1) Total. The DS has sold 22m units, the PSP has shipped 20m units. Hence the 10% off bit.
2) The "shipped" vs "sold" distinction is one I've heard before, and one that reaks if idiocy. Do you know how expensive it is to keep unsold inventory around? There are entire classes management folks take on how to avoid standing inventory. Moreover, its not like Walmart will order more PSPs (causing the shipped count to increase), before it sells the ones it has. Thus, the number of units shipped should be very close to the number of units sold.
Who said anything about the web? The internet, in general, is anonymous. Facebook is an onymous site. This means the same rules that apply to the internet in general apply to this location in specific. If you're on Facebook, I can do a ton of research on you because I know your name and the college you go to. Does this mean it's ethical to gather all the info and post it?
There is a difference between someone else digging around to get your information, and posting that information yourself on the goddamn internet. And there is a distinction between publishing little bits about yourself here (often because you can't help it --- a lot of these public records are made without your explicit consent), and between aggregating and posting them YOURSELF.
Who said anything about private details? It's just about regular friendly relationships. You may not discuss abortion with all your friends at the same time. This doesn't mean you would actively hide your opinions from your friends, but you probably don't want them broadcast either.
That's the fundemental distinction you're failing to make. A post on a wall is not like an off-had comment (in person) to a friend. It's like writing something in spray-paint on somebody's house. Hence the term "wall". Do you spray-paint comments about abortion on your friend's house, with the expectation that only he'll read them?
If it weirds you out, then you shouldn't be posting that information on the FUCKING INTERNET!
This new facebook feature doesn't do anything that I couldn't have hacked up in a Python script in a couple of days. All that information is not only public, but open for everyone to see on your profile.
Seriously. As a buyer, its very hard to get scammed on EBay, as long as you use your credit card, or better yet, Paypal. If the seller doesn't ship, get the charges overturned. There is a complete electronic paper trail on the site that provides any evidence you need.
It's quite true in a sense, though of course it depends on your definition of "great". If "great" is just someone who is very good at his/her job, then yes, you can be a "great" programmer without ever using Lisp. However, if you define "great" to mean somebody who really has a higher-level perspective about programming as a whole, then I'd have to say that you can't be "great" without experiencing Lisp or something like it.
Put simply, different languages represent different areas in the design space of programming languages. C represents one area, C++/Java/C# another set of closely-grouped areas, Ruby another, Python another, etc. Lisp represents a very large, and to many people used to C++/Java/etc, very novel portion of the design space, as does ML and its kin. A truely great programmer, then, must not only be proficient in the usage of a specific tool that represents a specific point in the design space, but must have a perspective of the whole design space. He must be able to look at specific solutions, and realize when they are just instances of a higher-order, more generalized principle. The only way to gain that perspective is to explore the design space, and mastering Lisp is a way to explore a very large and unique part of that space.
There's a saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This refers to a general notion that our tools limit the ways in which we think about solving problems. Let me give you a concrete example. Lisp has a feature called multi-method dispatch, in which the target of a polymorphic call is decided by the types of more than one of the arguments. To someone who has only ever used a language with single-dispatch (ie: C++/Java/C#'s virtual methods), the very idea of using multiple-dispatch to solve a particular problem never even comes to mind. He makes due with what he has, using techniques like the "visitor pattern", and sits content thinking that this is the best he can do. Somebody who knows Lisp, on the other hand, might still have to use the visitor pattern (because his boss forces him to use Java), but he'll realize that its just a way to do double-dispatch in a single-dispatch language, and that increased understanding of the nature of the solution will help him write better code.
While "sun" and "moon" are generic terms, "the sun" and "the moon" are the proper names for our star and earth's moon, respectively, in standard english text.
"Sol" is not an English term for "the sun". It's a latin term, used by people who are tools.
In English, it's called the The Sun, not Sol. You don't go around using other random Latin words in otherwise regular English text, do you? I don't suppose you go around calling the Earth "Terra" hmm?
People paid a premium for a weaker system because it had GAMES. The PS2 launched a year before the XBox and the GC. During that time, it sold okay, but was still losing to the PS1 at that point. However, what it did do in that year was build up a great library of games. So when the race actually got started in 2001 with the XBox and GC launches, the PS2 ate their lunch, because it had a much better library.
