All of those sales figures are for movies, as it does not count game content on BD, nor hardware sales. BD movies are on average equal to or $5 more for native discs, with HD-DVD/DVD combo discs being $5-10 more than a similar native HD-DVD or BD. And Sony has all the major content providers on their side except for Universal, but it's debatable on whether they're a major provider with their poor performance at the box office.
HP is stopping production of their DLP sets because they suffered from significant problems that killed HP's reputation in that market, especially when they were just getting into it. DLP as a whole is fine, and pound for pound is one of the best fixed pixel display technologies available. I think the only better one available today is LCOS (Sony SXRD or JVC HD-ILA). But I'm really looking forward to Organic LED (OLED). It's got the contrast ratio of CRT (the ultimate display technology when it comes to visual quality) and vibrant colors, but with a form factor that is thinner than LCD (a horrible display technology) or Plasma (energy inefficient). They just have to work on making the blue elements last longer, but Sony displayed several OLED sets at this year's CES show, and everyone who say them was stunned at how good they looked compared to the other flat screen technologies. It makes LCD and Plasma look like CGA monitors.
I guess that would be great if I were still interested. I got over Starcraft 6 years ago, and while I think it was the perfect RTS and had a very compelling story, I don't understand why they feel the need to come back to it now, after 10 years, for a sequel to a game with such a rabid following? I think it's impossible that it could be a better playing experience than the original or Brood War for multiplayer. Why is it that Blizzard can only seem to develop one game at a time when they certainly have the resources to do more? They have three solid gold game franchises, and two of them have languished for the better part of a decade: Starcraft for 9 years, and Diablo for 6. I can understand their commitment to quality, but it's not as if there aren't enough good developers, project managers, and producers out there to make a quality game.
One year, 1999 I believe, while I was working at a large regional ISP, I got a company logo polo shirt as a bonus, as opposed to the $100 cash I received the year before. I thought it was a crappy gift, but it was a very nice shirt. I happened to wear it into work the day the CEO of the company told us all that we'd have to pay for the shirts and it would be coming out of our next paycheck. I told him he could have mine back. It didn't seem to register with him that he couldn't give us a gift and then demand we pay for it. I left a month later for a job that paid over twice as much.
As a consultant, my firm gave me a $250 gift certificate to Target and a really nice lunch. I spent most of it buying stuff for poor kids and families who needed stuff this Christmas through a local church charity. I figured that I made enough this year and anything I can do to help others is worthwhile. Plus, it breaks your heart when you see a kid asking simply for warm clothes or a jacket for Christmas.
The funny thing about his blog is that I used to work in IT for a large energy company that happened to be a SUN customer who I am almost certain is the company he's referring to. Yes, we did have oil rigs that used sensors on the drill bits to help determine how and where to drill. The funny thing is that the data gathered from the drill bits was sent back to a server in the data center, which was a SUN E4000. Data from that server was then fed into another SUN E4000 running Oracle and an application which read seismic data and was used to guide the drill. They were both in what I would easily describe as a traditional datacenter in Houston, TX
For that matter any ION Storm game or any Romero game?
You mean games like Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Thief: Deadly Shadows? And Anarchronox was critically acclaimed, even if it didn't sell well.
Not everything to come out of Ion Storm was a joke, though Eidos killed off the studio. As for successful games without a sequel? How about Starcraft? And before you mention Brood Wars, it was an expansion pack, not a sequel.
The problem with your assertion is that the majority of transactions, at least in areas where I buy stuff on ebay, is personal sellers unloading personally owned items to others, and not new merchandise from a business to consumer. That's something Craigslist can do, but does poorly because everything is local and it's fixed price/best offer. Your model works great for new items, but not for used or hard to find items. I sell on ebay as well, and while I dislike their policies and BS, I also realize that for what I buy and sell there is no larger market. And what to I buy? Music gear. The sellers on ebay trying to sell new gear rarely make money because the people there aren't willing to pay, while those of us who own or buy used gear can sell it at a reasonable price (more than we'd get selling to Guitar Center or the local music shop) while those of us who buy can get it for cheaper than any brick or mortar store would be willing to sell it for.
