If I've heard correctly, Sony can't really do that. Their partners which manufacture Blu-Ray players would kill them, since they're in for profit. On the other hand, Toshiba is the only manufacturer of HD-DVD players, so they can do as they please.
The only way for Sony to do that would be either to convince their partners that it's worth doing it, or pay up for other companies' losses. Considering Sony's finances aren't very good right now, I'd say the chances of that happening aren't very big.
That doesn't mean Sony will be able to build the drives cheaply when they're doing it in small quantities. There's more to the drive than the diodes, and even the diodes will be more expensive if they're buying them in small quantities.
Specifically, if Blu-Ray loses to HD-DVD, the PlayStation 3, which is already overly expensive, would lose it's secondary selling point - as a Blu-Ray player.
Actually, it's even worse. If Blu-Ray loses, Blu-Ray players will stop being manufactured. Sony is relying on economies of scale to drive down the costs of Blu-Ray diodes and drives, which will make it even harder for them to make a profit on the PS3.
In the past 1.5 years they've already lost half the profit they made on the Playstation brand since 1997 (you can check it on their financial reports).
Combine that with the astronomical price cuts they're being forced to do, and you have the recipe for financial disaster at Sony's game division. There may never be a PS4 if things keep going the way they're going now.
It isn't a huge stretch to assume that such a find would come hand in hand with new technology for us. After all, if they want us to hear them, either they want to talk, or they want to get rid of us. It seems like a lot of work to try to get rid of things you don't even know are there, doesn't it?
You're assuming they don't know we're here. And of course, any technological recipes that they send us may turn out to spell disaster. That would probably not be a lot of work, it's just "make plans for disaster machine, send said plans across space".
I agree with some points of your analysis, but in some other ones you're assuming a bit too much.
There are other ways of knowing whether your numbers are truly off or not. Each quarter, the manufacturers release shipped numbers which in some cases can show whether your numbers were correct or not. Of course shipped doesn't equal sold, but there's still something to judge numbers against without NPD.
How do you think NPD judges if their numbers were correct too? They have around 60% of the market covered, which is obviously not enough for perfect estimates. There's plenty of historical data and news reports which help everyone make better estimates.
NPD is not the be all end all of game sales. Vgchartz's owner actually said that he would stop taking NPD's numbers as gospel after he had to undo corrections he did due to NPD (which was wrong). As I said, they failed at tracking the Wii and DS more than Vgchartz did in the last quarter.
Yes they are. The farthest they've been away from NPD was 30% (so there goes your "halfway" comment). BTW, Vgchartz was more reliable than NPD for the Wii and the DS in the last quarter.
Either that, or many people wanted to use this opportunity to make a point against the recording labels, and the results would be different if this became a standard practice.
Either that or many people wanted to use this opportunity to make a point against the recording labels, and the results would be different if this became a standard practice.
Flight controllers have already warned Parazynski not to touch the electricity-generating solar cells that cover virtually the entire wing. If the metal of a tool he was holding melted, it could burn a hole into his glove.
What kind of requirements are there to be a candidate in USA?? In my country, the only special requirement is that you get a few thousand authenticated signatures from people who support you... Shouldn't that be enough to be on the ballot?
They have recently stated that they're producing 1.8 million per month. They're probably stockpiling many of them for the holiday season, since they also said supply will double in Christmas. They'll also launch the Wii in China, so they will probably ramp up production even more!
Despite all of that, it's still quite likely that the Wii will still be sold out in many places at the end of the year.
That pretty much confirms that Sony will massively fail at even coming near their PS3 shipment forecasts for the fiscal year. They are forecasting 11 million shipped during the fiscal year, and have shipped 2 million in the first half.
With MGS4 now out of the fiscal year (ending March 31 2008), a new round of doom and gloom for Sony has been ordered from the media. Publishers will pay attention to it, and Konami will too. If Microsoft is trying to get Konami to port MGS4 to the 360, this will make it much easier.