Remember, its not just installed-base that determines where the third-parties will go. If it were, the Dreamcast would've been the victor last generation. What matters is the way the company supports third-parties. Sony is very good at this, Microsot is getting better at this, and Nintendo sucks at this.
1) There is no such thing as a digital connector! Even something like TOSLINK is an analog cable carrying an analog signal that represents a digital signal. Gold plating reduces attenuation at the connector, and hence improves your signal quality. This is true for any signal, digital or not.
2) Whether you'd notice or not depends on the application. Remember, most audio-visual digital signals are extremely low-level. We're not talking about sending a PCM over USB, and seeing a corrupt file, we're talking about sending raw bits to the output hardware. Take the DVI specification, for example. DVI calls for a maximum bit-error-rate of 1e-9. On a 1920x1200 display running at 60 Hz, that's a pixel error once every ~7 seconds. Most people don't even notice that, as it just shows up as a momentary dot of the wrong color. Audio is more complicated, because we're talking about feeding a digital signal into a DAC. DAC's don't faithfully reproduce the exact digital signal fed to them. DAC's have all sorts of analog-domain problems, and very minor differences with clocking or bit-errors can result in unexpected output. First, consider bit-errors in the least-significant bits of the signal. Such bit-errors will be handled just fine in the DAC, and output as a sample of an incorrect magnitude. The user won't notice something glaringly wrong in such cases. Second, consider bit-errors in the higher-order bits of the sample. Depending on the surrounding samples (ie: if we get something like 245 -> 10020 -> 232), the DAC won't faithfully output this random sample, but will most likely just distort the signal near that point.
And don't get me started on jitter. Jitter can really mess with the linearity of most DACs. Of course, the brilliant guys you designed SPDIF had the brains to design a digital link, that unlike nearly every other digital link on the planet, doesn't have either a seperate or an embedded clock signal. That causes all sorts of entertaining stuff on the DAC side, where electronics have to divine the clock information from the signal.
No doubt. My point was just to address the constant presumption that "digital == bit-accurate" so often seen among geeks that know a little less than they should.
I doubt that many people who don't have a HDTV would get a PS3 because I can't really distinguish its advantages over the 360 other than offering a blu-ray player and maybe slightly better graphics.
And games???
Why does everyone assume that Sony's strategy is to have a more expensive console that doesn't offer anything over its competition? Sony has always bet on the fact that its 3rd party developer base, which it has nurtured over the last ten years with the PS1 and PS2, would be the pivotal factor in allowing them to go with a higher-end console.
It's not hard to see why they might go into this believing that the games will be firmly on their side. Sony, last time around, managed to sell a console that had similar graphics to the GC, while being $100 more expensive, and inferior graphics to the XBox, despite being the same price. Why? Because it had a vastly superior gaming library.
If Sony misjudged their 3rd-party support, then they're sunk, regardless of Blu-Ray, or HDMI, or anything else. If they didn't, they're going to win, again, regardless of Blu-Ray, HDMI, or anything else. Since the NES, its always the console with the largest and most varied 3rd-party support that won. This was true for the NES, SNES, PSX, and PS2. It was why Sega quit the market, why N64 gave up the market lead to Sony with the N64, and why Microsoft lost tons of money on the XBox.
Try $500 for a console, $25 for another controller, and $60 for a game. Even with Atlanta's insane sales tax, that comes out to $626. Amortized over a projected 5-year lifespan, and adding in 5% interest you could've earned on that money instead, we're talking about $11 a month + change.
Heck, that's less than my Sirius bill every month...
No printer I've bought in the last several years has come with a USB cable. Neither did my PSP as a matter of fact, though nobody on Slashdot ever commented on it.
HD is a feature that about a 1/3 of the current PS3 buyers will be able to use. In the next couple of years, that's going to rise to over 1/2. By the end of the PS3's shelf-life, most people will have HDTVs. Remember, we're talking about a product with a projected 6-year lifespan. That's 2012 for those keeping count. Also remember that fully half of PS2s ever sold were sold after the first couple of years of the console's existance.
Is a feature worthless just because "only" a third of your current buyers will be able to use it? Is a feature worthless if the majority of your buyers can be expected to use it as the product matures?
