6.0 Mb/s connection? 30% overhead? Are you basing your findings off your cable modem performance? 25-30% overhead is terrible. You're doing something wrong. When testing a couple 10Gb cards through a few different switches, the most overhead I saw was maybe 8-10%, tops.
Also, there are several applications where a 10Gb connection would be used, so I don't think the fact that they used the 7.5 gigs is very impressive. To me it's the fact that they pushed video that played 7.5 Gbps. Now THAT would make for some great HDTV.
So thats why my college years are so hazy! I knew blowing up capacitors during electronics class was a little too much fun. Thank god it was the smoke from the capacitors, and not all that beer I drank!
True, but audio can be compressed much, much better than video seems to be. I haven't seen too many videos that were compressed to 1/15th the size of the original, and still looked almost as good as the original. Also, I use a nicely layed out spreadsheet fo organize my movies by title, genre, location, etc etc, so searching through my movies only takes a few seconds at best.
50 pack of dvd-r w/ 235 gigs of storage: 12.99
250 gig hard drive (with probably ~240 gigs formated): 69.99
I guess I'm not understanding what you mean by me valuing my time handling optical media. It takes at most, 10 seconds to locate the movie I want in a rack (30 seconds maybe if it's in a spindle), and get it into the dvd player. Popcorn still takes 2.5 minutes to pop. Maybe we should be more concerned with figuring out how to more efficiently pop popcorn? That seems to be a bigger time waster.
But what if you like all your movies, and you don't want to get rid of them? You can't fit a whole lot of HD content onto a hard drive, eventually you're going to have to either burn it to a disk, if they let you without gimping it, or delete it. A 250 GB hard drive can only hold about 10 to 15 HD movies, depending on the format. My DVD collection, if I had it in HD and without special features, would require a 5TB of space! And yes, I have watched all the movies I own more than once, so deleting movies wouldn't be an option.
I rather enjoy being able look at my collection, pick out a random movie, and hit play. Having to schedule my life around when a movie will finish downloading just isn't my thing. If there's a movie I want to watch and it's not in my collection, I can go to the video store two blocks away from my apartment, get it, and be back in 10 minutes.
Certain films I could wait for (via netflix or download), but most of the time I just don't want to wait. If I'm going to choose a movie in advance, it may as well be via netflix. With a download you can run it overnight, but odds are you're not going to watch it as soon as you get up. You'll wait till the evening after you get home from work. Then you have to go through the aforementioned work of either burning it or connecting it to the tv. Where is the convenience in doing this versus netflix? Either way you have to schedule your viewing, and one comes in a convenient, ready to view package.
That said, I still would rather go to a video store.
What, you mean like the Blu Ray combo disks? They aren't available yet, but then again the demand for HiDef videos aren't terribly great either at the moment.
You can get 3 movies at a time with netflix, so that's 22.5 hours with basic, 7.5 hours with premium service. Still faster, but keep in mind you have to tie up your Internet connection for that long. Then you need 45 gigs free on a hdd. Then you need to connect the computer to the TV with an hdcp approved connection. If you don't have that, you need to burn it to an HDDVD. Then you need to log into netflix and reenable your account after you realize how much hassle it is to download and play HD content!
The Internet.
The xbox 360 has what, a 20GB HDD? so it will be able to hold...1 HD movie (at Bluray/HDDVD quality), maybe a 3 or 4 if it's compressed more? And as mentioned, it lasts 24 hours, then it's gone. So if something comes up and you can't finish your movie, too bad!
Cable on-demand.
Instead of paying 3 or 4 bucks for a movie rental, which would display at full 1080p resolution, you get a compressed version for ~85 bucks a month (per Comcast pricing). Oh, and you don't really know if the movie will be offered there. If it's not, you get to run to blockbuster and pay 4 bucks anyway!
New formats mean pricey hardware.
So people are willing to drop $3k on a new setup, and then pay an extra $85 for cable ($1000+ a year!), but they aren't willing to drop $350 (at current prices) to play movies? Really? I seem to recall DVD players catching on just fine at those prices.
The rise of the hard drive.