I've tried selling on Craigslist, and I've sold on ebay. Ebay always makes me more money, even after fees, and it gives me a much wider audience for my used music gear.
I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on/. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
Actually, I've got CD's from the 1980s that still work, and a couple of 9-10 year old CD-R's that are still usable today. And until only recently I was living in the Houston area, which is both hot and humid with a lot of sun. So, it's quite possible that you're not treating your media appropriately.
My guess is that this decision was made by Hifn's legal counsel, which is where regulatory compliance issues are generally clarified at the corporate level. From HIPPA to GLB to SOX and everyhwere in between, it's the company legal counsel that's deciding more and more about how businesses are run. If you don't like it, fine, but I don't hold it against Hifn to restrict their data because the legal issues regarding even crypto software and the information requires serious expertise in the matter. From a technical standpoint, we may think it makes no sense to even distribute the data sheet, but for Hifn they see it as a matter of covering their own ass from the FedGov.
I agree completely. Why all the emphasis on the Warcraft Universe when there's so much devotion worldwide to the Starcraft one? Not that it matters, as they'd just ruin it by turning it into a crapp 3D RTS like the did with Warcraft III.
But I'm glad they've completely glossed over the fact that more music gets traded over USENET than over P2P networks. P2P is more efficient for a one on one transfer, but USENET allows one person to send content to millions with a single transaction. Sure, I may have to request a certain song or album now and again, but mostly I'm happy to take what's offered and offer up what I have.
Mandatory sunset date of one year. Not just this stupid law but also laws that your congress-vermin pass. One year, it's re-evaluated and then passed again or thrown away.
I think I like your idea even better than I liked Heinlein's idea of needing a 2/3 majority to create a new law in a parliamentary body, and only 1/3 to abolish a law.
so there you have it. 1080p, sure... Blu-Ray support...sorry I can't see how that is going to sell.
Question: How many sets on the market accept 1080p over component?
Andwer: I know of one consumer grade 1080p native display that supports 1080p over component (Westinghouse 42" LCD), and it's an undocumented feature. That's it.
If th PS3 console has a 5+ year lifespan, not having HDMI is a huge mistake. Granted, in the last 5 years we've seen Component, Firewire, DVI, and then HDMI for HD content, but it looks like HDMI is here to stay for the next few years. And, given the cost of an HDMI adapter and the licensing per device, it wouldn't cost Sony much to put one on all PS3 units. How much?
$15,000 to be a part of the HDMI camp annually. Sony already pays this, and distributes this cost to every HDMI component they sell.
The interface/chipset cost. As best as I can tell, this cost is between $5-15 (can't find hard numbers)
Licensing fee of $0.15/unit sold to consumers. It gets reduced to $0.05/unit sold if you put the HDMI logo on your product. It gets dropped again to $0.04/unit sold if you license and implement HDCP. So, $0.04!
Not having HDMI is dumb. It's just that simple. HDCP is spelling the end of component inputs, and they're time is short.
Having 2 SKUs is dumb. Ditch wifi and memory card readers, drop the HD to 20+GB if you have to, put HDMI on the thing and give us one SKU.
I've lost a job by spoofing it. I answered all but one of the four sections the way I wanted to, and then threw one of the tests a curve ball by contradicting the answers from the other pages. In the end, the person liked my credentials but decided not to hire me because of the deviation from the one test.
What they were looking for, since it was a tech job, was they were looking for a deep thinker who was analtyical and methodical without being emotional/intuitive and touchy-feely. This is most likely what they're looking for as well. Either way, the tests are dumb.