The thing you have to realize is that there is no such thing as a digital signal. Your "digital" signal is still an RF-domain analog signal on a conductor. All the analog-RF stuff, like attenuation losses in the cable, losses in the connectors, etc, is just as relevant for digital signals as analog ones.
The reason "digital" tends to be associated with "bit-perfect" is that digital signals (eg: ethernet, USB) tend to include error-correction layers. However, a large class of digital signals, those in audio and video, include no such error correction! You have excessive reflection on a DVI connector, you lose information, digital or not.
I once had a Circuit City guy try to say that gold-plated connectors were better when you wanted to use a long cable. I went on a diatribe about propagation losses in cabling and connectors, reflections, etc. I wonder if he realized I was saying that he was full of shit, buried in the engineering jargon...
Why support progressive scan (as the Gamecube does and the Wii will), but not ship the component cables required to use it? If anything, market pentration for progressive scan is much higher than the market pentration for HDTV.
It's not really a sensical argument. Console makers have been shipping the cheapest cables they can get away with since the dawn of time.
To be fair, the word "digital" should be used carefully in such situations. Digital != Bit-Accurate, as geeks tend to assume. Digital protocols often to include error correction layers, but that is not necessarily the case. DVI, the underlying protocol for HDMI, does not include any error correction, at all. It's more resistant to errors due to noise, because its uses differential signaling, but its not immune to bit-errors. Thus, given DVI's relatively high sigaling rate (165 MHz), cable quality might be an issue with very long runs.
It should also be noted that the traditional "digital" signals people like to argue over, for example SPDIF, also include no error correction whatsoever.
That is not to say that there is any merit in oxygen-free copper for HDMI cables, but rather that the world is a lot more complex than knee-jerkers on both sides of this particular argument realize.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Total. The DS has sold 22m units, the PSP has shipped 20m units. Hence the 10% off bit.
2) The "shipped" vs "sold" distinction is one I've heard before, and one that reaks if idiocy. Do you know how expensive it is to keep unsold inventory around? There are entire classes management folks take on how to avoid standing inventory. Moreover, its not like Walmart will order more PSPs (causing the shipped count to increase), before it sells the ones it has. Thus, the number of units shipped should be very close to the number of units sold.
Who said anything about the web? The internet, in general, is anonymous. Facebook is an onymous site. This means the same rules that apply to the internet in general apply to this location in specific. If you're on Facebook, I can do a ton of research on you because I know your name and the college you go to. Does this mean it's ethical to gather all the info and post it?
There is a difference between someone else digging around to get your information, and posting that information yourself on the goddamn internet. And there is a distinction between publishing little bits about yourself here (often because you can't help it --- a lot of these public records are made without your explicit consent), and between aggregating and posting them YOURSELF.
Who said anything about private details? It's just about regular friendly relationships. You may not discuss abortion with all your friends at the same time. This doesn't mean you would actively hide your opinions from your friends, but you probably don't want them broadcast either.
That's the fundemental distinction you're failing to make. A post on a wall is not like an off-had comment (in person) to a friend. It's like writing something in spray-paint on somebody's house. Hence the term "wall". Do you spray-paint comments about abortion on your friend's house, with the expectation that only he'll read them?
Again.
If it weirds you out, then you shouldn't be posting that information on the FUCKING INTERNET!
This new facebook feature doesn't do anything that I couldn't have hacked up in a Python script in a couple of days. All that information is not only public, but open for everyone to see on your profile.
And yes, we do not want our breakups made public.
Then don't post it on the fucking internet!
I'd kill to play FF7 again on a portable system. Download time? A 600MB game'd take me about 10 minutes...
Seriously. As a buyer, its very hard to get scammed on EBay, as long as you use your credit card, or better yet, Paypal. If the seller doesn't ship, get the charges overturned. There is a complete electronic paper trail on the site that provides any evidence you need.
Yet, the PSP's sales are only off by about 10% from the DS's, despite the fact that the PSP is much more expensive...
It's quite true in a sense, though of course it depends on your definition of "great". If "great" is just someone who is very good at his/her job, then yes, you can be a "great" programmer without ever using Lisp. However, if you define "great" to mean somebody who really has a higher-level perspective about programming as a whole, then I'd have to say that you can't be "great" without experiencing Lisp or something like it.
