If the PS/3 were pulled from the market developers would drop it. All their calculations that justify their current projects expect the PS/3 to be selling and increasing the number of potential customers for years.
I agree completely. But that's IF it gets pulled from the market. My comment was in response to your previous post that stated
...Consider that if they win there will never be another PS3 game...
PP winning the suit does not mean that the PS3 will be pulled from the market (for reasons stated in the part of my post you did not quote).
Really? If they win, would the law forbid Sony or other developers from creating games for the existing consoles? If Sony really thought they could lose the case, they'd probably either negotiate a settlement or start re-engineering the console to avoid the supposed patent infringement while maintaining software compatibility. The litigation could take years to be resolved anyway. I doubt current PS3 owners have anything to worry about from this.
Halo didn't generate the hype. It was as much a part of the hype as anything else. Quake was already on its third iteration when Halo hit the street and the FPS genre was already well established.
I can't imagine that. I'm still too busy imagining the losses MS will take after their price cut, considering the 360 is still not profitable and they are going to shell out over $1 Billion to fix a blatant hardware defect.
Also, BluRay is gaming-related since it allows developers to provide more game content.
I'll be pure engineer here - someone at Microsoft redid the formula, given the knowledge of failures that have happened since release. This time around, the math said that enough future sales would be lost to outweigh the cost of extending the warranty. It's really that simple. It's also interesting to note here that they didn't make it a lifetime warranty (20 years or something). They probably ran that formula too, and decided that the math tips the other way if you let it last forever.
I don't think it's really that simple. Consider, from a non-engineering perspective:
MS could have soon been facing a class action suit regarding defects in the 360.
Because they are not doing it out of good will but for damage control (e.g., to avoid class action). Plus, it makes it known that they were bullshitting when they repeatedly claimed that the 360 doesn't have a higher than normal defect rate
As for warranties, I'd much rather have a 15 month warranty on a product with about a 1 percent defect rate than a 3 year warranty on one that has a defect rate that is somewhere less than 50 percent.
Or country;-) The word is bigot. We don't need any neologism for it.
Yes, country definitely makes the list. Bigot won't work though. First, its definition is closer to fanboy than {flame,foe}boy. More importantly, while a neologism may not strictly be required, "bigot" isn't nearly sexy enough to be used in a Web 2.0 environment.
You bring up a good point with case of the "inverse fanboy" who feverishly, persistently, and often irrationally criticizes or insults a particular company or product. The phenomenon is widespread but I think it needs a better name. If there's not a prevalent term yet, I vote for "flameboy" or "foeboy".
Until Sony admits they are selling the console equivalent of the Bugatti Veyron, nothing much is going to change in the marketplace. Consider the commonalities. Exceptional performance; pushing the envelope; losing considerable amounts of money when each one is sold? Rabid fans line up to buy one. Not much you can do but show it off to your friends. All that power seems a bit out of reach for practical purposes. Flagship for the company.
The problem with your example is that the Bugatti Veyron would likely be impractical for most people, even at an affordable price. The PS3 doesn't look so bad when you consider that most of the "commonalities" you list also exist between the PS3 and PS2. And the PS2 was (and still is) quite successful.
Oh yes the revolutionary business model of selling a product for a reasonable price while still making a profit. Opposed to Sony's excellent method of selling at a staggeringly high price and *still* making a loss on each unit sold. Genius.
So they're going to sell it at more of a loss than originally? Especially with games for the thing being expensive to make?
Not necessarily. Production costs are apparently coming down so they will only take more of a loss if the price cut is greater than the reduction in production costs.
Within'? Note I used the term 'atmosphere propagation', the radar is still following a path between the sand particles and gravel, so it might be hairsplitting, this is still stuff piled on top the earth, not inside of it. Even Ground Penetrating Radar relies on there being some path to and from the target, even it it's between the granules in minerals.
That's a little misleading. Radar waves don't have to sneak through gaps between particles or granules. It has more to do with the dielectric properties of the material. Glass doesn't have gaps but radar can penetrate it. Water doesn't have gaps either but can be penetrated - the amount of penetration depends on radar range, power, & frequency and the dielectric properties of the water. Lower frequencies tend to have better ground penetration but also have lower bandwidth so they yield a lower resolution.
This is what I consider to be the "tragedy of the commons" for software engineering jobs. When I was a programmer, the people who did the least documentation were the fastest, and often the only folks who could approach certain parts of code, and so held in the highest esteem by the executives. Now I only write code for my own projects.
The problem is that attitude only works in certain types of environments, such as one where every programmer is working on their own one-person project. Based on what you wrote, I guess it would have actually been to your benefit to intentionally make your code harder for others to maintain.
