There is a random component, but external influences direct that random component in a specific direction. For example, how do two bodies reach thermal equilibrium? At the lowest level, its just energy transfer as a result of random collisions between particles. However, if it was completely random, then any final state would be as likely as any other. But that's not what you see in nature --- you have a very strong (and very predictable) drive towards a certain determinable equilibrium temperature, despite the fact that the underlying mechanism is basically random.
Increasing the RAM from 1GB to 2GB will only increase performance if your benchmark uses more than 1GB of RAM. This benchmark doesn't, so there shouldn't be any difference in performance.
You can buy a PC with the same config cheaper, but not substantially cheaper. I can't speak for the MBP, but when I got my Macbook this summer, I did some looking around, and even if you ignore things like build-quality, most comparable x86 laptops were less than 10% cheaper. If you got a comparably small and sturdy machine, the price was actually substantially higher.
As a former Ubuntu user turned OS X convert, I have to say that it *is* an Ubuntu/OS X horse race, with Windows eating dust far in the rear. I prefer OS X, because it's definitely sexier, but GNOME gets the fundamentals very right.
I highly doubt it. That particular comparison shows one year in the overall six year lifespan of the PS2. How much money was Nintendo making between 2001 and 2005, before the DS took attention off crappy sales of the Gamecube?
Even accounting for the small difference in intervals, we can see that the PS2 has sold about 5x as many titles as the Gamecube (which makes sense, given that it sold about 5x as many consoles). Even if Sony spent a billion developing the PS2, and took a billion dollar loss on the production, Nintendo would still have to make enormous margins on each Gamecube to make up for the sheer greater volume of PS2 software sold. If we assume about $7 per game (which is a historical figure from the early PS2 days), and a $2bn setup loss, Sony made about $4bn in profit from license sales. If we assume that Nintendo makes about the same license fee per game, they make about $1bn on GC games. If we further assume the GC had no R&D cost, and they never took any losses on the console, Nintendo would have to make a profit of $136 on each of ~22m Gamecubes sold to offset the extra 700m PS2 games sold. That's absurd for a console that introd at $200, and quickly dropped to $150 then $99.
They may not play Pokemon, but they may play Madden, Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and Red Steel...
Yeah, but are they going to play Madden on the system that has Pokemon, or on the system that has Halo or Gran Turismo?
The fact is that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all in competition for the same gamer-dollar.
If Nintendo is targeting the same gamers as Microsoft and Sony, they're screwed. Good first-party titles alone weren't enough to make the Gamecube anything better than an also-ran. Nintendo needs third party support, and that's exactly what they are so very bad at getting.
Super Smash Bros Melee: 3,765,500 Super Mario Sunshine: 2,886,000 The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker: 2,435,500 Metroid Prime: 1,492,500 (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: 758,000) Pokemon Colosseum: 1,165,000 Total: 11,744,500
Where did you get those statistics? I highly doubt that they represent sales within the span of one year. Moreover, they represent a small fraction of the PS2's software sales. From the second article, software shipments for the PS2 for the year ending September 30 were 47m. Every single GTA3 game sold over 11m copies apiece, and Gran Turismo 3 is over 14m copies. As of September 2005, the PS1 + PS2 had a total of 1.87bn software units sold. According to Wikipedia, the PS2's share of that was a bit over 1 billion, which makes sense given that sales records put PS1 software shipments at 690m. In comparison, as of March 2005, Nintendo had sold 160m cumulative software units for the Gamecube.
That's the most amazingly contorted logic I've ever heard.
1) If Nintendo was trying to foster goodwill, they would allow you to run unsigned code on the DS. The fact that its easier to run unsigned code on the DS doesn't mean that they suck any less than Sony, it just means they're not as good at system security.
2) How the hell would Nintendo release an update to fix a hardware passthrough? Would they send you a new DS and force you to return the old one? The reason Nintendo isn't cracking down on people bypassing the DS's code signing (because given their past history, they'd put a stop to it in a second if it was easy for them to do so) is because it would be too expensive to keep modifying the DS's hardware every time a hardware work-around was found. Moreover, because the DS hacks are all hardware-based (and clumsy), the probability of them being used for casual piracy is much lower than on the PSP, where the hacks could be exploited in software with no additional equipment.
Nintendo isn't any less "evil" in their lock-down practices than Sony. I've owned every single one of their consoles since the NES, and they are as controlling today as they were back then. The only difference between them and Sony is that Nintendo has had more practice, its tactics are more subtle, and Nintendo fanboys are too stupid to see through them.