The 360, as noted above, could probably only hold maybe half a dozen movies at ok resolutions (for an HDTV). After that you have to delete movies to make room for new ones. My DVD rack currently holds 100 DVDs. I win. Maybe a HDD makes sense for large collections, but even then, it'd have to be a sizely hard drive to contain all the HD content. You're looking at $150 just for the drive itself!
Personally, this guy sounds like an idiot. Everything he's asking for is years down the road. How much has broadband evolved (as far as speed goes) in the US in the last few years? I had 3Mb connection 6 years ago. Today? 6Mb. Not moving too fast there. HDD prices aren't anywhere close enough to the price of a DVD to make it feasable. On-Demand has the best chance, but only assuming every studio signs on and makes their content available. But at that point, I would bet your cable bill just went up another 30 bucks.
The HDTV crowd will adopt, eventually. Those of us still enjoying our $200 27" tv probably won't, at least for a long time.
As much as this looks like an OS thing, it's not...really. It's the Zune application that isn't compatible with the OS. It's not the Vista dev team's problem, it's the zune dev team's problem.
Except the linked article was using beta software, which is the basis of this whole thread. There's no point in yelling fire until Vista is available for use, which by my calendar is another 15 days or so. If Zune still doesn't work on the 30th, then we can post an article flaming them. Until then, who cares? Does anyone need Zune + Vista right now? Legally, no.
Welcome to tiered search optimizations! Google knows that you're not likely to click on any money generating ads for an OMG PONIEZ!1 search, but they sure know that you're likely to pay for some good ol' pr0n! Why should those free loading poniez fanatics get all the good database inquiries? Google knows where their revenue stream is coming from, and as a result, have optimized it for your clicking pleasure~
We're talking about a guy whose job is to ensure that his companies products sell well. I would likely believe Ballmer is thinking "free as in beer", even if the question was actually "free as in speech". If his mind first went to the latter, and I was carrying MS stock, I'd be a little worried.
Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen.
I haven't used the new touch screen voting machines, but if you went Democrat "across the board", isn't that a single check box? I seem to remember paper ballots just having one box to strike if you wanted to vote a single party for the entire ballot. How would so called screen calibration errors randomly select republicans then?
You're really a big fan of that wake from suspend aren't ya? What about those of us that use wireless networking with VPN connections? After waking up, wireless connections then need to reestablish. Since I'm usually on a VPN connection at home, I need to manually disconnect/reconnect that as well. Too many orphaned connections makes it pretty unhappy and leaves me unable to connect. So now before suspending, I have to close out any network stored files I'm working on and disconnect from the VPN,(+60 seconds), then after waking up I need to reconnect to the AP (anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds), then I need to find my RSA token generator, plug in the numbers, and connect (another 30 to 60 seconds), then reopen any files I was working on (30 seconds). So, anywhere up to 360 seconds a day + 30 days a month = 180 minutes. Definitely not worth my time.
Except that you're comparing two companies that are structured in completely different ways. Sony has several divisions: games, music, movies, electronics, with a wide variety of products in each category. Cypress Semiconductor Corp makes....semiconducturs. It's all they do, that's what they're known for. The DOJ is going after Sony Electronics, which is sort of the "sub corporation" that makes the memory. They have nothing to do with "ridiculous PS3 prices" (did they get sued for this?), or the DRM fiasco (do you mean rootkit?). Bad press with batteries isn't going to make people stop buying sony branded music, or seeing sony branded movies. No one is going to look at this and go, "omg boycott sony!", and actually follow through with it. Sony is big enough to absorb the blows from minor news such as this.
And I'm pretty sure Zonk is more biased against Sony than Microsoft is. I'm pretty sure that guy just looks around for bad sony news, even if it's meaningless (see this article).
Ferrari and Lambourgini would have much larger market shares if dollars spent affected the market share.
So now higher price = higher market share? Keep in mind there's another factor in there. Units sold. How many ferraris do you see on a daily basis? Now, how many toyotas? fords? saturns? I don't have the numbers, but I'm guessing the few hundred thousand autos sold by each major manufacturer each year adds up to a bit more than the few thousand Ferraris and Lamborghinis sold. Call me silly.
