Keep in mind - [i]bandwidth is not the same thing as speed.[/i] If your transfers are small enough that you're never really filling the pipe (as is probably the case if most of what you're doing is talking to a source code control system), then adding bandwidth won't make a bit of difference. It would be like using a box truck to pick up a your groceries.
For the kinds of usage patterns that source code control systems generate, latency is most likely going to make a bigger difference.
The classic example is the old saying, "Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a van full of tapes." It's true - the bandwidth of such a system would be incredible compared to what most people are used to working with. It's just that the latency for, say, a connection between Inda and the UK would be measured in days.
Well, for one, I said years, as in plural. Computer hardware up to the task cost more in 2003.
Second, I didn't havethe luxury of being able to just upgrade an existing 'puter, I tend to use outdated laptops.
I didn't realize that Tivo no longer does the lifetime sub. I was just pointing out that for a lot of folks out there MythTV is not the lower-cost option. I'd say if it weren't for that this would still be the case - most folks I know use laptops that they cart around fairly often, and I'd assume that after you're done buying CPU, mobo, power supply, case, tuner card, RAM, hard drive, etc. to build a MythTV box from scratch, you're doing pretty good if you can keep the price down around $500.
This decision is stupid, because it simply removes the most important aspect of a wiki - INSTANT gratification. It solves one underlying problem, but creates another. A fork could solve both.
I fail to see two things:
1. How does it remove instant gratification, except as much as is necessary to satisfy users who expect Wikipedia to be more like an encyclopedia. Users who want their instant gratification will just need to log in. I don't see what's so hard about that.
2. How would forking the project increase the instant gratification? It seems to me that turning Wikipedia into two things rather than one thing with two interfaces would just increase the overhead involved in keeping things synced and get rid of some of the things that make Wikipedia great as an encyclopedia - the way that articles get updated to reflect new developments almost immediately comes to mind.
What you're both missing is that this doesn't categorically make Wikipedia more or less of a wiki. It makes Wikipedia less of a wiki for some users, and more of one for others. I think this is a Good Thing.
The biggest problem Wikipedia ever had is that too many people can't tell the difference between "wiki" and "encyclo." The genius of this plan is that it makes Wikipedia behave more like an encyclopedia for the people who expect it to behave like one, or don't realize that it's fundamentally different from Britannica. There's at least some guarantee (or at least good faith effort) that all the pages will be reasonably accurate, and it's going to be a lot harder for people to vandalize it and confuse users in the process.
However, it gives a big opt-out for people who want it to be more open than that - all they have to do is get an account and log in. For these people, Wikipedia will now be a whole lot more wiki-like simply because, if everything goes as planned, every single one of Wikipedia's pages can now be open for editing. And the whole reason why they are now free to do things that way is because the people who don't "get" wikis can now be insulated from the site's inherently volatile nature, leaving everyone else to enjoy their wiki-ness without disturbing passers-by.
OSX is a vendor lock-in solution, and not many people like that.
If by "not many" you're willing to include the >90% of computer users and businesses that use Windows - another lock-in solution that's even more more so than OS X. How many open source apps for *nix can you run without modification on Windows?
I'd counter that the market seems to love vendor lock-in.
OSX is substantially slower on most benchmarks than Linux and Windows
For almost all applications - even server applications in small businesses - benchmarks are rapidly getting less and less important. Lately, performance has been increasing faster than people's needs in almost every area where you aren't dealing with either huge piles of data or video games. I would suggest that most of the market just doesn't care very much what the benchmarks say. Is being 5% slower really going to be noticeable to someone who mostly just plays with Excel spreadsheets or toys with database frontends all day long?
It is interesting that Apple do not do this, they don't even have separate "upgrade" prices.
Of course, at least on the OS it doesn't make sense for Apple to offer a separate upgrade price. All Macs come with OS X, so all Mac users are upgrade users.
I would love to see some numbers on what drives cable pricing in a given area. Are there any municipalities where the cable isn't controlled by a monopoly?
Agreed. I hope the future of OSes is that they will become *more* predictable, not less.
