It offloads the physics processing from the CPU to the graphics card. According to the benchmark, it improves the frame rate by more than 10x.
So in the best case, physics is currently taking at least 9x more computation than all other graphic card activities and offloading to the CPU reduces the cost of physics to 0.
Now in the less than best case...this claim is bullshit.
BUT, will Ajax supplant the client app as the workhorse of productivity applications? Not a chance.
You might be right, but I've spent the past 3 years migrating client applications to.NET and XmlHttp data-brokered solutions. Ajax was not a popular term when we started doing it. This is a company of 3,000 employees with many clients all over the state and all of them now have rapid web-based access to a variety of analytic tools, reports, and raw data.
There are some very compelling reasons for suffering through Javascript-enabled web applications and many of them relate to platform independence and rapid deployment. I can deploy a new version of a web application targeted at multiple browsers and versions, with significant updates, all by dropping the files into the production environment. And they're off running with it.
The funniest thing for me about Ajax is it basically is just doing what Java Applets can do, only Java is better. WTF?!?!
No, applets are not better. Applets are fatter, you've got client-side sandbox security, and you need a Java VM (not everyone wants to run one of these on their client machines, trust me). Whereas Ajax sits upon dirt simple well established web standards. If Applets were better, Ajax would not have generated the buzz it has. Ajax may not solve the problem as well as it should, but it absolutely points to an as yet unaddressed shortcoming of other available solutions including Java and Java applets.
I think you're right about the transient nature of Ajax, however, because it is a transitionary technology. Ajax has opened up a Pandoras box of, "Hey, we can develop web applications with this level of interactivity in a seamless way. Too bad it's a little icky to do. Let's see, what can we do about that?"
In other words, Ajax is a bit like a proof of concept project that will drive some good innovation and web standardization as we move forward so that you can get the nice things of Ajax with a better development model.
Trying to enforce _your_ own point of view, regardless of what people want, is what's incompatible with democracy.
And yet we go to war all the time. "Fuck you, Iraq. You will be a democracy, so sayeth the Lord Almighty." I'll let you guess who I am paraphrasing here.
Most players lack the ability to switch off. Do people like television advertising? Most do not. On the other hand, most people will tolerate a great deal as long as their brain numbing distraction of choice remains available.
Anything that enters the mainstream will have advertisements because if there's a way for someone to legally make a dime, it is going to happen, particularly when it feeds off the least common denominator of principle in the population as a whole.
I don't watch television, I don't listen to radio, and I don't play games with ads in them. I personally know 0 other people like that. I've never even met anyone else like that. Sure you meet people that are angry about invasive advertising, but when it comes down to it, there's something in the media that they just need so bad they cannot really turn it off.
The general reaction when I mention this and indicate that a big reason is that I get really pissed when I am interested in something and some fucker comes along and laces that something with every act of manipulation that they can to make me spend money...the general reaction is disbelief and comments about my dubious sanity.
Given that, advertising is inevitable. Just look at it this way. If every single major game producer decides to go in-game advertising, you know without a doubt that gamers will continue to pay to play. Without a doubt. It's a bit like price fixing. Then eventually, the economy will adjust so that a successful game company pretty much needs (read: publishers won't back a game with a lower advertisement-free profit margin) the additional in-game advertising revenue, and there you go.
There's no turning back, and huge economic pressure will arise to starve out competitors that would offer a liberated experience, but cannot do so because the majority of consumers are tolerant and costs are adjusted to require revenue generated by the tolerance of advertising and the profitability of the resulting impulse purchases that occur.
It's not the first nor the last time that Blizzard CSR's have made a mistake. They just don't have to care. All they have to do is offer a statistically acceptable automated response. If you fall into the 5% of lost subscriptions in exchange for them saving 10% in staff costs by using 99% form responses to all complaints, then that's what they will do.
I left WOW last year over a relatively minor misunderstanding because it took me 2 weeks of mailpong to get a response that was not a form letter with a EULA extract. I just didn't want to support a company that treats its customers like robots with dollar bills stapled to their foreheads.
I know my phone calls don't make a difference -- yet. But over time, as more people realize that voting with their dollars and voting with how they spend their time, we'll see change being made through a free market of motivations.