I would put forth the idea that total time played is an very good indication of the popularity (or market share) of a game.
Popularity != market share. Popularity != time used. The word you're looking for is "quality".
I'd like to also put forth the idea that it would probably be a great idea for a company to give a game away for free (perhaps their own pirated copy even) that was extremely popular to get people to buy their console.
It's called shareware. These days, you might know it as a demo. Remember the Doom shareware back in the day? Probably not from the sounds of it.
Definitions can be very subjective things.
I would like to point you to a dictionary. I'd point you to your local high school too, if I knew where you lived.
I do agree with the posters who pointed out that the jewelers are in a bind here. Its a bit like PC manufacturers and MicroSoft. If they buy from the synthetic folks DeBeers is likely to blackball them.
Agreed. A while back in an Econ class we watched a documentary on DeBeers. There was a diamond purchaser that walked whoever was producing the bit through the process of buying rough(uncut?) diamonds from DeBeers. He explained that you didn't place orders for DeBeers, you just showed up and take what DeBeers chooses to give you. Word had seemed to have gotten out that he was doing the documentary (seeing as though the camera crew was right there when he picked them up), and he received an entire order of green diamonds, which he said he would not be able to turn a profit at all.
I'm sure DeBeers is watching, very closely, to who is carrying lab created diamonds. I have no doubt that they'll be able to extend their control to the artificial diamond market as well.
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6.0 Mb/s connection? 30% overhead? Are you basing your findings off your cable modem performance? 25-30% overhead is terrible. You're doing something wrong. When testing a couple 10Gb cards through a few different switches, the most overhead I saw was maybe 8-10%, tops.
Also, there are several applications where a 10Gb connection would be used, so I don't think the fact that they used the 7.5 gigs is very impressive. To me it's the fact that they pushed video that played 7.5 Gbps. Now THAT would make for some great HDTV.
So thats why my college years are so hazy! I knew blowing up capacitors during electronics class was a little too much fun. Thank god it was the smoke from the capacitors, and not all that beer I drank!
True, but audio can be compressed much, much better than video seems to be. I haven't seen too many videos that were compressed to 1/15th the size of the original, and still looked almost as good as the original. Also, I use a nicely layed out spreadsheet fo organize my movies by title, genre, location, etc etc, so searching through my movies only takes a few seconds at best.
50 pack of dvd-r w/ 235 gigs of storage: 12.99
250 gig hard drive (with probably ~240 gigs formated): 69.99
I guess I'm not understanding what you mean by me valuing my time handling optical media. It takes at most, 10 seconds to locate the movie I want in a rack (30 seconds maybe if it's in a spindle), and get it into the dvd player. Popcorn still takes 2.5 minutes to pop. Maybe we should be more concerned with figuring out how to more efficiently pop popcorn? That seems to be a bigger time waster.
But what if you like all your movies, and you don't want to get rid of them? You can't fit a whole lot of HD content onto a hard drive, eventually you're going to have to either burn it to a disk, if they let you without gimping it, or delete it. A 250 GB hard drive can only hold about 10 to 15 HD movies, depending on the format. My DVD collection, if I had it in HD and without special features, would require a 5TB of space! And yes, I have watched all the movies I own more than once, so deleting movies wouldn't be an option.
I rather enjoy being able look at my collection, pick out a random movie, and hit play. Having to schedule my life around when a movie will finish downloading just isn't my thing. If there's a movie I want to watch and it's not in my collection, I can go to the video store two blocks away from my apartment, get it, and be back in 10 minutes.
Certain films I could wait for (via netflix or download), but most of the time I just don't want to wait. If I'm going to choose a movie in advance, it may as well be via netflix. With a download you can run it overnight, but odds are you're not going to watch it as soon as you get up. You'll wait till the evening after you get home from work. Then you have to go through the aforementioned work of either burning it or connecting it to the tv. Where is the convenience in doing this versus netflix? Either way you have to schedule your viewing, and one comes in a convenient, ready to view package.
That said, I still would rather go to a video store.