When I was a programmer, the people who did the least documentation were often fastest, usually the sloppiest, and often the only folks who could approach certain parts of code. So they got stuck maintaining those parts of code instead of moving on to better projects. They were also less likely to be selected for larger projects that required collaborative development because neither the project leads nor the other programmers wanted to work with them. Some of them eventually learned to play nice with the other programmers. The ones that didn't were encouraged to pursue other career options.
Luck of the draw. A couple people have commented that there are 4 different images that may, seemingly randomly, appear when you go to the main Dell page. You happened to get lucky and get the Ubuntu image. If you had not happened to get that image, there would not have been an intuitive way to navigate to the E1505N page.
I went to configure an E1505N laptop. With a 2.0 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, and 120 GB HD it totaled just under $1000. At that price, I'm more inclined to get the comparable MacBook ($1300) which is better in a number of ways (thinner, slightly faster CPU, built-in camera,...) and can run Ubuntu through VMware.
Hopefully, Dell will break into the linux market with these offerings and eventually have a larger/better selection in the future.
They are on a back page. If you go to Dell's web site and navigate to buy an E1505 laptop, Ubuntu is not an OS option anywhere along the way. I had to type Ubuntu in the search box to find the page where I could see/configure one.
Do third-world children really abuse what they own like that? Or is that the way a first world child would?
They probably don't. But their environment does. In contrast to the ClassMate, OLPC has no openings so that sand won't penetrate it. It also has a sealed keyboard so that water (read: rain) can be poured on it without damaging the laptop. OLPC was specifically designed to be used in a third world environment.
It would be interesting to see the ways that people would circumvent an email tax. I can see email riding over IM connections with the localhost email client using the IM client as a mail server on P2P email system.
Worst case would be a per-byte tax on internet connections. That one would be hard to beat.
There are billions of colors. We see only three. A few see four.
Technically speaking, the color of light is basically the frequency of the EM radiation. Since there are billions of frequencies at which light could be emitted between ultraviolet and infrared band, there are billions of color.
While most of your post is accurate, the second paragraph quoted above is misleading. Color, in this context, is phenomenological. It is not simply the frequency of light. We see many more than 3 colors. While your statement that there are "billions of frequencies at which light could be emitted" is technically correct, those billions of frequencies do not correspond to all the colors we can perceive. There is no single frequency of light that corresponds to the color brown.
The other concern is that Intel gouges prices to push OLPC out of the market, then begins raising prices. It creates profit for Intel but a significantly smaller market for the laptops, which defeats the whole purpose of OLPC.
I suddenly felt as though Half Life 2 could one day be a possible future, whirling observer bots and all!
Putting it in that perspective, the whirling observer bots don't bother me at all. It's those pesky headcrabs that try to sneak up on my while I'm busily typing away at me desk that really worry me.
I would have strongly agreed with you about 10 years ago. I had a connection to get German coffee (Tchibo, IIRC) and would get it whenever I could. However, over the last decade or so, the quality and variety of coffee, beer, and some other specialty foods in the U.S. has improved greatly. Regardless of what people think of Starbucks coffee, I think the ubiquity of that chain raised the bar for coffee and sparked the improved quality and variety of coffee in the U.S. Now, when I travel to Germany, I still enjoy a good cup or German coffee but I no longer feel like I'm been missing out in the U.S.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely. But that's IF it gets pulled from the market. My comment was in response to your previous post that stated
PP winning the suit does not mean that the PS3 will be pulled from the market (for reasons stated in the part of my post you did not quote).
Really? If they win, would the law forbid Sony or other developers from creating games for the existing consoles? If Sony really thought they could lose the case, they'd probably either negotiate a settlement or start re-engineering the console to avoid the supposed patent infringement while maintaining software compatibility. The litigation could take years to be resolved anyway. I doubt current PS3 owners have anything to worry about from this.
But with bad news, it would help convey a sense of understanding or empathy. For example:
:-(
Mr. Johnson,
Your employment here at MegaCorp is terminated, effective immediately
Director,
Human Resources
Yes, you have demonstrated that in spades.
Halo didn't generate the hype. It was as much a part of the hype as anything else. Quake was already on its third iteration when Halo hit the street and the FPS genre was already well established.
The 3-year warranty only covers the RRoD problem. Anything else falls under the previous warranty.
I can't imagine that. I'm still too busy imagining the losses MS will take after their price cut, considering the 360 is still not profitable and they are going to shell out over $1 Billion to fix a blatant hardware defect.
Also, BluRay is gaming-related since it allows developers to provide more game content.