If Microsoft is so serious about security, could they please start by bringing their logging out of the dark ages and to what has been available on UNIX for some times. A UNIX system will log the difference between a bad username and a username with a bad password to the auth.error or auth.info facility, even if it delivers the same generic "Bad username or password" message to the user trying to log in. That's the information Windows actually logs, which makes realtime security monitoring a joke if you're looking to determine if someone is grinding through usernames or actually trying to brute force a password for a single account with a realtime security solution.
It would also be nice if MS SQL server actually logged the remote IP/hostname of failed SQL sessions for SQL standalone authentication. When some user tries to violate policy by attempting to log in as the Admin user in the DB and then fails, I can't go correct the problem. It makes auditing access impossible if shared accounts are used (they shouldn't, but it still happens, even when people should know better).
Not exactly. I picked up a 1GB MS Pro Duo on sale for $45. You can pick up 2GB for around $100 shipped if you look. If the PS3 doesn't come with a HD, and I don't think it will to keep costs down so the $499, $45 for 1GB of storage space isn't a bad idea. Compared to $40 for 8MB of space on the PS2, it's a pretty significant price reduction.
The PS3 is ditching memory cards for Sony's Memory Stick Pro Duo format (same as the PSP and newer Sony gear use), which hold up to 2GB of data right now. While that's not enough to hold a full traditional game, that is enough to hold mini-games and media content the likes of which are currently being seen on XBOX Live and happen to be very popular. While a HD is an option that I'd probably want, I like having the option of getting one in the size that fits my needs, and given the size of HD content, I'd expect I'd want a big one.
OK, let's step back a minute and analyze these numbers.
$350 for the BD-ROM drive? What happened to $100 for the drive as reported here on slashdot and other places back last September? The drive assemblies for the PS3 are already being made by a joint venture between Toshiba and Samsung (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Corp.) So let's say the drive is a more reasonable $100/unit.
And the cell processor at the 90nm process in November of 2005 was yielding 65 good chips per wafer with a wafer costing $9,000-$10,000. There are over 200 sites on the wafer, so that's just over a 31% yield at a flat cost of $150/processor, so assume $175 per solderable Cell processor. If they can increase yield per wafer to say 50%, then they'll drop the price to around $125 for solderable Cell processor, and yield of 66% would decrese costs to around $100 per solderable CPU. Still, we'll stick with $175 per CPU. That's $55 less than the Merrill Lynch estimate.
So, plugging in my new estimated values for BD-ROM drive and Cell processor based on previously released articles estimating the prices, I get right at $495 per PS3. That's not exactly a loss leader if the cost is $500. Sony will be double dipping on licensing fees for the PS3 games (PS3 licensing as well as BD-ROM licensing), but it won't be anywhere near $20. $12-15 is far more likely. The real money is made in peripherals, which is where the profit margins are much higher. A PS2 controller cost was $40 or so at launch, but took less than $10 to manufacture and package. A PS3 controller will likely show similar margins. And what about memory cards? The PS3 will use Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, just like the PSP and most of Sony's newer electronic devices. The profit margins on these is significantly higher.
And let's not forget that we're about to be at the beginning of the High Definition optical media format war. If PS3 can get a couple of million players into livingrooms across the country and spur the purchases of more HDTV displays, Sony will have effectively won the format war (they've already got the majority of the studio support) with a higher adoption rate than DVD saw until several years into it's consumer life. And the real money will be made on BD-ROM movie licensing fees. Profits generated by the PS3 will be nothing compared to those generated over the next 10 years by whoever wins the HD optical format war.
Enron never required publicly, privately, or explicitly that employees were required to purchase and keep Enron stock in their retirement portfolios. It was certainly part of the culture, but it was part of the culture that came from middle management as best I could tell. The only thing that involved money that made you visible to the upper level management types was time spent on community/charity work and donations to charities, especially United Way, as Enron matched dollar for dollar and actively encouraged involvement in the community. It was an established fact, if never spoken officially by management, that you had to give enough to the United Way to be part of their Make a Difference club to get promoted.