You're letter does not matter, but your letter combined with 30,000 other letters saying similar things does. I think you're in the "voting doesn't matter because I'm just one person" situation. On the election level, it might be that way sometimes, but at an individual member of congress level, your voice matters somewhat more. If a large enough portion of the constituency is vocal about an issue, it may lead to a change in position.
In any case, it seems like a better bet than trying to give the bad guys a death of a thousand cuts. Especially when the bastards have no blood in their veins to begin with,;-).
Why *should* I take up ebooks? What is the compelling case? Until there is a compelling case *for* switching, the reasons against aren't crucial, IMO.
I want my whole library on a single device, and I want a backup that fits in my pocket. I will keep the backup in a safe place (not my home) and carry the library with me wherever I may roam. I will read more because of it, and my life will benefit from that.
I'll never have to worry about the condition of my books. It will never require a truck to move my library. I'll never worry that a fire will entirely wipe out the collection of literary treasures that I have amassed over decades, and letting go of most of my books will remind me that people and their ideas are more important than the objects that record them. There are a long list of things that motivate me to switch.
Do I treasure books? Yes, I do. Are there some books that I will keep? Yes, there is a small number of books that I revisit frequently and have special significance in my life. In a way, moving most of my collection to digital will make me appreciate the books that I do have even more. Like the value of a real owl in Blade Runner.
Maybe those reasons are no good for you, but I personally have plenty.
Yet, I see nothing improving. I fear than in 20 years we will look back at this era and view it as a "golden age of computing". Things will be locked down so tight, and all software will be pay-as-you-go.
And I will be outside gardening, which I like to think of as programming the biggest computer there is.
Someday we will have DRM for nature, too...because we are idiots.
Then we'll all be wiped out by the natural equivalent of a DRM violater, a virus, and in the waning hour of our species we'll wonder why it seemed reasonable to associate imaginary monetary unit value with a particular breed of rose, and why we thought we, as interesting but limited programs in the Great Simulation, thought we could realistically prohibit the Universe from doing as it sees fit with the codes that it has created age after age without any input from us.
And the answer is pretty simple. We have an unmitigated greed for stuff and more stuff. Which means eventually, we'll all get stuffed.
1. 90% of the population was not using the internet.
2. Search had less value because far less important content was available (now virtually every company including towns, states, and nations have vital information available on the web).
3. The web was not a cultural hub for a vast segment of the computer literate population.
4. People from all walks of life were not asking, "Did you AltaVista that?"
It's a different situation. Google is not unshakable, but they are not going to disappear either. I think they play a prominent role in the economy for decades, much as IBM has and will continue to do.
And M$ is still a big monopolistic jerk that charges companies and individuals billions of dollars a year by flipping bits, throwing FUD, and withholding simple features to drive licensing revenue. They make their money by hiding what they do behind a wall of proprietary software and mountains of System and Method patents.
I don't say it is evil. I simply say that it was a successful model in the past when the internet was smaller, the general population less aware, and alternatives were fewer. But now better models are emerging and M$ can build as much additional crap with the old model as they like and still they will fail in the face of a more open service oriented company.
Example:
Whatever PR deceptions they may throw at us about how amazing Vista is, either the "innovations" in it are derivative crap, in which case I'm not interested, or they are legitimate innovations (very unlikely), in which case open competitors will bring competitive alternatives to market. Do you enjoy being forced to shell out money on new versions of software because of forced obsolecense? Just because M$ decides, "I'm the only OS in town for all practical purposes, so I just won't support XP, even though it still meets the needs of 95% of people and they don't want to spend a couple hundred dollars again for 'same shit, new wrapper'. I'll just use FUD to show that a lack of further support will lead to costly security vulnerabilities and say that customers will be losing out on incredible benefits that they never knew they needed."
Deep down, everyone hates that. Which is why people will keep googling, and the only people using MSN will be the ones that need to "belong" to the mythical M$ in whatever way they can, because they have that glassy eyed utterly blind fanaticism that allows them to rationalize things like, "My company just paid $30M because a simple feature is missing that requires me to buy twice as many software licenses for M$ SQL Server." But, oh. It's M$, so I guess it's worth it.