PS: Does it make any sense to release this game during the slow summer season? There could be further delays up to 2008's holiday season.
There's no proof either way. It could or not be NP-complete. From wikipedia:
It is not known exactly which complexity classes contain the decision version of the integer factorization problem. It is known to be in both NP and co-NP. This is because both YES and NO answers can be trivially verified given the prime factors (we can verify their primality using the AKS primality test, and that their product is N by multiplication). It is known to be in BQP because of Shor's algorithm. It is suspected to be outside of all three of the complexity classes P, NP-Complete, and co-NP-Complete. If it could be proved that it is in either NP-Complete or co-NP-Complete, that would imply NP = co-NP. That would be a very surprising result, and therefore integer factorization is widely suspected to be outside both of those classes. Many people have tried to find classical polynomial-time algorithms for it and failed, and therefore it is widely suspected to be outside P.
There's a very big difference between the two things you just attempted to compare. While computer scientists may have "thought" that O(n^2) was the fastest complexity for sorting, they hadn't proven so. On the other hand, it is perfectly proven that all NP-complete problems can be converted to each other. The proofs are not complicated and they're perfectly agreed on.
The definition of NP-complete does not allow for what you just said. A polynomial time algorithm for any NP-complete problem will allow you to solve all NP-complete problems in polynomial time, since you can convert them to each other in polynomial time.
Every now and then I take a crack at P=NP, and sometimes, I feel like I've really got a good proof - a program idea, that, when implemented, could FACTOR fairly quickly.
Do you mean factor numbers? Even though it would be impressive to have an algorithm which factors numbers quickly, it wouldn't prove anything about the P=NP? problem. Factoring numbers is not known to be an NP-complete problem, so solving it in polynomial time doesn't automatically imply that P=NP.
If you want a Wii and can't find it yet, you should know that supply will double in Christmas according to Nintendo themselves. They've probably been stockpiling units for the important holiday season.
The question is, when are they going to start releasing those units? You have to be attentive, because it's likely that demand is so high, that even doubled supply will still not be enough.
Sales being steady doesn't mean they haven't been stockpiling... It's possible they increased production a few months ago already, and are stocking part of it for the holiday period. It's a common strategy when there's high demand for a product.
Anyway, the effect should be the same for the holiday period. If supply decreases immediately after, we'll know they were stockpiling.
9:17 a.m.: Been making more Wii systems. Demand continues to surprise Nintendo. Consumers will still have to "hustle" to find the system this year. Will have about two times the product they had last year.
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If I've heard correctly, Sony can't really do that. Their partners which manufacture Blu-Ray players would kill them, since they're in for profit. On the other hand, Toshiba is the only manufacturer of HD-DVD players, so they can do as they please.
The only way for Sony to do that would be either to convince their partners that it's worth doing it, or pay up for other companies' losses. Considering Sony's finances aren't very good right now, I'd say the chances of that happening aren't very big.
That doesn't mean Sony will be able to build the drives cheaply when they're doing it in small quantities. There's more to the drive than the diodes, and even the diodes will be more expensive if they're buying them in small quantities.
Actually, it's even worse. If Blu-Ray loses, Blu-Ray players will stop being manufactured. Sony is relying on economies of scale to drive down the costs of Blu-Ray diodes and drives, which will make it even harder for them to make a profit on the PS3.
In the past 1.5 years they've already lost half the profit they made on the Playstation brand since 1997 (you can check it on their financial reports).
Combine that with the astronomical price cuts they're being forced to do, and you have the recipe for financial disaster at Sony's game division. There may never be a PS4 if things keep going the way they're going now.
You're assuming they don't know we're here. And of course, any technological recipes that they send us may turn out to spell disaster. That would probably not be a lot of work, it's just "make plans for disaster machine, send said plans across space".
I agree with some points of your analysis, but in some other ones you're assuming a bit too much.