Remember, we're talking about a company that kept proprietary media formats for a full decade after its competitors had moved to standard CDs and DVDs. The company that made customers pay $70-$80 for N64 games so they could keep their lucrative cart licensing business. The company that killed their once-extensive third-party support through over-control. The company that elevated region lockouts to a fine art. The company that is getting a free pass at putting region lockouts into the Wii, while Sony gets no credit for making the PSP and PS3 region-free.
The Wii isn't serious competition for Microsoft because they're not targeting the same gamers. Consider the core games of the 360's lineup over the next year or so: Madden/etc, Gears of War, Halo. Do you think people who are into those types of games are going to play Pokemon?
Nintendo may very well be successful in the "casual gamer" market its targeting with the Wii, but the fact remains that the traditional console gaming market is still a multi-billion dollar industry which is still several times larger than any other sub-market of the overall gaming industry. It's going to be either Microsoft or Sony that takes that market.
the real surprise here is that Nintendo's profits are UP when they have been developing the Wii - sure it's a less intensive system that is probably lower in price, but a 'next gen' console should still suck up a bit of profits.
The Wii isn't a new console, it's a refresh of the Gamecube hardware. As such, its development cost is very small compared to the billion dollar+ development costs of the PS3.
They don't turn a blind eye towards it, they just can't do anything about it. The DS's hacks are hardware-based, and are much harder for them to close than the software-based hacks on the PSP.
Nintendo is more anal-retentive about controlling their console than anybody else. That's why the Gamecube used a proprietary disk instead of a standard format (like DVD, or HD-DVD or Blu-Ray).
The deep irony here is that Nintendo isn't doing anything more than Sony to foster that goodwill (the DS requires signed code as well!), it's just that the DS's hardware is much easier to crack...
First, Sony isn't failing. Sony made way more profit than Nintendo for much of the last six years. Was Nintendo failing when the PS2 was reaping record profits for Sony, and the Gamecube was stagnating? Of course not. Companies go through cycles, and some companies take more risk, and thus go through bigger cycles than others.
You're criticizing Sony for bad decision making "from the top down", but do you realize that the rootkit had nothing to do with top Sony management? It was something that a BMG software contractor came up with, and put into BMG's products less than a year after Sony purchased them. Not only was it not anybody at Sony's idea to put that software in the CDs, but they top people at Sony didn't even know about it.
Yes, Sony get sued, and payed for it, because as BMG's new owner, they were legally liable. That's absolutely fair. However, while you can fault them for not being proactive in finding out what their newly acquired subsidiary was doing, but you can hardly attribute the grand conspiracy among top-Sony management that many Slashdotters try to work in.
This is a good point, and one I think a lot of Slashdotters are missing. Sony took losses in order to launch the PS2 as well. And they made an assload of money on it over the last six years. Nintendo has adopted an opposite approach --- they consistently make a profit, and take less risk, but they make less money overall. Both approaches are valid ones.
The real news will come three or four years from now. If Sony hasn't made a net profit on the PS3 by then, then its fair to deride them for it. Until then, it's more of a "so what?"
It's not really the case that the people who visit those sites are the ones who are part of Sony's launch plans. Most of those people won't buy a console at launch anyway, because they know enough to not buy something that has no games. Instead, consider all those people who buy a new copy of Madden every year. Consider the college kids with rich parents that play Halo with their frat brothers. There are a lot of those people, and if Sony gets its marketing right, they'll snap up the PS3, Lik-Sang or not.
That's not lying, that's called "compliance with local regulations". Stuff that is tested and compliant in the US and Canada is not necessarily tested and compliant in Europe. Indeed, EU regulations are usually much more stringent. For example, many companies have had to change their products to be ROHS compliant in order to sell in most EU member nations. Yet, products that are not ROHS compliant can still be sold in the US and Canada with no problems.
That would only be a correct argument if we were talking about the US prior to the consolidation of federal power. And at that time, you may well have had to file a lawsuit in each state in order to get it to stick nationally.
However, in the present US, the federal government controls all inter-state commerce. Thus, filing in any state and showing that a federal law was violated stops the whole thing. However, the EU does not work that way! The EU member states are far more independent, and winning a case in one locale does not necessarily imply it'll hold everywhere.
You couldn't even open that thing in an airplane seat. Hell, my 13.3" macbook is almost too big for comfortable economy-class use. And the attendant back, pain, oh god...