I had a helpdesk job when Windows and Office XP first came out. Adaptive menus and the ability to decide whether or not you want the sidebar and stuff like that makes providing tech support an absolute nightmare. I remember it taking me a week to figure out the best order of places to look when trying to get a caller to the network settings window.
In comparison, providing support to the Win98 users was a dream; it was easier for me to keep track of what was going on and talk people through it, and it was certainly a far sight less baffling to the more computer-illiterate callers I got.
Wow. If that's what interns are going for nowadays, sign me up to be an intern for life! (Or at least until the next dot compost and forces the market to realize yet again how ridiculously overpaid some folks are.)
o I assume from your post you'd be happy with an a-la-carte cable? Fine. You pay $5 and up for each of the channels you want (a common price point in most arguments). Pick your favorite 11 channels. Congrats. You are now paying MORE than I am with my 200 channels, non a la carte.
I want to live where you live. Cable in my area is about $60 for maybe fifty channels, five of which I actually watch. Even if they charged twice as much as in your hypothetical, I'd still come out ahead paying for the ones I watch. At $5 a channel like in your argument, I'd be getting my a la carte cable for about the price that the local cable company charges for "basic cable," which is all the local network affiliates plus cspan, QVC, and Univision; and minus a pair of rabbit ears and about $20 every month.
>>But at the same time Apple gets applauded for rolling EVERY SINGLE LITTLE POSSIBLE THING into their OS?
Because they don't force you to use any of it.
I'd actually shorten that a bit further to "Because they don't."
Apple supplies an instant messenger, web browser, media viewer, etc. with their OS, but that is not rolling it into the OS any more than supplying Firefox with a Linux distro is rolling it into the OS. Like the parent said, it's a separate app; you're free to not use, delete, or replace it as you see fit. Heck, it's even fairly easy to remove Aqua from OS X (effectively turning it into a different operating system - Darwin) if you really want to.
Microsoft, on the other hand, really does roll this stuff in. It's not even possible to remove the damn web browser because it's a fundamental system component that huge chunks of the OS rely on. Similar situation for Windows Media Player, and they do their best to make it hard to remove all sorts of other "bundled apps."
What will be even worse is when the physicists and chemists gang up to pummel computer scientists for using 'atom' to describe a kind of data.
Also coming up on pay-per-view, psychologists and meteorologists duke it out over the term 'depression' and disagreement between poets and parking enforcement officers over 'meter' finally boils over.
OK, you're right, misalignment is an annoying problem on projection TVs and it's pathetic that retailers don't go through the alignment procedure because it's not too hard to do. But that only applies to projection televisions. What about the field of view on LCD and flat panel televisions?
And the field of view on a projection TV is still crappy, even if it is aligned properly. My dad bought one a couple years back, and I hate watching the damn thing. I can't watch TV while I'm sitting on the floor, I can't watch the TV while I'm standing, I can't watch it while I'm sitting in the La-Z-Boy off to the side, I'm pretty much doomed to a life of sitting front and center on his sofa if I want to watch TV. God forbid the whole family should get together to watch something, because there are six of us and the couch only fits three comfortably. And it's too bad he put it in a room without windows; the thing is so dim that he'd have to buy blackout curtains if he ever wanted to be able to watch TV while the sun is still up. It's not like this was a cheap crappy projection TV, either. He went in and bought the most expensive TV on the floor at what was at the time the largest Best Buy in the country.
I wouldn't say that CRTs are horrifyingly large. They're just horrifyingly large if you want them to be. I'm perfectly happy with my 24" TV, and I don't think I'm the only consumer on the planet who doesn't feel the need to have his living room be commanted by some gigantic Picture Box of Doom.
The resolution doesn't bother me since it's the same as the resolution of my TV signal and I'm not going to waste any time crying in my beer because I lack the ability to represent one image pixel with four pixels of my TV's display. Yes it's true that the resolution of the TV signal I'm getting may increase beyond what my CRT does in the future, but that future date keeps moving back, the price of LCD and flat panel TV's keeps going down, and it just doesn't make much sense to me to pay a lot for something before it's useful to me when I can be patient and pay less by not buying it until I need it.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it's a pain to keep a quality image" and "difficult to maintain properly." I've had my CRT television for ten years, I haven't lifted a finger to do any maintenance on it aside from wiping the dust off the screen every so often, and as far as I can tell it is still working just fine. I don't even bother to turn off the TV when I'm going to go wander off with a videogame paused while I spend an hour and a half cooking, eating, and cleaning up after some fancy dinner. Meanwhile, the estimates for lifetime that I've been hearing for plasma displays make it sound like ten years would be a pretty good life. Not sure about LCDs.