So, no, we were not required to have all of our retirement savings in Enron stock. But because the stock had done so well and was continuing to go up, many people lumped all of their money into Enron stock hoping to grow their savings quickly in a way that seemed safe.
As far as knowing what was going on, many of us had an idea that something was wrong going back to Q4 2000. My manager at the time quit in November and told us that he didn't know what was going on, but something wasn't right and he didn't want to be a part of it anymore. He resigned, cashed out his stock options, and moved to Hollywood where he took a position dealing with the security of streaming content. The rest of us tried to find other jobs, but by this time the bubble was already bursting and jobs were starting to get scarce. I don't think anyone, except those higher up, knew exactly what was going on.
You have to understand that Enron had a culture similar to Microsoft, in that almost everyone who worked there loved it. Everyone was treated and compensated well, and it showed in the attitudes of the people who worked there. The benefits package for all employees was the best I've ever seen. I never drank the "Ra Ra Kool-Aid," but I never felt bad about working there until it all went downhill. Members of management up to the C-level were approachable and friendly. I rode in an elevator with Ken Lay a couple of times and he was always pleasant and listened to what I had to say. You got the feeling he cared about the business from the ground up and wanted to know what was going on, and he wanted to hear it from those who were doing it instead of having it filtered up through the chain of command. The business hated a scandal more than anything, which is ironic in the context of how the company fell from grace. The slightest hint of scandal or controversy would see you resigned from your position and escourted from the building. My director was forced to resign after allegations of sexual harassment.
I also worked at Enron, and we were trying to get money and hardware resources pumped into several open source projects, namely the OpenBSD project, because we were one of the companies trying to use it in our production environment. Unfortunately my layoff came before we could get anything signed, at which point there was nothing left to give.
Enron and its subsidiaries had a lot of great people working for them, and it was one of the few places where bright minds/tech people could get promoted for being great at what they did, and it didn't matter if you were some fresh-faced college graduate recruited for our analyst program or a guy who dropped out of high school but was brilliant at programming. It also left a lot of those bright people in a financial and professional lurch. What was worse than the sudden loss of employment was the loss of professional stature. I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business, actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person. A lot of people thought we were part of some vast conspiracy, when many of us were the ones who got screwed in the process of Enron's downfall just like the other stock shareholders. The only difference between us and them is it was significantly more perseonal.
Maybe it's just me, but one of the key components of ensuring availability of computer systems for end users involves NEVER running beta or pre-production code on production systems. I can understand using a release product in a controlled environment for testing of a new product in your production environment, but anyone who uses pure beta software in the work environment is asking to face these kinds of trouble and shows they have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to providing IT services and technologies. Beta code, by it's very nature, is going to have and cause problems.
No, what's funny is the last time I caught glimpse of a Pride Parade, it was a bunch of guys with Hulk Hogan facial hair in leather codpieces and biker hats... and women with mullets. I don't know what right they were fighting for, but they definitely looked FABULOUS in that Folsom Street Fair sort of way.
Security intelligence companies that gather information about exploits and malware are already offering bounties for new exploits that haven't been found in the wild yet so they can scoop their competitors, and $5,000 US is about right for what most of them pay. What makes this any different?
Why do people listen to Kevin Mitnick on technical issues? He never once wrote a single line of code. He never once used anything he himself had created. All he was good at was using other people's tools, making hime a glorified script kiddie with connections to get the tools he needed. The only difference between him and your average script kiddie is he had specific targets that usually had something he wanted which motivated his attacks, instead of just randomly hitting vulnerable systems.
He proved he was a moron when he used the same MIN/ESN pair for his OKI the entire time Shimomura was tracing him down.
Slashdot Mirror
All of those sales figures are for movies, as it does not count game content on BD, nor hardware sales. BD movies are on average equal to or $5 more for native discs, with HD-DVD/DVD combo discs being $5-10 more than a similar native HD-DVD or BD. And Sony has all the major content providers on their side except for Universal, but it's debatable on whether they're a major provider with their poor performance at the box office.