I don't know what kind of idiot would subject themselves to this. Why not just get a nice big external display like everyone else does?
Whatever BSG's writers want, give it to them. They're far better than the writers on nearly every other one of your shows, and is one of the highlights of a network this is otherwise deservedly in last place among the big four.
I think there are a lot of hold-outs from when Dell didn't suck. Dell used to make very good machines at reasonable prices. They weren't the cheapest (that was Gateway), but it wasn't the most expensive, either.
I've got a Dell D300 that'll be seeing its ninth birthday next january. In that time, it got a solid five years of use as a workstation, and another three and a half as a server for my parents. I shut it down over the summer, simply because they didn't need it anymore. I opened it to find it full of drywall dust, because apparently nobody had thought to remove it from the closet while they renovated the basement last year.
I replaced that Dell D300 with an Inspiron 8200. It wasn't very good. It was a flimsy, awkward thing, the screen had to be replaced after a year, and after the three-year warranty ran out, the DVD drive started to get sketchy. And that was a $2k machine too --- I shudder to think what the $1000 boxes are like.
Actually, Dell's total revenues are only about thrice as large as Apple's. The difference in machines shipped is probably not much different. While Apple might have higher margins on its machines, it doesn't sell the kind of high-end server setups Dell does.
In any case, if you want to talk quality, look at the Consumer Reports comparisons. Apple is consistently on top, based on statistics about customer satisfaction and repair rates.
This sub-thread is about why the original poster insisted that Blu-Ray is more proprietary than DVD. Whether Sony has been historically successful with new formats is neither here nor there.
Moreover, Sony's track record with consortium-backed formats is quite good. Sony and Philips were part of the original consortium that created the CD, and both were founding members of the DVD Forum.
Regarding non-consortium-backed formats, the record is substantially worse. MiniDisc and Memory Stick never achieved ubiqtuity, but they found their niches. UMD failed as a format for anything but the PSP, but ironically was much more open than the other two, having an ECMA standard for the format.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a random component, but external influences direct that random component in a specific direction. For example, how do two bodies reach thermal equilibrium? At the lowest level, its just energy transfer as a result of random collisions between particles. However, if it was completely random, then any final state would be as likely as any other. But that's not what you see in nature --- you have a very strong (and very predictable) drive towards a certain determinable equilibrium temperature, despite the fact that the underlying mechanism is basically random.
Changing of skin color isn't evolution. Its a much more short term and less permanent adaptation.
You mean the marketshare numbers that show Linux with the same desktop share as OS X?
Increasing the RAM from 1GB to 2GB will only increase performance if your benchmark uses more than 1GB of RAM. This benchmark doesn't, so there shouldn't be any difference in performance.
You can buy a PC with the same config cheaper, but not substantially cheaper. I can't speak for the MBP, but when I got my Macbook this summer, I did some looking around, and even if you ignore things like build-quality, most comparable x86 laptops were less than 10% cheaper. If you got a comparably small and sturdy machine, the price was actually substantially higher.
As a former Ubuntu user turned OS X convert, I have to say that it *is* an Ubuntu/OS X horse race, with Windows eating dust far in the rear. I prefer OS X, because it's definitely sexier, but GNOME gets the fundamentals very right.
I highly doubt it. That particular comparison shows one year in the overall six year lifespan of the PS2. How much money was Nintendo making between 2001 and 2005, before the DS took attention off crappy sales of the Gamecube?
If you look at the statistics:
Cumulative Nintendo game sales to March 2005
Cumulative PS2 software sales to July 2005
Even accounting for the small difference in intervals, we can see that the PS2 has sold about 5x as many titles as the Gamecube (which makes sense, given that it sold about 5x as many consoles). Even if Sony spent a billion developing the PS2, and took a billion dollar loss on the production, Nintendo would still have to make enormous margins on each Gamecube to make up for the sheer greater volume of PS2 software sold. If we assume about $7 per game (which is a historical figure from the early PS2 days), and a $2bn setup loss, Sony made about $4bn in profit from license sales. If we assume that Nintendo makes about the same license fee per game, they make about $1bn on GC games. If we further assume the GC had no R&D cost, and they never took any losses on the console, Nintendo would have to make a profit of $136 on each of ~22m Gamecubes sold to offset the extra 700m PS2 games sold. That's absurd for a console that introd at $200, and quickly dropped to $150 then $99.
They may not play Pokemon, but they may play Madden, Zelda, Metroid Prime 3 and Red Steel ...