I can recall several dotbombs that had this same business model (an e-wallet that had all your info in it already so all you needed to do was purchase from participating vendors and a username/password/whatever was all you'd need to make each purchase), and they all failed miserably.
Except, of course, for PayPal, which is wildly successful to the point of being the only payment option for many (possibly most) small-time storefronts I see on the Web.
I'm going to guess that a large part of that is that the concentration of 98 boxen has become so low. With fewer computers capable of spreading Win98 viruses, things will be easier. But back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and at that time Win98 was even worse than XP is now, especially before MS came out with some of the last few security patches.
Windows 98's era was that period of time where a Windows virus would nearly bring the computing world to its knees every six months or so. Windows 98 has a tendency to save passwords even though you told it not to. And it doesn't even encrypt them; it just obfuscates them a little bit. Windows 98 was the platform on which it first became possible to catch an e-mail virus without even opening the e-mail.
I wouldn't have a problem if you said that you were enjoying fewer virus infections, but claiming it's because Windows 98 is inherently superior to Windows XP is preposterous. I would guess that you would have even better luck with viruses if you switched to Windows 3.11, for much the same reason that you're having such good luck with 98 right now.
Ditto. Hopefully more retailers will take steps like this. I think the games industry has already done plenty with setting up ESRB. Retailers follwing their initiative and being more responsible about who they sell games to is probably the best way to avoid more attempts at enacting draconian legislation.
Of course, this isn't really why they are objecting. Whatever McAfee and Symantec say, writing proof-of-concept exploits seems like standard practise to me. My best guess is that their fear is that this might cut into their profits because Consumer Reports is going to make the non-geek public more aware of the limitations of antivirus software. This could make them decide, "Well, if it can't protect me from all the viruses, especially not the new ones, than maybe it's not worth the money."
Of course, Consumer Reports is almost certainly responsible enough to address this issue and point out to people that it's really a reason why they need to be updating their virus definitions as frequently as is practical.
But guys... what's the point to use so old software?
The point is to keep guys like me who don't always feel the need to mess with the "latest and greatest" happy. I like Slackware because Slackware is solid, and Slackware is solid because it moves with caution.
And yes, consumers are clueless. By any self-respecting nerd measure, almost utterly so. That's not meant to be elitism; its just that most consumers don't know what a rootkit is, for example. Heck, most of the people I talk to with iPods don't even know there's DRM built into the things.
No offense, but most Slashdot members are clueless, too. For example, most of them seem to conveniently forget that it's not just the iPod that is DRM-encumbered. Nearly every major MP3 player on the market supports a DRM-encumbered format. Or do Windows Media files not count?
Or how about that Slashdotters are more than ready to point out that pundits and the media in general are more influenced by fashion than reason when it comes to deciding what product to hound and what product to not hound? Oh wait, they do remember - but only when it's $FOSS_PROJECT that's being derided. And don't even get me started on Slashdot as a source of knowledge about the zeitgeist of the computing world. It isn't, and here's a simple reason - the vast majority of people here on Slashdot are here for the melee. Consequently, vitriol is overrepresented here. Heck, a look through my own posting history shows that that's most of what I do. It only makes sense - I have a stronger urge to voice my feelings when I'm feeling miffed than when I'm not.
Yes, but my context was the iPod launch, not the subsequent long line of successor products. Originally it was quite expensive - I don't recall exactly if it was $600, but I know it was at least $500. And Mac-only.
