebody is trying to make money off of its popularity. If a site is generating revenue then it makes sense for the owner of that site to find a provider who can reliably provide the bandwidth the site needs and who will listen when the site needs something.
This affects a site who gets Slashdotted just accidentally. A hypothetical site can suddenly get reclassified from a hobbyist bandwidth bracket to a business generating bandwidth bracket, where the pricing rules are different.
It doesn't take much to implement a TCP/IP stack, apparently. Check out a matchhead-sized web server. http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic.html
Not only does it recursively open as many windows as possible, but my virus scanner reported a virus.
Can a moderator edit out that link?
I refuse to buy a cordless that doesn't have quick-change batteries and a charger in the base. When the current battery is run down I swap it with the one in the base. NiCads last a coupla years and then I replace them.
The big advantage is that the phone doesn't have to spend a lot of time on the base. The base can be out of the way and the phone where it's convenient.
My next cordless will likely be a Panasonic, which takes standard AA batteries. A coupla sets of NiMHi will be just as convenient and even easier to replace.
dougmc is basically correct, and his post can be summed up thus: PC gaming and console gaming are different markets, albeit with similarities and some overlap. Many games that do well on one don't do well on the other. The technical and logistic differences dougmc mentioned lend themselves to different types of games. Many of the people who play a lot of games on one do not play much at all on the other. The average age of gamers on PCs is about five to ten years higher than on consoles. The console market is, I think, a bigger market. So it has bigger money behind it. The hits there tend to be larger than the hits in PC games. All that leads to pulling talent away from PCs and to the consoles, where there's more money to be made. That brain drain has accelerated in the last two years, which may be why there's a relative dearth of hot titles out on the PC the last year when compared to the consoles. The dip might be an anomoly that could balance itself out some in the next couple of years. Each time a console comes out it looks like a great bang for the buck its first few months. But each console has a life expectancy of three to five years. Long before that the progress of the PC makes the previous generations of consoles look pretty blah. Consoles will never kill PCs as gaming machines. They're different markets with different economics driving them. As long as there are PCs people will be playing games on them.