What, you mean like the Blu Ray combo disks? They aren't available yet, but then again the demand for HiDef videos aren't terribly great either at the moment.
You can get 3 movies at a time with netflix, so that's 22.5 hours with basic, 7.5 hours with premium service. Still faster, but keep in mind you have to tie up your Internet connection for that long. Then you need 45 gigs free on a hdd. Then you need to connect the computer to the TV with an hdcp approved connection. If you don't have that, you need to burn it to an HDDVD. Then you need to log into netflix and reenable your account after you realize how much hassle it is to download and play HD content!
The Internet.
The xbox 360 has what, a 20GB HDD? so it will be able to hold...1 HD movie (at Bluray/HDDVD quality), maybe a 3 or 4 if it's compressed more? And as mentioned, it lasts 24 hours, then it's gone. So if something comes up and you can't finish your movie, too bad!
Cable on-demand.
Instead of paying 3 or 4 bucks for a movie rental, which would display at full 1080p resolution, you get a compressed version for ~85 bucks a month (per Comcast pricing). Oh, and you don't really know if the movie will be offered there. If it's not, you get to run to blockbuster and pay 4 bucks anyway!
New formats mean pricey hardware.
So people are willing to drop $3k on a new setup, and then pay an extra $85 for cable ($1000+ a year!), but they aren't willing to drop $350 (at current prices) to play movies? Really? I seem to recall DVD players catching on just fine at those prices.
The rise of the hard drive.
The 360, as noted above, could probably only hold maybe half a dozen movies at ok resolutions (for an HDTV). After that you have to delete movies to make room for new ones. My DVD rack currently holds 100 DVDs. I win. Maybe a HDD makes sense for large collections, but even then, it'd have to be a sizely hard drive to contain all the HD content. You're looking at $150 just for the drive itself!
Personally, this guy sounds like an idiot. Everything he's asking for is years down the road. How much has broadband evolved (as far as speed goes) in the US in the last few years? I had 3Mb connection 6 years ago. Today? 6Mb. Not moving too fast there. HDD prices aren't anywhere close enough to the price of a DVD to make it feasable. On-Demand has the best chance, but only assuming every studio signs on and makes their content available. But at that point, I would bet your cable bill just went up another 30 bucks.
The HDTV crowd will adopt, eventually. Those of us still enjoying our $200 27" tv probably won't, at least for a long time.
As much as this looks like an OS thing, it's not...really. It's the Zune application that isn't compatible with the OS. It's not the Vista dev team's problem, it's the zune dev team's problem.
Except the linked article was using beta software, which is the basis of this whole thread. There's no point in yelling fire until Vista is available for use, which by my calendar is another 15 days or so. If Zune still doesn't work on the 30th, then we can post an article flaming them. Until then, who cares? Does anyone need Zune + Vista right now? Legally, no.
You mean a piece of hardware isn't compatible with beta software?! This has never happened before, ever!
Somehow they've optimized that one.
Welcome to tiered search optimizations! Google knows that you're not likely to click on any money generating ads for an OMG PONIEZ!1 search, but they sure know that you're likely to pay for some good ol' pr0n! Why should those free loading poniez fanatics get all the good database inquiries? Google knows where their revenue stream is coming from, and as a result, have optimized it for your clicking pleasure~
thumbs-only typing
/.ers, 'special dialing wand' typing.
And for those of us muumuu wearing
It better be a looooonnngggg time before they start singing that! I have no desire to stick a paper bag over my head quite yet...
We're talking about a guy whose job is to ensure that his companies products sell well. I would likely believe Ballmer is thinking "free as in beer", even if the question was actually "free as in speech". If his mind first went to the latter, and I was carrying MS stock, I'd be a little worried.
I didn't think people started celebrating the birth of Santa until a few hundred years later, I could be wrong though.
Another voter who went Democrat across the board kept finding Republicans listed in the summary screen.
I haven't used the new touch screen voting machines, but if you went Democrat "across the board", isn't that a single check box? I seem to remember paper ballots just having one box to strike if you wanted to vote a single party for the entire ballot. How would so called screen calibration errors randomly select republicans then?