OK, taking it from there, you're right, the story's a bit different. But Sony's still insane to think there's any comparison. The iPod is essentially a standalone product - you can buy one, and as long as you have a computer with a FireWire (and, later, USB) port and the ability to create MP3s, you can keep throwing music on the thing. (Keep in mind that the battery's long-term survivability wasn't a known issue at the time; knowing that I'd certainly agree that $600 seems crazy.) The iPod didn't need to have any serious command of the market any more than the more pricey brands of other products need to, because all the consumer cares about is that they buy the product and it's done.
The PS3, on the other hand, is more than just a single product. It's also a library of games, which must be maintained until the next generation. To get that, there must be a strong presence in the market, so that game publishers will publish for the platform. It's also a community - the next-gen system with the most people will have a better chance of having a richer pool of users for online gaming. Plus, you can share games with your friends or take a game over to a friend's house or whatever if you both own the same system. If the PS3 only succeeds in getting a tiny share of the market, it can find itself just as any of the other myriad failed home console platforms. Comparing PS3 to an iPod is like comparing a deck of cards to an MMO.
Personally I think bifurcating the platform is a terrible idea; it runs counter one of the main points of a game 'console'. A better argument is to say they should have ditched Blu-ray altogether
My understanding is that the PS3 won't be playing games on Blu-Ray, it'll just be there for movies. Games will still come on DVDs. You're right, if they want Blu-Ray to be a future option for games, bifurcating the system would be crazy. But if that's not the case, it wouldn't really be bifurcating the platform because Blu-Ray wasn't a part of the games platform in the first place.
(Although now that I think of it, the iPod was (and is) nearly universally derided for being too expensive. But I don't think the situation is comparable. Nintendo is the innovator here. They should be charging $600 for those things, heh.)
It's really not comparable at all. For one, the idea that the iPod is universally derided as being too expensive is laughable - if it were really that outrageously priced, why in the world would it continue to maintain >50% market share, especially when it continues to have a number of strong competitors? Consumers aren't that clueless - more likely you're overlooking something in the iPod that others are seeing and then assuming that the rest of the world is also looking at the product through your eyes.
Also, $600 for an iPod is flat-out wrong. According to today's edition of the Apple Store, iPod is really a line of products ranging from the $69, 512MB iPod Shuffle all the way to the $400, 60GB full-size iPod. I'm going to guess that a more accurate picture of reality is that nobody is paying $600 for an iPod (and even when the price was that high, very few people were) and the vast bulk of the sales are for the lower-end versions.
Sony isn't offering a low-end version. If they were to clue in and offer a PS3 without the Blu-Ray player at a dramatically reduced price, I might be willing to think that their PS3 pricing scheme has anything at all to do with the iPod's pricing scheme. But, of course, that isn't going to happen because Sony isn't trying to sell a game system with the PS3. The plan for the PS3 is to use game-playing features to chump people into buying a Blu-Ray player.
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Keep in mind - [i]bandwidth is not the same thing as speed.[/i] If your transfers are small enough that you're never really filling the pipe (as is probably the case if most of what you're doing is talking to a source code control system), then adding bandwidth won't make a bit of difference. It would be like using a box truck to pick up a your groceries.
For the kinds of usage patterns that source code control systems generate, latency is most likely going to make a bigger difference.
The classic example is the old saying, "Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a van full of tapes." It's true - the bandwidth of such a system would be incredible compared to what most people are used to working with. It's just that the latency for, say, a connection between Inda and the UK would be measured in days.
Well, for one, I said years, as in plural. Computer hardware up to the task cost more in 2003.
Second, I didn't havethe luxury of being able to just upgrade an existing 'puter, I tend to use outdated laptops.
I didn't realize that Tivo no longer does the lifetime sub. I was just pointing out that for a lot of folks out there MythTV is not the lower-cost option. I'd say if it weren't for that this would still be the case - most folks I know use laptops that they cart around fairly often, and I'd assume that after you're done buying CPU, mobo, power supply, case, tuner card, RAM, hard drive, etc. to build a MythTV box from scratch, you're doing pretty good if you can keep the price down around $500.
I priced it out. (Years ago, so I'm sure the prices have changed.)
Tivo + livetime subscription: $500, $400 after rebate
Computer capable of running MythTV halfway decently: $1000
I like openness, but not costs-twice-as-much more.