Put simply, different languages represent different areas in the design space of programming languages. C represents one area, C++/Java/C# another set of closely-grouped areas, Ruby another, Python another, etc. Lisp represents a very large, and to many people used to C++/Java/etc, very novel portion of the design space, as does ML and its kin. A truely great programmer, then, must not only be proficient in the usage of a specific tool that represents a specific point in the design space, but must have a perspective of the whole design space. He must be able to look at specific solutions, and realize when they are just instances of a higher-order, more generalized principle. The only way to gain that perspective is to explore the design space, and mastering Lisp is a way to explore a very large and unique part of that space.
There's a saying that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This refers to a general notion that our tools limit the ways in which we think about solving problems. Let me give you a concrete example. Lisp has a feature called multi-method dispatch, in which the target of a polymorphic call is decided by the types of more than one of the arguments. To someone who has only ever used a language with single-dispatch (ie: C++/Java/C#'s virtual methods), the very idea of using multiple-dispatch to solve a particular problem never even comes to mind. He makes due with what he has, using techniques like the "visitor pattern", and sits content thinking that this is the best he can do. Somebody who knows Lisp, on the other hand, might still have to use the visitor pattern (because his boss forces him to use Java), but he'll realize that its just a way to do double-dispatch in a single-dispatch language, and that increased understanding of the nature of the solution will help him write better code.
While "sun" and "moon" are generic terms, "the sun" and "the moon" are the proper names for our star and earth's moon, respectively, in standard english text.
"Sol" is not an English term for "the sun". It's a latin term, used by people who are tools.
In English, it's called the The Sun, not Sol. You don't go around using other random Latin words in otherwise regular English text, do you? I don't suppose you go around calling the Earth "Terra" hmm?
Fucking sci-fi nerds...
People paid a premium for a weaker system because it had GAMES. The PS2 launched a year before the XBox and the GC. During that time, it sold okay, but was still losing to the PS1 at that point. However, what it did do in that year was build up a great library of games. So when the race actually got started in 2001 with the XBox and GC launches, the PS2 ate their lunch, because it had a much better library.
Remember, its not just installed-base that determines where the third-parties will go. If it were, the Dreamcast would've been the victor last generation. What matters is the way the company supports third-parties. Sony is very good at this, Microsot is getting better at this, and Nintendo sucks at this.
Uh, I have the standard $13 a month Sirius subscription. You're confusing amortized monthly cost with total walk-out cost.
There are two seperate points to make:
1) There is no such thing as a digital connector! Even something like TOSLINK is an analog cable carrying an analog signal that represents a digital signal. Gold plating reduces attenuation at the connector, and hence improves your signal quality. This is true for any signal, digital or not.
2) Whether you'd notice or not depends on the application. Remember, most audio-visual digital signals are extremely low-level. We're not talking about sending a PCM over USB, and seeing a corrupt file, we're talking about sending raw bits to the output hardware. Take the DVI specification, for example. DVI calls for a maximum bit-error-rate of 1e-9. On a 1920x1200 display running at 60 Hz, that's a pixel error once every ~7 seconds. Most people don't even notice that, as it just shows up as a momentary dot of the wrong color. Audio is more complicated, because we're talking about feeding a digital signal into a DAC. DAC's don't faithfully reproduce the exact digital signal fed to them. DAC's have all sorts of analog-domain problems, and very minor differences with clocking or bit-errors can result in unexpected output. First, consider bit-errors in the least-significant bits of the signal. Such bit-errors will be handled just fine in the DAC, and output as a sample of an incorrect magnitude. The user won't notice something glaringly wrong in such cases. Second, consider bit-errors in the higher-order bits of the sample. Depending on the surrounding samples (ie: if we get something like 245 -> 10020 -> 232), the DAC won't faithfully output this random sample, but will most likely just distort the signal near that point.
And don't get me started on jitter. Jitter can really mess with the linearity of most DACs. Of course, the brilliant guys you designed SPDIF had the brains to design a digital link, that unlike nearly every other digital link on the planet, doesn't have either a seperate or an embedded clock signal. That causes all sorts of entertaining stuff on the DAC side, where electronics have to divine the clock information from the signal.
No doubt. My point was just to address the constant presumption that "digital == bit-accurate" so often seen among geeks that know a little less than they should.