You're really a big fan of that wake from suspend aren't ya? What about those of us that use wireless networking with VPN connections? After waking up, wireless connections then need to reestablish. Since I'm usually on a VPN connection at home, I need to manually disconnect/reconnect that as well. Too many orphaned connections makes it pretty unhappy and leaves me unable to connect. So now before suspending, I have to close out any network stored files I'm working on and disconnect from the VPN,(+60 seconds), then after waking up I need to reconnect to the AP (anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds), then I need to find my RSA token generator, plug in the numbers, and connect (another 30 to 60 seconds), then reopen any files I was working on (30 seconds). So, anywhere up to 360 seconds a day + 30 days a month = 180 minutes. Definitely not worth my time.
doh, guess I shouldn't have quit after 15 minutes. dark + 5.1 surround + those radiod screams = esc esc esc
Except that you're comparing two companies that are structured in completely different ways. Sony has several divisions: games, music, movies, electronics, with a wide variety of products in each category. Cypress Semiconductor Corp makes....semiconducturs. It's all they do, that's what they're known for. The DOJ is going after Sony Electronics, which is sort of the "sub corporation" that makes the memory. They have nothing to do with "ridiculous PS3 prices" (did they get sued for this?), or the DRM fiasco (do you mean rootkit?). Bad press with batteries isn't going to make people stop buying sony branded music, or seeing sony branded movies. No one is going to look at this and go, "omg boycott sony!", and actually follow through with it. Sony is big enough to absorb the blows from minor news such as this.
And I'm pretty sure Zonk is more biased against Sony than Microsoft is. I'm pretty sure that guy just looks around for bad sony news, even if it's meaningless (see this article).
"Sony intends to cooperate fully with the DOJ in what appears to be an industrywide inquiry," the company said in a short statement. (Emphasis mine).
So the DOJ appears to be investigating every manufacturer, and there is no info even hinting that Sony did everything wrong.
Oh, now I see, it's a Zonk post.
Pssssstt! Look at the quote I was responding to. Then, re-read my comment. Repeat as necessary.
In many cases you are completely wrong. Market share is the percentage of people using a product.
You're not off to a good start yourself.
Ferrari and Lambourgini would have much larger market shares if dollars spent affected the market share.
So now higher price = higher market share? Keep in mind there's another factor in there. Units sold. How many ferraris do you see on a daily basis? Now, how many toyotas? fords? saturns? I don't have the numbers, but I'm guessing the few hundred thousand autos sold by each major manufacturer each year adds up to a bit more than the few thousand Ferraris and Lamborghinis sold. Call me silly.
I would put forth the idea that total time played is an very good indication of the popularity (or market share) of a game.
Popularity != market share. Popularity != time used. The word you're looking for is "quality".
I'd like to also put forth the idea that it would probably be a great idea for a company to give a game away for free (perhaps their own pirated copy even) that was extremely popular to get people to buy their console.
It's called shareware. These days, you might know it as a demo. Remember the Doom shareware back in the day? Probably not from the sounds of it.
Definitions can be very subjective things.
I would like to point you to a dictionary. I'd point you to your local high school too, if I knew where you lived.
I'm a big fan of "ID 10T" errors.
In FF: tools menu - Options - "Check Now".
Not a single one of the Office programs I use tries to open anything in IE.
I do agree with the posters who pointed out that the jewelers are in a bind here. Its a bit like PC manufacturers and MicroSoft. If they buy from the synthetic folks DeBeers is likely to blackball them.
Agreed. A while back in an Econ class we watched a documentary on DeBeers. There was a diamond purchaser that walked whoever was producing the bit through the process of buying rough(uncut?) diamonds from DeBeers. He explained that you didn't place orders for DeBeers, you just showed up and take what DeBeers chooses to give you. Word had seemed to have gotten out that he was doing the documentary (seeing as though the camera crew was right there when he picked them up), and he received an entire order of green diamonds, which he said he would not be able to turn a profit at all.
I'm sure DeBeers is watching, very closely, to who is carrying lab created diamonds. I have no doubt that they'll be able to extend their control to the artificial diamond market as well.