They haven't been able to do it when they didn't already have a natural monopoly to build on. (First MSDOS, then Windows.) Windows, Excel, IE, DirectX all built on natural monopolies
The XBox has been profitable (I think) but it has never done anything like "crush the competition".
A bunch of homeless guys have $150 where otherwise they wouldn't have. Some middle-class consumers parted with money they could afford to part with. Is that ugly?
Yeah, really...there's really only two things Sony could do to avoid this.
1) Refuse to sell any PS3s at all before they have enough to meet the demand.
2) Jack up the price of the first run PS3s to the $1500-2000 some people are obviously willing to pay to get the things.
Of course, if they did (1),/. would run a "PS3 RELEESE DELAYED!!!" story and if they did (2),/. would run a "PS3 WAY OVVERPRICED!!!" story.
A self-interested man is not going to abandon a party with momentum. Yes, he could potentially jump ship and become a powerful Republican instead of a powerful Democrat, but given that it's very likely the Democrats will gain seats in 2008, it'd be a stupidly self-destructive thing to do. He has little to gain and everything to lose.
Shortages are perfectly possible. If you've got more positions requiring a certain kind of knowledge than you have people with that knowledge, then you've got a shortage. In your example, the "shortage" only disappears because wages have risen to the point where a certain number of employers have given up on filling positions.
A hard drive would increase weight and kill battery life. Memory sticks are far superior to hard drives for a gaming device. Memory sticks are fine for most video formatted for the device. It's getting the video to the device that's the issue. (If you said Compact Flash I might agree with you.)
Having spent some time interacting with an autistic child (part of my son's "play group"), I'm fairly certain he would have been labelled as "not normal" in any age.
The reason the PSP is not an iPod killer is software. The software for playing audio on the PSP is very poor. (To put it mildly.) This is not a surprise, as the PSP was not designed for audio, and any audio support is an afterthought. (Video support is somewhat better, but the difficulty getting videos onto the device means that it'll never really compete.)
As a game machine, the PSP excells. Technologically, it is superior to the DS-Lite...unfortunately for Sony, they screwed up the game catalog, which made it hard to convince people to buy the cheaper DS-Lite.
No...the reason the DS-Lite is outselling the PSP is well-known: it's the games. The PSP had a very week lineup of games, especially at the beginning.
Users don't give a fuck about proprietary technologies. (And as others have pointed out, the PSP's storage medium is the memory stick, which is too expensive, but otherwise decent flash storage.)
Judge: I can't really rule without seeing the game. Rockstar: We've got nothing to hide, want to see it? Judge: Sure, that'd help. Jack Thompson Self Serving Press Release: Hah! Because of MY great lawsuit, the judge ORDERED Rockstar to produce their evil game!! Gullible Press: "Judge orders Rockstar to produce game!" Slashdot: "fascist jugde orders rockstar to prodce game!"
The term "Quantum leap" does not refer to the size of the leap. It refers to the ability of particles at that level to go from point A to point B without crossing the intervening space. The metaphor is of making a jump from one place to another, bypassing all the intervening steps.
Yeah, this is more like "Hey Motherboard designers, we wanna buy this...you know, us guys who except to buy hundreds of thousands of machines in the next few years".
There's a lot of history for that. Way back when, you used a "math coprocessor" to speed up floating point math. That functionality eventually got rolled into the chip itself.
Does it really matter? I mean, look at your current process list. If you're like most people, you'll see a lot of idle threads. Each successive processor is less useful. Two processors is great. Four will probably help. Eighty will only be useful to those rare people who need to run massively parallel algorithms.
I don't buy it. I'm 41 and have kids. Like the initial poster, my gaming is limited to an odd hour or two here and there.
Some games, I finish, even though it may take a month or two. Others, I don't. The common denominator? The ones I finish are usually good. The ones I don't are usually boring. If there's a difference, it's that older people with less time are less likely to put up with a mediocre game.
That's not a good analogy. A CD player could not play cassete tapes, so of course people who bought them bought only CDs. On the other hand, an iPod can play tracks ripped from CDs.
When I switched from vinyl to CD, there was a huge incentive to rebuy stuff I already owned so that I could listen to it on the CD player. With the iPod, there's no such incentive as I can listen to all my old CD music just fine.
Exactly. I've mostly bought from iTunes over the last year or so, but physical CDs still make up the vast majority of my library simply because it took me twenty years to get that library.
In college, I helped run a machine that used removable hard-drives we referred to as "pizza boxes" because they were about the size of a large pizza container. (And here 10 MB drives.)
Capacity is the main selling point of hard drives. When capacity stops meaning as much, people will move to things like flash for the lower power consumption.
My prediction would be that in 10-15 years, consumer machines don't have hard drives at all as solid-state memory achieves terabyte sizes and the number of rewrites ceases to be an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
They haven't been able to do it when they didn't already have a natural monopoly to build on. (First MSDOS, then Windows.) Windows, Excel, IE, DirectX all built on natural monopolies
The XBox has been profitable (I think) but it has never done anything like "crush the competition".