I fail to see two things:
1. How does it remove instant gratification, except as much as is necessary to satisfy users who expect Wikipedia to be more like an encyclopedia. Users who want their instant gratification will just need to log in. I don't see what's so hard about that.
2. How would forking the project increase the instant gratification? It seems to me that turning Wikipedia into two things rather than one thing with two interfaces would just increase the overhead involved in keeping things synced and get rid of some of the things that make Wikipedia great as an encyclopedia - the way that articles get updated to reflect new developments almost immediately comes to mind.
What you're both missing is that this doesn't categorically make Wikipedia more or less of a wiki. It makes Wikipedia less of a wiki for some users, and more of one for others. I think this is a Good Thing.
The biggest problem Wikipedia ever had is that too many people can't tell the difference between "wiki" and "encyclo." The genius of this plan is that it makes Wikipedia behave more like an encyclopedia for the people who expect it to behave like one, or don't realize that it's fundamentally different from Britannica. There's at least some guarantee (or at least good faith effort) that all the pages will be reasonably accurate, and it's going to be a lot harder for people to vandalize it and confuse users in the process.
However, it gives a big opt-out for people who want it to be more open than that - all they have to do is get an account and log in. For these people, Wikipedia will now be a whole lot more wiki-like simply because, if everything goes as planned, every single one of Wikipedia's pages can now be open for editing. And the whole reason why they are now free to do things that way is because the people who don't "get" wikis can now be insulated from the site's inherently volatile nature, leaving everyone else to enjoy their wiki-ness without disturbing passers-by.
If by "not many" you're willing to include the >90% of computer users and businesses that use Windows - another lock-in solution that's even more more so than OS X. How many open source apps for *nix can you run without modification on Windows?
I'd counter that the market seems to love vendor lock-in.
For almost all applications - even server applications in small businesses - benchmarks are rapidly getting less and less important. Lately, performance has been increasing faster than people's needs in almost every area where you aren't dealing with either huge piles of data or video games. I would suggest that most of the market just doesn't care very much what the benchmarks say. Is being 5% slower really going to be noticeable to someone who mostly just plays with Excel spreadsheets or toys with database frontends all day long?
Of course, at least on the OS it doesn't make sense for Apple to offer a separate upgrade price. All Macs come with OS X, so all Mac users are upgrade users.
. . . who let George sit in Gene's chair?
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.
I would love to see some numbers on what drives cable pricing in a given area. Are there any municipalities where the cable isn't controlled by a monopoly?
Agreed. I hope the future of OSes is that they will become *more* predictable, not less.
I had a helpdesk job when Windows and Office XP first came out. Adaptive menus and the ability to decide whether or not you want the sidebar and stuff like that makes providing tech support an absolute nightmare. I remember it taking me a week to figure out the best order of places to look when trying to get a caller to the network settings window.
In comparison, providing support to the Win98 users was a dream; it was easier for me to keep track of what was going on and talk people through it, and it was certainly a far sight less baffling to the more computer-illiterate callers I got.
Wow. If that's what interns are going for nowadays, sign me up to be an intern for life! (Or at least until the next dot compost and forces the market to realize yet again how ridiculously overpaid some folks are.)
I want to live where you live. Cable in my area is about $60 for maybe fifty channels, five of which I actually watch. Even if they charged twice as much as in your hypothetical, I'd still come out ahead paying for the ones I watch. At $5 a channel like in your argument, I'd be getting my a la carte cable for about the price that the local cable company charges for "basic cable," which is all the local network affiliates plus cspan, QVC, and Univision; and minus a pair of rabbit ears and about $20 every month.
I'd actually shorten that a bit further to "Because they don't."
Apple supplies an instant messenger, web browser, media viewer, etc. with their OS, but that is not rolling it into the OS any more than supplying Firefox with a Linux distro is rolling it into the OS. Like the parent said, it's a separate app; you're free to not use, delete, or replace it as you see fit. Heck, it's even fairly easy to remove Aqua from OS X (effectively turning it into a different operating system - Darwin) if you really want to.