HP is stopping production of their DLP sets because they suffered from significant problems that killed HP's reputation in that market, especially when they were just getting into it. DLP as a whole is fine, and pound for pound is one of the best fixed pixel display technologies available. I think the only better one available today is LCOS (Sony SXRD or JVC HD-ILA). But I'm really looking forward to Organic LED (OLED). It's got the contrast ratio of CRT (the ultimate display technology when it comes to visual quality) and vibrant colors, but with a form factor that is thinner than LCD (a horrible display technology) or Plasma (energy inefficient). They just have to work on making the blue elements last longer, but Sony displayed several OLED sets at this year's CES show, and everyone who say them was stunned at how good they looked compared to the other flat screen technologies. It makes LCD and Plasma look like CGA monitors.
I guess that would be great if I were still interested. I got over Starcraft 6 years ago, and while I think it was the perfect RTS and had a very compelling story, I don't understand why they feel the need to come back to it now, after 10 years, for a sequel to a game with such a rabid following? I think it's impossible that it could be a better playing experience than the original or Brood War for multiplayer. Why is it that Blizzard can only seem to develop one game at a time when they certainly have the resources to do more? They have three solid gold game franchises, and two of them have languished for the better part of a decade: Starcraft for 9 years, and Diablo for 6. I can understand their commitment to quality, but it's not as if there aren't enough good developers, project managers, and producers out there to make a quality game.
One year, 1999 I believe, while I was working at a large regional ISP, I got a company logo polo shirt as a bonus, as opposed to the $100 cash I received the year before. I thought it was a crappy gift, but it was a very nice shirt. I happened to wear it into work the day the CEO of the company told us all that we'd have to pay for the shirts and it would be coming out of our next paycheck. I told him he could have mine back. It didn't seem to register with him that he couldn't give us a gift and then demand we pay for it. I left a month later for a job that paid over twice as much.
As a consultant, my firm gave me a $250 gift certificate to Target and a really nice lunch. I spent most of it buying stuff for poor kids and families who needed stuff this Christmas through a local church charity. I figured that I made enough this year and anything I can do to help others is worthwhile. Plus, it breaks your heart when you see a kid asking simply for warm clothes or a jacket for Christmas.
The funny thing about his blog is that I used to work in IT for a large energy company that happened to be a SUN customer who I am almost certain is the company he's referring to. Yes, we did have oil rigs that used sensors on the drill bits to help determine how and where to drill. The funny thing is that the data gathered from the drill bits was sent back to a server in the data center, which was a SUN E4000. Data from that server was then fed into another SUN E4000 running Oracle and an application which read seismic data and was used to guide the drill. They were both in what I would easily describe as a traditional datacenter in Houston, TX
For that matter any ION Storm game or any Romero game?
You mean games like Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War, and Thief: Deadly Shadows? And Anarchronox was critically acclaimed, even if it didn't sell well.
Not everything to come out of Ion Storm was a joke, though Eidos killed off the studio. As for successful games without a sequel? How about Starcraft? And before you mention Brood Wars, it was an expansion pack, not a sequel.
The problem with your assertion is that the majority of transactions, at least in areas where I buy stuff on ebay, is personal sellers unloading personally owned items to others, and not new merchandise from a business to consumer. That's something Craigslist can do, but does poorly because everything is local and it's fixed price/best offer. Your model works great for new items, but not for used or hard to find items. I sell on ebay as well, and while I dislike their policies and BS, I also realize that for what I buy and sell there is no larger market. And what to I buy? Music gear. The sellers on ebay trying to sell new gear rarely make money because the people there aren't willing to pay, while those of us who own or buy used gear can sell it at a reasonable price (more than we'd get selling to Guitar Center or the local music shop) while those of us who buy can get it for cheaper than any brick or mortar store would be willing to sell it for. I've tried selling on Craigslist, and I've sold on ebay. Ebay always makes me more money, even after fees, and it gives me a much wider audience for my used music gear.