People aren't going to stop googling, because enough people are smart enough to not toss away the freedom that the few successful M$ competitors have afforded them.
I also have one of these and it's called an immune system.
"If we can just create a complex system in the human body that monitors status and catalyzes restorative chemical responses we might really have something!"
"Uhm...sir? I asked the French, and they said they've already got one."
"WHAT? What did they say?"
"That they...that they already have one, sir."
"Well ask them if we can see it?"
"I did, sir."
"What did they say?"
"They laughed at me and then they threw vegetables and chickens at me. Then they said, we already have one, too."
It means they don't want to release tripe, so they will wait until the feel satisfied that it is the killer game which locks the masses into the 360 platform rather than the PS3.
And just like in the Hollywood movie industry where dollars direct creativity to ensure "the best product", the likely outcome is shit.
If anything your main influence on your kids will be applying brakes to their desire for every gadget in the Universe, because our markets are geared to program every kid to consume like crazy. It's even hard to say, "Well, what should I introduce my kid too?" because things are changing so fast. 5 years from now, who knows what the "indispensible" tool will be? You're kids will sure give you a large selection of things that they think are "indispensible".
Get your daughter literate and get her reading good things with you and alone as soon as you can. Let her become an educated chooser if what is needed and what not. Participate in that process with her based on her experiences with her social circles such as the one in school. Rather than focus on gadgets, focus on the real lessons that no one taught you as a child or they tried and did in such an unreachable way you had to learn the hard way on your own. It never sticks when a parent just says, "Hey. This is important." It's much better to let your kids discover what is important on their own with some guidance...
That way you raise a thinker, rather than a sheep.
The poster a few posts up did not say Earth would be uninhabitable. He just said our current lifestyle would become unsustainable. For certain, if the planet does warm significantly, you will have elevated sea levels that flood many major metropolitan areas all over the world, and that will cause some havoc in real estate and the market in general. Then there is the effect of climate change on food production. I guess one bonus is that the need for heating oil goes down,:-). This is assuming the heating scenario does not trigger a mini-glacial period.
The way I see it, the most likely fallout of planet wide warming is an increase in infectious diseases. Take a look at the avian bird flu as it is slowly spreading across the world despite our best efforts to contain it. The higher the temperatures go, the more interesting the disease become. It's no accident that the most virulent diseases in the world are in warm moist climates.
Even that is not an alarmist thing to say. We can adapt. But in a warmer Earth, I think disease may play a bigger roll in population reduction than many anticipate. In a colder Earth, we play the bigger role by killing each other for diminishing food and fuel resources. Pick your poison.
I know there are always a lot of people that say, "Hey, it is not so bad. We will adapt. Etc." But I think everyone can agree that the tone of commentary on the planets climate has shifted pretty dramatically since I was in school 15 years ago. We've got some serious trends emerging including high hurricane activity (with unusual electrical properties never before witnessed), rapid melting of glaciers that is outstripping the predicted rates by our best scientists (just today recent data is showing Greenland melting far faster than we predicted even 5 years ago and the arctic shelves are calving into the ocean at a rapid rate), increased threat of a pandemic despite our rapidly increasing scientific knowledge in the field of epidemiology (right now we are looking at a bird flu which is a hit on our food rather than on our population directly), and of course, our dwindling fossil fuel supplies upon which our industries are based.
That last one I put in there as an indicated of economic stresses on the system. We will feel some pressure from that one. Yes, we can transition away from fossil fuels, but if you combine the economic pressure from that with rising sea levels displacing industry and people, greater likelihood of worldwide epidemics (sure the US is pretty covered but 3rd world countries should be terrified by this possibility more than a US citizen could likely imagine), and so on.
Any one of these things, we can deal with, but we are not confronting just one thing. We are confronting a multitude of things that are all converging on our current way of life: an unsustainable one. Heck, I work in health care and I know the exponential cost projects very well. We can't sustain the costs. There's just no way. Something will give within the next 10 to 20 years...which again coincides with all these other things. There's a big pattern here. I don't think many people see the forest for the trees on this right now. You can argue about this one posts topic, but it's just one topic of a dozen that are all pointing toward, "Ouchtime".