Microsoft, on the other hand, really does roll this stuff in. It's not even possible to remove the damn web browser because it's a fundamental system component that huge chunks of the OS rely on. Similar situation for Windows Media Player, and they do their best to make it hard to remove all sorts of other "bundled apps."
What will be even worse is when the physicists and chemists gang up to pummel computer scientists for using 'atom' to describe a kind of data.
Also coming up on pay-per-view, psychologists and meteorologists duke it out over the term 'depression' and disagreement between poets and parking enforcement officers over 'meter' finally boils over.
OK, you're right, misalignment is an annoying problem on projection TVs and it's pathetic that retailers don't go through the alignment procedure because it's not too hard to do. But that only applies to projection televisions. What about the field of view on LCD and flat panel televisions?
And the field of view on a projection TV is still crappy, even if it is aligned properly. My dad bought one a couple years back, and I hate watching the damn thing. I can't watch TV while I'm sitting on the floor, I can't watch the TV while I'm standing, I can't watch it while I'm sitting in the La-Z-Boy off to the side, I'm pretty much doomed to a life of sitting front and center on his sofa if I want to watch TV. God forbid the whole family should get together to watch something, because there are six of us and the couch only fits three comfortably. And it's too bad he put it in a room without windows; the thing is so dim that he'd have to buy blackout curtains if he ever wanted to be able to watch TV while the sun is still up. It's not like this was a cheap crappy projection TV, either. He went in and bought the most expensive TV on the floor at what was at the time the largest Best Buy in the country.
I wouldn't say that CRTs are horrifyingly large. They're just horrifyingly large if you want them to be. I'm perfectly happy with my 24" TV, and I don't think I'm the only consumer on the planet who doesn't feel the need to have his living room be commanted by some gigantic Picture Box of Doom.
The resolution doesn't bother me since it's the same as the resolution of my TV signal and I'm not going to waste any time crying in my beer because I lack the ability to represent one image pixel with four pixels of my TV's display. Yes it's true that the resolution of the TV signal I'm getting may increase beyond what my CRT does in the future, but that future date keeps moving back, the price of LCD and flat panel TV's keeps going down, and it just doesn't make much sense to me to pay a lot for something before it's useful to me when I can be patient and pay less by not buying it until I need it.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it's a pain to keep a quality image" and "difficult to maintain properly." I've had my CRT television for ten years, I haven't lifted a finger to do any maintenance on it aside from wiping the dust off the screen every so often, and as far as I can tell it is still working just fine. I don't even bother to turn off the TV when I'm going to go wander off with a videogame paused while I spend an hour and a half cooking, eating, and cleaning up after some fancy dinner. Meanwhile, the estimates for lifetime that I've been hearing for plasma displays make it sound like ten years would be a pretty good life. Not sure about LCDs.
Except, of course, for PayPal, which is wildly successful to the point of being the only payment option for many (possibly most) small-time storefronts I see on the Web.
I'm going to guess that a large part of that is that the concentration of 98 boxen has become so low. With fewer computers capable of spreading Win98 viruses, things will be easier. But back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and at that time Win98 was even worse than XP is now, especially before MS came out with some of the last few security patches.
Windows 98's era was that period of time where a Windows virus would nearly bring the computing world to its knees every six months or so. Windows 98 has a tendency to save passwords even though you told it not to. And it doesn't even encrypt them; it just obfuscates them a little bit. Windows 98 was the platform on which it first became possible to catch an e-mail virus without even opening the e-mail.
I wouldn't have a problem if you said that you were enjoying fewer virus infections, but claiming it's because Windows 98 is inherently superior to Windows XP is preposterous. I would guess that you would have even better luck with viruses if you switched to Windows 3.11, for much the same reason that you're having such good luck with 98 right now.
You are well outside the bell curve in your experience with Win98 and viruses.
Ditto. Hopefully more retailers will take steps like this. I think the games industry has already done plenty with setting up ESRB. Retailers follwing their initiative and being more responsible about who they sell games to is probably the best way to avoid more attempts at enacting draconian legislation.