I've gone back to DVDs and CDs that I haven't used on twelve months and find they are unreadable - let alone four years. I'm sure there are people on /. that have had working hard drives for 7, 8, hell 10 years+.
Even audio CDs don't last more than a couple of years, particularly if you do something ridiculous, such as actually use them. Who here as a pile of audio CDs they bought in the 90s that are degraded beyond use?
Actually, I've got CD's from the 1980s that still work, and a couple of 9-10 year old CD-R's that are still usable today. And until only recently I was living in the Houston area, which is both hot and humid with a lot of sun. So, it's quite possible that you're not treating your media appropriately.
My guess is that this decision was made by Hifn's legal counsel, which is where regulatory compliance issues are generally clarified at the corporate level. From HIPPA to GLB to SOX and everyhwere in between, it's the company legal counsel that's deciding more and more about how businesses are run. If you don't like it, fine, but I don't hold it against Hifn to restrict their data because the legal issues regarding even crypto software and the information requires serious expertise in the matter. From a technical standpoint, we may think it makes no sense to even distribute the data sheet, but for Hifn they see it as a matter of covering their own ass from the FedGov.
I agree completely. Why all the emphasis on the Warcraft Universe when there's so much devotion worldwide to the Starcraft one? Not that it matters, as they'd just ruin it by turning it into a crapp 3D RTS like the did with Warcraft III.
But I'm glad they've completely glossed over the fact that more music gets traded over USENET than over P2P networks. P2P is more efficient for a one on one transfer, but USENET allows one person to send content to millions with a single transaction. Sure, I may have to request a certain song or album now and again, but mostly I'm happy to take what's offered and offer up what I have.
Mandatory sunset date of one year. Not just this stupid law but also laws that your congress-vermin pass. One year, it's re-evaluated and then passed again or thrown away.
I think I like your idea even better than I liked Heinlein's idea of needing a 2/3 majority to create a new law in a parliamentary body, and only 1/3 to abolish a law.
so there you have it. 1080p, sure... Blu-Ray support...sorry I can't see how that is going to sell.
Question: How many sets on the market accept 1080p over component?
Andwer: I know of one consumer grade 1080p native display that supports 1080p over component (Westinghouse 42" LCD), and it's an undocumented feature. That's it.
If th PS3 console has a 5+ year lifespan, not having HDMI is a huge mistake. Granted, in the last 5 years we've seen Component, Firewire, DVI, and then HDMI for HD content, but it looks like HDMI is here to stay for the next few years. And, given the cost of an HDMI adapter and the licensing per device, it wouldn't cost Sony much to put one on all PS3 units. How much?
$15,000 to be a part of the HDMI camp annually. Sony already pays this, and distributes this cost to every HDMI component they sell.
The interface/chipset cost. As best as I can tell, this cost is between $5-15 (can't find hard numbers)
Licensing fee of $0.15/unit sold to consumers. It gets reduced to $0.05/unit sold if you put the HDMI logo on your product. It gets dropped again to $0.04/unit sold if you license and implement HDCP. So, $0.04!
Not having HDMI is dumb. It's just that simple. HDCP is spelling the end of component inputs, and they're time is short.
Having 2 SKUs is dumb. Ditch wifi and memory card readers, drop the HD to 20+GB if you have to, put HDMI on the thing and give us one SKU.
The gaming press is wrong.
Rockster press release
Rockstar Games Announces Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360(TM) and PlayStation(R)3 Computer Entertainment System Tuesday May 9, 3:15 pm ET
It will be on the 360 first, but it will be on the PS3 as well.
I've lost a job by spoofing it. I answered all but one of the four sections the way I wanted to, and then threw one of the tests a curve ball by contradicting the answers from the other pages. In the end, the person liked my credentials but decided not to hire me because of the deviation from the one test. What they were looking for, since it was a tech job, was they were looking for a deep thinker who was analtyical and methodical without being emotional/intuitive and touchy-feely. This is most likely what they're looking for as well. Either way, the tests are dumb.