I don't think it's hopeless, but I think there's a Hell of a lot of work to do in the next 20 years. People need to start making right choices on their own and helping their neighbors to get educated and shift their life choices toward a path that protects us from the problems on the horizons. In health care, it's simple things like HSAs that let you get tax free payroll deductions into an investment account to pay for health care and getting more educated about what treatment you really need and what you don't (you might not need that drug the Doctor is being paid to prescribe--sometimes you do). Here's a fact: health care costs are rising exponentially and well beyond the capacity of our insu
Your argument is very poor. High salaries and "it's your job to know this company" get you into situations like the.COM bubble in which a multitude of analysts were crowing about the virtues of every flash-in-the-pan company out there. And just because someone's ass is on the line does not mean they cannot screw up atrociously. Frequently the pressure makes it more likely.
As one of the posters above pointed out, one of the key valuations in the analysis is a $350 Blue-Ray premium. A technology that Sony owns. $350 is a large portion of the estimated cost to Sony and there is no justification in the analysis. Similarly for the $230 cost on the Cell processor.
If you read the introduction, the entire analysis was motivated by commentary from one of Merrill Lynch's Japanese analysts. In other words, an industry knowledgeable person proposed a "What if?" scenario and ostensibly provided some corroborating analysis which is also not provided.
Sony is not stupid. They're not likely to sell a console at a $400 (~50%) loss, but they very well might sell it at a $150 or $200 loss, which might happen if the cost of the Cell and Blue-Ray components is $200 below the hand waving analysis in that report. There's deplorably little information about why a 6 month delay is a possibility and there's no line item breakdown of the $350 Blue-Ray cost. It's just a single aggregated line item with no supporting evidence other than "we think" in their material analysis.
PS3 = NeXT. Technology ahead of its time and a market not ready to bite. How much will a 360 cost by the time the PS3 comes out? If you are looking for a new system for yourself or your kids and the choice is a $900 machine with cutting edge technology that most of the market is not quite ready for or a $400 machine with an extensive library of games and a more market proven online experience, what will you do?
Now you see the genius of United States economic policy. We are consuming oil as fast as we can and producing all kinds of polymerizable materials so that when we do hit the point of diminishing returns for oil from the easy sources, we can turn around and sell all that oil we stockpiled in our Big Wheels (plastic 3-wheeler with a rear wheel brake--vintage drag racing, baby!).
There you have it. Now I see the brilliance of our rampant and unsustainable consumption of petroleum products.
Slashdot Mirror
Now in the less than best case...this claim is bullshit.
There are some very compelling reasons for suffering through Javascript-enabled web applications and many of them relate to platform independence and rapid deployment. I can deploy a new version of a web application targeted at multiple browsers and versions, with significant updates, all by dropping the files into the production environment. And they're off running with it.
No, applets are not better. Applets are fatter, you've got client-side sandbox security, and you need a Java VM (not everyone wants to run one of these on their client machines, trust me). Whereas Ajax sits upon dirt simple well established web standards. If Applets were better, Ajax would not have generated the buzz it has. Ajax may not solve the problem as well as it should, but it absolutely points to an as yet unaddressed shortcoming of other available solutions including Java and Java applets.I think you're right about the transient nature of Ajax, however, because it is a transitionary technology. Ajax has opened up a Pandoras box of, "Hey, we can develop web applications with this level of interactivity in a seamless way. Too bad it's a little icky to do. Let's see, what can we do about that?"
In other words, Ajax is a bit like a proof of concept project that will drive some good innovation and web standardization as we move forward so that you can get the nice things of Ajax with a better development model.
It's a common phenomenon in history where there is a cultural lull and pundits are claiming that everything that can be done has been done.
Just look at biotech. WTF, this executive is a tunnel vision idiot. There are amazing things on the horizon.
Anything that enters the mainstream will have advertisements because if there's a way for someone to legally make a dime, it is going to happen, particularly when it feeds off the least common denominator of principle in the population as a whole.
I don't watch television, I don't listen to radio, and I don't play games with ads in them. I personally know 0 other people like that. I've never even met anyone else like that. Sure you meet people that are angry about invasive advertising, but when it comes down to it, there's something in the media that they just need so bad they cannot really turn it off.