Yeah, but are they going to play Madden on the system that has Pokemon, or on the system that has Halo or Gran Turismo?
The fact is that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all in competition for the same gamer-dollar.
If Nintendo is targeting the same gamers as Microsoft and Sony, they're screwed. Good first-party titles alone weren't enough to make the Gamecube anything better than an also-ran. Nintendo needs third party support, and that's exactly what they are so very bad at getting.
Super Smash Bros Melee: 3,765,500
Super Mario Sunshine: 2,886,000
The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker: 2,435,500
Metroid Prime: 1,492,500 (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes: 758,000)
Pokemon Colosseum: 1,165,000
Total: 11,744,500
Where did you get those statistics? I highly doubt that they represent sales within the span of one year. Moreover, they represent a small fraction of the PS2's software sales. From the second article, software shipments for the PS2 for the year ending September 30 were 47m. Every single GTA3 game sold over 11m copies apiece, and Gran Turismo 3 is over 14m copies. As of September 2005, the PS1 + PS2 had a total of 1.87bn software units sold. According to Wikipedia, the PS2's share of that was a bit over 1 billion, which makes sense given that sales records put PS1 software shipments at 690m. In comparison, as of March 2005, Nintendo had sold 160m cumulative software units for the Gamecube.
That's the most amazingly contorted logic I've ever heard.
1) If Nintendo was trying to foster goodwill, they would allow you to run unsigned code on the DS. The fact that its easier to run unsigned code on the DS doesn't mean that they suck any less than Sony, it just means they're not as good at system security.
2) How the hell would Nintendo release an update to fix a hardware passthrough? Would they send you a new DS and force you to return the old one? The reason Nintendo isn't cracking down on people bypassing the DS's code signing (because given their past history, they'd put a stop to it in a second if it was easy for them to do so) is because it would be too expensive to keep modifying the DS's hardware every time a hardware work-around was found. Moreover, because the DS hacks are all hardware-based (and clumsy), the probability of them being used for casual piracy is much lower than on the PSP, where the hacks could be exploited in software with no additional equipment.
Nintendo isn't any less "evil" in their lock-down practices than Sony. I've owned every single one of their consoles since the NES, and they are as controlling today as they were back then. The only difference between them and Sony is that Nintendo has had more practice, its tactics are more subtle, and Nintendo fanboys are too stupid to see through them.
Remember, we're talking about a company that kept proprietary media formats for a full decade after its competitors had moved to standard CDs and DVDs. The company that made customers pay $70-$80 for N64 games so they could keep their lucrative cart licensing business. The company that killed their once-extensive third-party support through over-control. The company that elevated region lockouts to a fine art. The company that is getting a free pass at putting region lockouts into the Wii, while Sony gets no credit for making the PSP and PS3 region-free.
The Wii isn't serious competition for Microsoft because they're not targeting the same gamers. Consider the core games of the 360's lineup over the next year or so: Madden/etc, Gears of War, Halo. Do you think people who are into those types of games are going to play Pokemon?
Nintendo may very well be successful in the "casual gamer" market its targeting with the Wii, but the fact remains that the traditional console gaming market is still a multi-billion dollar industry which is still several times larger than any other sub-market of the overall gaming industry. It's going to be either Microsoft or Sony that takes that market.
the real surprise here is that Nintendo's profits are UP when they have been developing the Wii - sure it's a less intensive system that is probably lower in price, but a 'next gen' console should still suck up a bit of profits.
The Wii isn't a new console, it's a refresh of the Gamecube hardware. As such, its development cost is very small compared to the billion dollar+ development costs of the PS3.
They don't turn a blind eye towards it, they just can't do anything about it. The DS's hacks are hardware-based, and are much harder for them to close than the software-based hacks on the PSP.
Nintendo is more anal-retentive about controlling their console than anybody else. That's why the Gamecube used a proprietary disk instead of a standard format (like DVD, or HD-DVD or Blu-Ray).
The deep irony here is that Nintendo isn't doing anything more than Sony to foster that goodwill (the DS requires signed code as well!), it's just that the DS's hardware is much easier to crack...
Can we add a reality-check here?
First, Sony isn't failing. Sony made way more profit than Nintendo for much of the last six years. Was Nintendo failing when the PS2 was reaping record profits for Sony, and the Gamecube was stagnating? Of course not. Companies go through cycles, and some companies take more risk, and thus go through bigger cycles than others.