Of course, this isn't really why they are objecting. Whatever McAfee and Symantec say, writing proof-of-concept exploits seems like standard practise to me. My best guess is that their fear is that this might cut into their profits because Consumer Reports is going to make the non-geek public more aware of the limitations of antivirus software. This could make them decide, "Well, if it can't protect me from all the viruses, especially not the new ones, than maybe it's not worth the money."
Of course, Consumer Reports is almost certainly responsible enough to address this issue and point out to people that it's really a reason why they need to be updating their virus definitions as frequently as is practical.
But guys... what's the point to use so old software?
The point is to keep guys like me who don't always feel the need to mess with the "latest and greatest" happy. I like Slackware because Slackware is solid, and Slackware is solid because it moves with caution.
No offense, but most Slashdot members are clueless, too. For example, most of them seem to conveniently forget that it's not just the iPod that is DRM-encumbered. Nearly every major MP3 player on the market supports a DRM-encumbered format. Or do Windows Media files not count?
Or how about that Slashdotters are more than ready to point out that pundits and the media in general are more influenced by fashion than reason when it comes to deciding what product to hound and what product to not hound? Oh wait, they do remember - but only when it's $FOSS_PROJECT that's being derided. And don't even get me started on Slashdot as a source of knowledge about the zeitgeist of the computing world. It isn't, and here's a simple reason - the vast majority of people here on Slashdot are here for the melee. Consequently, vitriol is overrepresented here. Heck, a look through my own posting history shows that that's most of what I do. It only makes sense - I have a stronger urge to voice my feelings when I'm feeling miffed than when I'm not.
OK, taking it from there, you're right, the story's a bit different. But Sony's still insane to think there's any comparison. The iPod is essentially a standalone product - you can buy one, and as long as you have a computer with a FireWire (and, later, USB) port and the ability to create MP3s, you can keep throwing music on the thing. (Keep in mind that the battery's long-term survivability wasn't a known issue at the time; knowing that I'd certainly agree that $600 seems crazy.) The iPod didn't need to have any serious command of the market any more than the more pricey brands of other products need to, because all the consumer cares about is that they buy the product and it's done.
The PS3, on the other hand, is more than just a single product. It's also a library of games, which must be maintained until the next generation. To get that, there must be a strong presence in the market, so that game publishers will publish for the platform. It's also a community - the next-gen system with the most people will have a better chance of having a richer pool of users for online gaming. Plus, you can share games with your friends or take a game over to a friend's house or whatever if you both own the same system. If the PS3 only succeeds in getting a tiny share of the market, it can find itself just as any of the other myriad failed home console platforms. Comparing PS3 to an iPod is like comparing a deck of cards to an MMO.
My understanding is that the PS3 won't be playing games on Blu-Ray, it'll just be there for movies. Games will still come on DVDs. You're right, if they want Blu-Ray to be a future option for games, bifurcating the system would be crazy. But if that's not the case, it wouldn't really be bifurcating the platform because Blu-Ray wasn't a part of the games platform in the first place.
It's really not comparable at all. For one, the idea that the iPod is universally derided as being too expensive is laughable - if it were really that outrageously priced, why in the world would it continue to maintain >50% market share, especially when it continues to have a number of strong competitors? Consumers aren't that clueless - more likely you're overlooking something in the iPod that others are seeing and then assuming that the rest of the world is also looking at the product through your eyes.
Also, $600 for an iPod is flat-out wrong. According to today's edition of the Apple Store, iPod is really a line of products ranging from the $69, 512MB iPod Shuffle all the way to the $400, 60GB full-size iPod. I'm going to guess that a more accurate picture of reality is that nobody is paying $600 for an iPod (and even when the price was that high, very few people were) and the vast bulk of the sales are for the lower-end versions.
Sony isn't offering a low-end version. If they were to clue in and offer a PS3 without the Blu-Ray player at a dramatically reduced price, I might be willing to think that their PS3 pricing scheme has anything at all to do with the iPod's pricing scheme. But, of course, that isn't going to happen because Sony isn't trying to sell a game system with the PS3. The plan for the PS3 is to use game-playing features to chump people into buying a Blu-Ray player.
Perhaps the 7th category is for people who miss the joke?
That would make the 7th category nothing but a subset of the 6th.