The general reaction when I mention this and indicate that a big reason is that I get really pissed when I am interested in something and some fucker comes along and laces that something with every act of manipulation that they can to make me spend money...the general reaction is disbelief and comments about my dubious sanity.
Given that, advertising is inevitable. Just look at it this way. If every single major game producer decides to go in-game advertising, you know without a doubt that gamers will continue to pay to play. Without a doubt. It's a bit like price fixing. Then eventually, the economy will adjust so that a successful game company pretty much needs (read: publishers won't back a game with a lower advertisement-free profit margin) the additional in-game advertising revenue, and there you go.
There's no turning back, and huge economic pressure will arise to starve out competitors that would offer a liberated experience, but cannot do so because the majority of consumers are tolerant and costs are adjusted to require revenue generated by the tolerance of advertising and the profitability of the resulting impulse purchases that occur.
I left WOW last year over a relatively minor misunderstanding because it took me 2 weeks of mailpong to get a response that was not a form letter with a EULA extract. I just didn't want to support a company that treats its customers like robots with dollar bills stapled to their foreheads.
*beep* *beep* *click* *whir*
In any case, it seems like a better bet than trying to give the bad guys a death of a thousand cuts. Especially when the bastards have no blood in their veins to begin with, ;-).
I'll never have to worry about the condition of my books. It will never require a truck to move my library. I'll never worry that a fire will entirely wipe out the collection of literary treasures that I have amassed over decades, and letting go of most of my books will remind me that people and their ideas are more important than the objects that record them. There are a long list of things that motivate me to switch.
Do I treasure books? Yes, I do. Are there some books that I will keep? Yes, there is a small number of books that I revisit frequently and have special significance in my life. In a way, moving most of my collection to digital will make me appreciate the books that I do have even more. Like the value of a real owl in Blade Runner.
Maybe those reasons are no good for you, but I personally have plenty.
Someday we will have DRM for nature, too...because we are idiots.
Then we'll all be wiped out by the natural equivalent of a DRM violater, a virus, and in the waning hour of our species we'll wonder why it seemed reasonable to associate imaginary monetary unit value with a particular breed of rose, and why we thought we, as interesting but limited programs in the Great Simulation, thought we could realistically prohibit the Universe from doing as it sees fit with the codes that it has created age after age without any input from us.
And the answer is pretty simple. We have an unmitigated greed for stuff and more stuff. Which means eventually, we'll all get stuffed.
Frikken Lasers (tm). :-)
2. Search had less value because far less important content was available (now virtually every company including towns, states, and nations have vital information available on the web).
3. The web was not a cultural hub for a vast segment of the computer literate population.
4. People from all walks of life were not asking, "Did you AltaVista that?"
It's a different situation. Google is not unshakable, but they are not going to disappear either. I think they play a prominent role in the economy for decades, much as IBM has and will continue to do.
And M$ is still a big monopolistic jerk that charges companies and individuals billions of dollars a year by flipping bits, throwing FUD, and withholding simple features to drive licensing revenue. They make their money by hiding what they do behind a wall of proprietary software and mountains of System and Method patents.
I don't say it is evil. I simply say that it was a successful model in the past when the internet was smaller, the general population less aware, and alternatives were fewer. But now better models are emerging and M$ can build as much additional crap with the old model as they like and still they will fail in the face of a more open service oriented company.
Example:
Whatever PR deceptions they may throw at us about how amazing Vista is, either the "innovations" in it are derivative crap, in which case I'm not interested, or they are legitimate innovations (very unlikely), in which case open competitors will bring competitive alternatives to market. Do you enjoy being forced to shell out money on new versions of software because of forced obsolecense? Just because M$ decides, "I'm the only OS in town for all practical purposes, so I just won't support XP, even though it still meets the needs of 95% of people and they don't want to spend a couple hundred dollars again for 'same shit, new wrapper'. I'll just use FUD to show that a lack of further support will lead to costly security vulnerabilities and say that customers will be losing out on incredible benefits that they never knew they needed."
Deep down, everyone hates that. Which is why people will keep googling, and the only people using MSN will be the ones that need to "belong" to the mythical M$ in whatever way they can, because they have that glassy eyed utterly blind fanaticism that allows them to rationalize things like, "My company just paid $30M because a simple feature is missing that requires me to buy twice as many software licenses for M$ SQL Server." But, oh. It's M$, so I guess it's worth it.