Not only is the simulation scenario possible, it's also likely... :O
There are other ways of knowing whether your numbers are truly off or not. Each quarter, the manufacturers release shipped numbers which in some cases can show whether your numbers were correct or not. Of course shipped doesn't equal sold, but there's still something to judge numbers against without NPD.
How do you think NPD judges if their numbers were correct too? They have around 60% of the market covered, which is obviously not enough for perfect estimates. There's plenty of historical data and news reports which help everyone make better estimates.
NPD is not the be all end all of game sales. Vgchartz's owner actually said that he would stop taking NPD's numbers as gospel after he had to undo corrections he did due to NPD (which was wrong). As I said, they failed at tracking the Wii and DS more than Vgchartz did in the last quarter.
Yes they are. The farthest they've been away from NPD was 30% (so there goes your "halfway" comment). BTW, Vgchartz was more reliable than NPD for the Wii and the DS in the last quarter.
Oops, I meant to reply to this post instead...
Either that, or many people wanted to use this opportunity to make a point against the recording labels, and the results would be different if this became a standard practice.
For some reason, I'm inclined towards the latter.
Either that or many people wanted to use this opportunity to make a point against the recording labels, and the results would be different if this became a standard practice.
For some reason, I'm inclined towards the latter.
No, I don't think you're being too pedantic. Maybe this is the answer?
What kind of requirements are there to be a candidate in USA?? In my country, the only special requirement is that you get a few thousand authenticated signatures from people who support you... Shouldn't that be enough to be on the ballot?
They have recently stated that they're producing 1.8 million per month. They're probably stockpiling many of them for the holiday season, since they also said supply will double in Christmas. They'll also launch the Wii in China, so they will probably ramp up production even more!
Despite all of that, it's still quite likely that the Wii will still be sold out in many places at the end of the year.
That pretty much confirms that Sony will massively fail at even coming near their PS3 shipment forecasts for the fiscal year. They are forecasting 11 million shipped during the fiscal year, and have shipped 2 million in the first half.
With MGS4 now out of the fiscal year (ending March 31 2008), a new round of doom and gloom for Sony has been ordered from the media. Publishers will pay attention to it, and Konami will too. If Microsoft is trying to get Konami to port MGS4 to the 360, this will make it much easier.
PS: Does it make any sense to release this game during the slow summer season? There could be further delays up to 2008's holiday season.
There's a very big difference between the two things you just attempted to compare. While computer scientists may have "thought" that O(n^2) was the fastest complexity for sorting, they hadn't proven so. On the other hand, it is perfectly proven that all NP-complete problems can be converted to each other. The proofs are not complicated and they're perfectly agreed on.
The definition of NP-complete does not allow for what you just said. A polynomial time algorithm for any NP-complete problem will allow you to solve all NP-complete problems in polynomial time, since you can convert them to each other in polynomial time.
How can generating a prime number be NP-complete? Do you mean testing if a number is prime or not? That problem is in P:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test
Regarding whether FACTOR is NP-complete or not, most computer scientists don't think so.
Do you mean factor numbers? Even though it would be impressive to have an algorithm which factors numbers quickly, it wouldn't prove anything about the P=NP? problem. Factoring numbers is not known to be an NP-complete problem, so solving it in polynomial time doesn't automatically imply that P=NP.
Over iterations? Are you talking about the production phase of the discs? What does that have to do with the choice of final media?
I don't think most people nowdays appreciate how much 1.44 MB is...
If you want a Wii and can't find it yet, you should know that supply will double in Christmas according to Nintendo themselves. They've probably been stockpiling units for the important holiday season.
The question is, when are they going to start releasing those units? You have to be attentive, because it's likely that demand is so high, that even doubled supply will still not be enough.
Sales being steady doesn't mean they haven't been stockpiling... It's possible they increased production a few months ago already, and are stocking part of it for the holiday period. It's a common strategy when there's high demand for a product.
Anyway, the effect should be the same for the holiday period. If supply decreases immediately after, we'll know they were stockpiling.
Source: http://tinyurl.com/3cro8k
Source: http://tinyurl.com/2ue39n