If Microsoft is so serious about security, could they please start by bringing their logging out of the dark ages and to what has been available on UNIX for some times. A UNIX system will log the difference between a bad username and a username with a bad password to the auth.error or auth.info facility, even if it delivers the same generic "Bad username or password" message to the user trying to log in. That's the information Windows actually logs, which makes realtime security monitoring a joke if you're looking to determine if someone is grinding through usernames or actually trying to brute force a password for a single account with a realtime security solution.
It would also be nice if MS SQL server actually logged the remote IP/hostname of failed SQL sessions for SQL standalone authentication. When some user tries to violate policy by attempting to log in as the Admin user in the DB and then fails, I can't go correct the problem. It makes auditing access impossible if shared accounts are used (they shouldn't, but it still happens, even when people should know better).
Not exactly. I picked up a 1GB MS Pro Duo on sale for $45. You can pick up 2GB for around $100 shipped if you look. If the PS3 doesn't come with a HD, and I don't think it will to keep costs down so the $499, $45 for 1GB of storage space isn't a bad idea. Compared to $40 for 8MB of space on the PS2, it's a pretty significant price reduction.
The PS3 is ditching memory cards for Sony's Memory Stick Pro Duo format (same as the PSP and newer Sony gear use), which hold up to 2GB of data right now. While that's not enough to hold a full traditional game, that is enough to hold mini-games and media content the likes of which are currently being seen on XBOX Live and happen to be very popular. While a HD is an option that I'd probably want, I like having the option of getting one in the size that fits my needs, and given the size of HD content, I'd expect I'd want a big one.
OK, let's step back a minute and analyze these numbers.
$350 for the BD-ROM drive? What happened to $100 for the drive as reported here on slashdot and other places back last September? The drive assemblies for the PS3 are already being made by a joint venture between Toshiba and Samsung (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Corp.) So let's say the drive is a more reasonable $100/unit.
And the cell processor at the 90nm process in November of 2005 was yielding 65 good chips per wafer with a wafer costing $9,000-$10,000. There are over 200 sites on the wafer, so that's just over a 31% yield at a flat cost of $150/processor, so assume $175 per solderable Cell processor. If they can increase yield per wafer to say 50%, then they'll drop the price to around $125 for solderable Cell processor, and yield of 66% would decrese costs to around $100 per solderable CPU. Still, we'll stick with $175 per CPU. That's $55 less than the Merrill Lynch estimate.
So, plugging in my new estimated values for BD-ROM drive and Cell processor based on previously released articles estimating the prices, I get right at $495 per PS3. That's not exactly a loss leader if the cost is $500. Sony will be double dipping on licensing fees for the PS3 games (PS3 licensing as well as BD-ROM licensing), but it won't be anywhere near $20. $12-15 is far more likely. The real money is made in peripherals, which is where the profit margins are much higher. A PS2 controller cost was $40 or so at launch, but took less than $10 to manufacture and package. A PS3 controller will likely show similar margins. And what about memory cards? The PS3 will use Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, just like the PSP and most of Sony's newer electronic devices. The profit margins on these is significantly higher.
And let's not forget that we're about to be at the beginning of the High Definition optical media format war. If PS3 can get a couple of million players into livingrooms across the country and spur the purchases of more HDTV displays, Sony will have effectively won the format war (they've already got the majority of the studio support) with a higher adoption rate than DVD saw until several years into it's consumer life. And the real money will be made on BD-ROM movie licensing fees. Profits generated by the PS3 will be nothing compared to those generated over the next 10 years by whoever wins the HD optical format war.
Enron never required publicly, privately, or explicitly that employees were required to purchase and keep Enron stock in their retirement portfolios. It was certainly part of the culture, but it was part of the culture that came from middle management as best I could tell. The only thing that involved money that made you visible to the upper level management types was time spent on community/charity work and donations to charities, especially United Way, as Enron matched dollar for dollar and actively encouraged involvement in the community. It was an established fact, if never spoken officially by management, that you had to give enough to the United Way to be part of their Make a Difference club to get promoted.