I don't think it's really that simple. Consider, from a non-engineering perspective:
Because they are not doing it out of good will but for damage control (e.g., to avoid class action). Plus, it makes it known that they were bullshitting when they repeatedly claimed that the 360 doesn't have a higher than normal defect rate
As for warranties, I'd much rather have a 15 month warranty on a product with about a 1 percent defect rate than a 3 year warranty on one that has a defect rate that is somewhere less than 50 percent.
Yes, country definitely makes the list. Bigot won't work though. First, its definition is closer to fanboy than {flame,foe}boy. More importantly, while a neologism may not strictly be required, "bigot" isn't nearly sexy enough to be used in a Web 2.0 environment.
You bring up a good point with case of the "inverse fanboy" who feverishly, persistently, and often irrationally criticizes or insults a particular company or product. The phenomenon is widespread but I think it needs a better name. If there's not a prevalent term yet, I vote for "flameboy" or "foeboy".
The problem with your example is that the Bugatti Veyron would likely be impractical for most people, even at an affordable price. The PS3 doesn't look so bad when you consider that most of the "commonalities" you list also exist between the PS3 and PS2. And the PS2 was (and still is) quite successful.
The business model is not without precedent.
sed s/Sony/Microsoft/ $PARENT_POST
Not necessarily. Production costs are apparently coming down so they will only take more of a loss if the price cut is greater than the reduction in production costs.
That's a little misleading. Radar waves don't have to sneak through gaps between particles or granules. It has more to do with the dielectric properties of the material. Glass doesn't have gaps but radar can penetrate it. Water doesn't have gaps either but can be penetrated - the amount of penetration depends on radar range, power, & frequency and the dielectric properties of the water. Lower frequencies tend to have better ground penetration but also have lower bandwidth so they yield a lower resolution.
The problem is that attitude only works in certain types of environments, such as one where every programmer is working on their own one-person project. Based on what you wrote, I guess it would have actually been to your benefit to intentionally make your code harder for others to maintain.
When I was a programmer, the people who did the least documentation were often fastest, usually the sloppiest, and often the only folks who could approach certain parts of code. So they got stuck maintaining those parts of code instead of moving on to better projects. They were also less likely to be selected for larger projects that required collaborative development because neither the project leads nor the other programmers wanted to work with them. Some of them eventually learned to play nice with the other programmers. The ones that didn't were encouraged to pursue other career options.
Luck of the draw. A couple people have commented that there are 4 different images that may, seemingly randomly, appear when you go to the main Dell page. You happened to get lucky and get the Ubuntu image. If you had not happened to get that image, there would not have been an intuitive way to navigate to the E1505N page.
I went to configure an E1505N laptop. With a 2.0 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, and 120 GB HD it totaled just under $1000. At that price, I'm more inclined to get the comparable MacBook ($1300) which is better in a number of ways (thinner, slightly faster CPU, built-in camera,...) and can run Ubuntu through VMware. Hopefully, Dell will break into the linux market with these offerings and eventually have a larger/better selection in the future.
They are on a back page. If you go to Dell's web site and navigate to buy an E1505 laptop, Ubuntu is not an OS option anywhere along the way. I had to type Ubuntu in the search box to find the page where I could see/configure one.
They probably don't. But their environment does. In contrast to the ClassMate, OLPC has no openings so that sand won't penetrate it. It also has a sealed keyboard so that water (read: rain) can be poured on it without damaging the laptop. OLPC was specifically designed to be used in a third world environment.
It would be interesting to see the ways that people would circumvent an email tax. I can see email riding over IM connections with the localhost email client using the IM client as a mail server on P2P email system. Worst case would be a per-byte tax on internet connections. That one would be hard to beat.
While most of your post is accurate, the second paragraph quoted above is misleading. Color, in this context, is phenomenological. It is not simply the frequency of light. We see many more than 3 colors. While your statement that there are "billions of frequencies at which light could be emitted" is technically correct, those billions of frequencies do not correspond to all the colors we can perceive. There is no single frequency of light that corresponds to the color brown.
The other concern is that Intel gouges prices to push OLPC out of the market, then begins raising prices. It creates profit for Intel but a significantly smaller market for the laptops, which defeats the whole purpose of OLPC.
Putting it in that perspective, the whirling observer bots don't bother me at all. It's those pesky headcrabs that try to sneak up on my while I'm busily typing away at me desk that really worry me.
I would have strongly agreed with you about 10 years ago. I had a connection to get German coffee (Tchibo, IIRC) and would get it whenever I could. However, over the last decade or so, the quality and variety of coffee, beer, and some other specialty foods in the U.S. has improved greatly. Regardless of what people think of Starbucks coffee, I think the ubiquity of that chain raised the bar for coffee and sparked the improved quality and variety of coffee in the U.S. Now, when I travel to Germany, I still enjoy a good cup or German coffee but I no longer feel like I'm been missing out in the U.S.