Not until Sony stops selling the PS2, which is still outselling the Xbox 360.
Bad news, dude. 90% of the population are trend-whore phones.
A bunch of homeless guys have $150 where otherwise they wouldn't have. Some middle-class consumers parted with money they could afford to part with. Is that ugly?
1) Refuse to sell any PS3s at all before they have enough to meet the demand.
2) Jack up the price of the first run PS3s to the $1500-2000 some people are obviously willing to pay to get the things.
Of course, if they did (1), /. would run a "PS3 RELEESE DELAYED!!!" story and if they did (2), /. would run a "PS3 WAY OVVERPRICED!!!" story.
A self-interested man is not going to abandon a party with momentum. Yes, he could potentially jump ship and become a powerful Republican instead of a powerful Democrat, but given that it's very likely the Democrats will gain seats in 2008, it'd be a stupidly self-destructive thing to do. He has little to gain and everything to lose.
Shortages are perfectly possible. If you've got more positions requiring a certain kind of knowledge than you have people with that knowledge, then you've got a shortage. In your example, the "shortage" only disappears because wages have risen to the point where a certain number of employers have given up on filling positions.
I hear offering them lots of money works.
A hard drive would increase weight and kill battery life. Memory sticks are far superior to hard drives for a gaming device. Memory sticks are fine for most video formatted for the device. It's getting the video to the device that's the issue. (If you said Compact Flash I might agree with you.)
Having spent some time interacting with an autistic child (part of my son's "play group"), I'm fairly certain he would have been labelled as "not normal" in any age.
The reason the PSP is not an iPod killer is software. The software for playing audio on the PSP is very poor. (To put it mildly.) This is not a surprise, as the PSP was not designed for audio, and any audio support is an afterthought. (Video support is somewhat better, but the difficulty getting videos onto the device means that it'll never really compete.)
As a game machine, the PSP excells. Technologically, it is superior to the DS-Lite...unfortunately for Sony, they screwed up the game catalog, which made it hard to convince people to buy the cheaper DS-Lite.
No...the reason the DS-Lite is outselling the PSP is well-known: it's the games. The PSP had a very week lineup of games, especially at the beginning.
Users don't give a fuck about proprietary technologies. (And as others have pointed out, the PSP's storage medium is the memory stick, which is too expensive, but otherwise decent flash storage.)
Judge: I can't really rule without seeing the game.
Rockstar: We've got nothing to hide, want to see it?
Judge: Sure, that'd help.
Jack Thompson Self Serving Press Release: Hah! Because of MY great lawsuit, the judge ORDERED Rockstar to produce their evil game!!
Gullible Press: "Judge orders Rockstar to produce game!"
Slashdot: "fascist jugde orders rockstar to prodce game!"
It could, of course, be negligibly small...but if it was zero, there'd have been no one around to write the equation it in the first place.
The term "Quantum leap" does not refer to the size of the leap. It refers to the ability of particles at that level to go from point A to point B without crossing the intervening space. The metaphor is of making a jump from one place to another, bypassing all the intervening steps.
Yeah, this is more like "Hey Motherboard designers, we wanna buy this...you know, us guys who except to buy hundreds of thousands of machines in the next few years".
There's a lot of history for that. Way back when, you used a "math coprocessor" to speed up floating point math. That functionality eventually got rolled into the chip itself.
Does it really matter? I mean, look at your current process list. If you're like most people, you'll see a lot of idle threads. Each successive processor is less useful. Two processors is great. Four will probably help. Eighty will only be useful to those rare people who need to run massively parallel algorithms.
Bah. I've been gaming since 1981, and as far as I can tell, games have gotten progressively easier over time.
I don't buy it. I'm 41 and have kids. Like the initial poster, my gaming is limited to an odd hour or two here and there.
Some games, I finish, even though it may take a month or two. Others, I don't. The common denominator? The ones I finish are usually good. The ones I don't are usually boring. If there's a difference, it's that older people with less time are less likely to put up with a mediocre game.
9600!?
Fuck, man, I remember feeling 1337 because I got a 1200 baud half/duplex Apple-cat modem.
That's not a good analogy. A CD player could not play cassete tapes, so of course people who bought them bought only CDs. On the other hand, an iPod can play tracks ripped from CDs.
When I switched from vinyl to CD, there was a huge incentive to rebuy stuff I already owned so that I could listen to it on the CD player. With the iPod, there's no such incentive as I can listen to all my old CD music just fine.
Exactly. I've mostly bought from iTunes over the last year or so, but physical CDs still make up the vast majority of my library simply because it took me twenty years to get that library.
In college, I helped run a machine that used removable hard-drives we referred to as "pizza boxes" because they were about the size of a large pizza container. (And here 10 MB drives.)
Capacity is the main selling point of hard drives. When capacity stops meaning as much, people will move to things like flash for the lower power consumption.
My prediction would be that in 10-15 years, consumer machines don't have hard drives at all as solid-state memory achieves terabyte sizes and the number of rewrites ceases to be an issue.