You're criticizing Sony for bad decision making "from the top down", but do you realize that the rootkit had nothing to do with top Sony management? It was something that a BMG software contractor came up with, and put into BMG's products less than a year after Sony purchased them. Not only was it not anybody at Sony's idea to put that software in the CDs, but they top people at Sony didn't even know about it.
Yes, Sony get sued, and payed for it, because as BMG's new owner, they were legally liable. That's absolutely fair. However, while you can fault them for not being proactive in finding out what their newly acquired subsidiary was doing, but you can hardly attribute the grand conspiracy among top-Sony management that many Slashdotters try to work in.
This is a good point, and one I think a lot of Slashdotters are missing. Sony took losses in order to launch the PS2 as well. And they made an assload of money on it over the last six years. Nintendo has adopted an opposite approach --- they consistently make a profit, and take less risk, but they make less money overall. Both approaches are valid ones.
The real news will come three or four years from now. If Sony hasn't made a net profit on the PS3 by then, then its fair to deride them for it. Until then, it's more of a "so what?"
It's not really the case that the people who visit those sites are the ones who are part of Sony's launch plans. Most of those people won't buy a console at launch anyway, because they know enough to not buy something that has no games. Instead, consider all those people who buy a new copy of Madden every year. Consider the college kids with rich parents that play Halo with their frat brothers. There are a lot of those people, and if Sony gets its marketing right, they'll snap up the PS3, Lik-Sang or not.
That's not lying, that's called "compliance with local regulations". Stuff that is tested and compliant in the US and Canada is not necessarily tested and compliant in Europe. Indeed, EU regulations are usually much more stringent. For example, many companies have had to change their products to be ROHS compliant in order to sell in most EU member nations. Yet, products that are not ROHS compliant can still be sold in the US and Canada with no problems.
That would only be a correct argument if we were talking about the US prior to the consolidation of federal power. And at that time, you may well have had to file a lawsuit in each state in order to get it to stick nationally.
However, in the present US, the federal government controls all inter-state commerce. Thus, filing in any state and showing that a federal law was violated stops the whole thing. However, the EU does not work that way! The EU member states are far more independent, and winning a case in one locale does not necessarily imply it'll hold everywhere.
You couldn't even open that thing in an airplane seat. Hell, my 13.3" macbook is almost too big for comfortable economy-class use. And the attendant back, pain, oh god...
I don't know what kind of idiot would subject themselves to this. Why not just get a nice big external display like everyone else does?
Whatever BSG's writers want, give it to them. They're far better than the writers on nearly every other one of your shows, and is one of the highlights of a network this is otherwise deservedly in last place among the big four.
I think there are a lot of hold-outs from when Dell didn't suck. Dell used to make very good machines at reasonable prices. They weren't the cheapest (that was Gateway), but it wasn't the most expensive, either.
I've got a Dell D300 that'll be seeing its ninth birthday next january. In that time, it got a solid five years of use as a workstation, and another three and a half as a server for my parents. I shut it down over the summer, simply because they didn't need it anymore. I opened it to find it full of drywall dust, because apparently nobody had thought to remove it from the closet while they renovated the basement last year.
I replaced that Dell D300 with an Inspiron 8200. It wasn't very good. It was a flimsy, awkward thing, the screen had to be replaced after a year, and after the three-year warranty ran out, the DVD drive started to get sketchy. And that was a $2k machine too --- I shudder to think what the $1000 boxes are like.
Actually, Dell's total revenues are only about thrice as large as Apple's. The difference in machines shipped is probably not much different. While Apple might have higher margins on its machines, it doesn't sell the kind of high-end server setups Dell does.
In any case, if you want to talk quality, look at the Consumer Reports comparisons. Apple is consistently on top, based on statistics about customer satisfaction and repair rates.
Heh. I hope nobody clues the MPAA into Unison. It's a nice Mac program that makes usenet, well, usable for Mac people...
This sub-thread is about why the original poster insisted that Blu-Ray is more proprietary than DVD. Whether Sony has been historically successful with new formats is neither here nor there.
Moreover, Sony's track record with consortium-backed formats is quite good. Sony and Philips were part of the original consortium that created the CD, and both were founding members of the DVD Forum.
Regarding non-consortium-backed formats, the record is substantially worse. MiniDisc and Memory Stick never achieved ubiqtuity, but they found their niches. UMD failed as a format for anything but the PSP, but ironically was much more open than the other two, having an ECMA standard for the format.
So? If something didn't happen in Boston, it didn't happen in Boston. Even if way more people know where Boston is, it still didn't happen in Boston.