So, no, we were not required to have all of our retirement savings in Enron stock. But because the stock had done so well and was continuing to go up, many people lumped all of their money into Enron stock hoping to grow their savings quickly in a way that seemed safe.
As far as knowing what was going on, many of us had an idea that something was wrong going back to Q4 2000. My manager at the time quit in November and told us that he didn't know what was going on, but something wasn't right and he didn't want to be a part of it anymore. He resigned, cashed out his stock options, and moved to Hollywood where he took a position dealing with the security of streaming content. The rest of us tried to find other jobs, but by this time the bubble was already bursting and jobs were starting to get scarce. I don't think anyone, except those higher up, knew exactly what was going on.
You have to understand that Enron had a culture similar to Microsoft, in that almost everyone who worked there loved it. Everyone was treated and compensated well, and it showed in the attitudes of the people who worked there. The benefits package for all employees was the best I've ever seen. I never drank the "Ra Ra Kool-Aid," but I never felt bad about working there until it all went downhill. Members of management up to the C-level were approachable and friendly. I rode in an elevator with Ken Lay a couple of times and he was always pleasant and listened to what I had to say. You got the feeling he cared about the business from the ground up and wanted to know what was going on, and he wanted to hear it from those who were doing it instead of having it filtered up through the chain of command. The business hated a scandal more than anything, which is ironic in the context of how the company fell from grace. The slightest hint of scandal or controversy would see you resigned from your position and escourted from the building. My director was forced to resign after allegations of sexual harassment.
I also worked at Enron, and we were trying to get money and hardware resources pumped into several open source projects, namely the OpenBSD project, because we were one of the companies trying to use it in our production environment. Unfortunately my layoff came before we could get anything signed, at which point there was nothing left to give.
Enron and its subsidiaries had a lot of great people working for them, and it was one of the few places where bright minds/tech people could get promoted for being great at what they did, and it didn't matter if you were some fresh-faced college graduate recruited for our analyst program or a guy who dropped out of high school but was brilliant at programming. It also left a lot of those bright people in a financial and professional lurch. What was worse than the sudden loss of employment was the loss of professional stature. I had prospective employers, even those in the energy trading business, actually deny me employment because I worked at Enron, as if I had something to do with their downfall as an upper level tech person. A lot of people thought we were part of some vast conspiracy, when many of us were the ones who got screwed in the process of Enron's downfall just like the other stock shareholders. The only difference between us and them is it was significantly more perseonal.
Maybe it's just me, but one of the key components of ensuring availability of computer systems for end users involves NEVER running beta or pre-production code on production systems. I can understand using a release product in a controlled environment for testing of a new product in your production environment, but anyone who uses pure beta software in the work environment is asking to face these kinds of trouble and shows they have absolutely no idea what they're doing when it comes to providing IT services and technologies. Beta code, by it's very nature, is going to have and cause problems.
No, what's funny is the last time I caught glimpse of a Pride Parade, it was a bunch of guys with Hulk Hogan facial hair in leather codpieces and biker hats... and women with mullets. I don't know what right they were fighting for, but they definitely looked FABULOUS in that Folsom Street Fair sort of way.
Security intelligence companies that gather information about exploits and malware are already offering bounties for new exploits that haven't been found in the wild yet so they can scoop their competitors, and $5,000 US is about right for what most of them pay. What makes this any different?
Why do people listen to Kevin Mitnick on technical issues? He never once wrote a single line of code. He never once used anything he himself had created. All he was good at was using other people's tools, making hime a glorified script kiddie with connections to get the tools he needed. The only difference between him and your average script kiddie is he had specific targets that usually had something he wanted which motivated his attacks, instead of just randomly hitting vulnerable systems.
He proved he was a moron when he used the same MIN/ESN pair for his OKI the entire time Shimomura was tracing him down.