I doubt that many people who don't have a HDTV would get a PS3 because I can't really distinguish its advantages over the 360 other than offering a blu-ray player and maybe slightly better graphics.
And games???
Why does everyone assume that Sony's strategy is to have a more expensive console that doesn't offer anything over its competition? Sony has always bet on the fact that its 3rd party developer base, which it has nurtured over the last ten years with the PS1 and PS2, would be the pivotal factor in allowing them to go with a higher-end console.
It's not hard to see why they might go into this believing that the games will be firmly on their side. Sony, last time around, managed to sell a console that had similar graphics to the GC, while being $100 more expensive, and inferior graphics to the XBox, despite being the same price. Why? Because it had a vastly superior gaming library.
If Sony misjudged their 3rd-party support, then they're sunk, regardless of Blu-Ray, or HDMI, or anything else. If they didn't, they're going to win, again, regardless of Blu-Ray, HDMI, or anything else. Since the NES, its always the console with the largest and most varied 3rd-party support that won. This was true for the NES, SNES, PSX, and PS2. It was why Sega quit the market, why N64 gave up the market lead to Sony with the N64, and why Microsoft lost tons of money on the XBox.
Way to make up numbers.
Try $500 for a console, $25 for another controller, and $60 for a game. Even with Atlanta's insane sales tax, that comes out to $626. Amortized over a projected 5-year lifespan, and adding in 5% interest you could've earned on that money instead, we're talking about $11 a month + change.
Heck, that's less than my Sirius bill every month...
The PS3 has a standard HDMI port.
No printer I've bought in the last several years has come with a USB cable. Neither did my PSP as a matter of fact, though nobody on Slashdot ever commented on it.
HD is a feature that about a 1/3 of the current PS3 buyers will be able to use. In the next couple of years, that's going to rise to over 1/2. By the end of the PS3's shelf-life, most people will have HDTVs. Remember, we're talking about a product with a projected 6-year lifespan. That's 2012 for those keeping count. Also remember that fully half of PS2s ever sold were sold after the first couple of years of the console's existance.
Is a feature worthless just because "only" a third of your current buyers will be able to use it? Is a feature worthless if the majority of your buyers can be expected to use it as the product matures?
The thing you have to realize is that there is no such thing as a digital signal. Your "digital" signal is still an RF-domain analog signal on a conductor. All the analog-RF stuff, like attenuation losses in the cable, losses in the connectors, etc, is just as relevant for digital signals as analog ones.
The reason "digital" tends to be associated with "bit-perfect" is that digital signals (eg: ethernet, USB) tend to include error-correction layers. However, a large class of digital signals, those in audio and video, include no such error correction! You have excessive reflection on a DVI connector, you lose information, digital or not.
Holy crap. That's a new one.
I once had a Circuit City guy try to say that gold-plated connectors were better when you wanted to use a long cable. I went on a diatribe about propagation losses in cabling and connectors, reflections, etc. I wonder if he realized I was saying that he was full of shit, buried in the engineering jargon...
the PS3 is trying to push HDTV and how great it will be for gaming
You don't need HDMI cables to play games in HD.
Why support progressive scan (as the Gamecube does and the Wii will), but not ship the component cables required to use it? If anything, market pentration for progressive scan is much higher than the market pentration for HDTV.
It's not really a sensical argument. Console makers have been shipping the cheapest cables they can get away with since the dawn of time.
To be fair, the word "digital" should be used carefully in such situations. Digital != Bit-Accurate, as geeks tend to assume. Digital protocols often to include error correction layers, but that is not necessarily the case. DVI, the underlying protocol for HDMI, does not include any error correction, at all. It's more resistant to errors due to noise, because its uses differential signaling, but its not immune to bit-errors. Thus, given DVI's relatively high sigaling rate (165 MHz), cable quality might be an issue with very long runs.
It should also be noted that the traditional "digital" signals people like to argue over, for example SPDIF, also include no error correction whatsoever.
That is not to say that there is any merit in oxygen-free copper for HDMI cables, but rather that the world is a lot more complex than knee-jerkers on both sides of this particular argument realize.
Except every major console in history has shipped with a lowest-common-denominator cable.
Does the 360 ship with a component cable? Did the dreamcast ship with a VGA cable?
Will the Wii ship with a component cable, despite the fact that its required to enable progressive-scan mode? The GC didn't...