People aren't going to stop googling, because enough people are smart enough to not toss away the freedom that the few successful M$ competitors have afforded them.
How is this not an incredible invasion of privacy?
"Hello?"
"Vroom vroom!"
"Damn!"
*click*
Apparently so as one of the next posts this morning is the announcement by Sony of a Blue-Ray timeframe.
Anyone know if this is related to the Blue-Ray consortium's unresolved issues that are delaying the receipt of my PS3?
"If we can just create a complex system in the human body that monitors status and catalyzes restorative chemical responses we might really have something!"
"Uhm...sir? I asked the French, and they said they've already got one."
"WHAT? What did they say?"
"That they...that they already have one, sir."
"Well ask them if we can see it?"
"I did, sir."
"What did they say?"
"They laughed at me and then they threw vegetables and chickens at me. Then they said, we already have one, too."
Hypocritical. Bastards.
And just like in the Hollywood movie industry where dollars direct creativity to ensure "the best product", the likely outcome is shit.
Get your daughter literate and get her reading good things with you and alone as soon as you can. Let her become an educated chooser if what is needed and what not. Participate in that process with her based on her experiences with her social circles such as the one in school. Rather than focus on gadgets, focus on the real lessons that no one taught you as a child or they tried and did in such an unreachable way you had to learn the hard way on your own. It never sticks when a parent just says, "Hey. This is important." It's much better to let your kids discover what is important on their own with some guidance...
That way you raise a thinker, rather than a sheep.
Yeah, my computer automatically boots Windows every time I turn it on--pisses me off to no end. Huge vulnerability, too.
Almost as crazy as people that spend $5/day each month on a latte, eh?
The way I see it, the most likely fallout of planet wide warming is an increase in infectious diseases. Take a look at the avian bird flu as it is slowly spreading across the world despite our best efforts to contain it. The higher the temperatures go, the more interesting the disease become. It's no accident that the most virulent diseases in the world are in warm moist climates.
Even that is not an alarmist thing to say. We can adapt. But in a warmer Earth, I think disease may play a bigger roll in population reduction than many anticipate. In a colder Earth, we play the bigger role by killing each other for diminishing food and fuel resources. Pick your poison.
I know there are always a lot of people that say, "Hey, it is not so bad. We will adapt. Etc." But I think everyone can agree that the tone of commentary on the planets climate has shifted pretty dramatically since I was in school 15 years ago. We've got some serious trends emerging including high hurricane activity (with unusual electrical properties never before witnessed), rapid melting of glaciers that is outstripping the predicted rates by our best scientists (just today recent data is showing Greenland melting far faster than we predicted even 5 years ago and the arctic shelves are calving into the ocean at a rapid rate), increased threat of a pandemic despite our rapidly increasing scientific knowledge in the field of epidemiology (right now we are looking at a bird flu which is a hit on our food rather than on our population directly), and of course, our dwindling fossil fuel supplies upon which our industries are based.
That last one I put in there as an indicated of economic stresses on the system. We will feel some pressure from that one. Yes, we can transition away from fossil fuels, but if you combine the economic pressure from that with rising sea levels displacing industry and people, greater likelihood of worldwide epidemics (sure the US is pretty covered but 3rd world countries should be terrified by this possibility more than a US citizen could likely imagine), and so on.
Any one of these things, we can deal with, but we are not confronting just one thing. We are confronting a multitude of things that are all converging on our current way of life: an unsustainable one. Heck, I work in health care and I know the exponential cost projects very well. We can't sustain the costs. There's just no way. Something will give within the next 10 to 20 years...which again coincides with all these other things. There's a big pattern here. I don't think many people see the forest for the trees on this right now. You can argue about this one posts topic, but it's just one topic of a dozen that are all pointing toward, "Ouchtime".
I don't think it's hopeless, but I think there's a Hell of a lot of work to do in the next 20 years. People need to start making right choices on their own and helping their neighbors to get educated and shift their life choices toward a path that protects us from the problems on the horizons. In health care, it's simple things like HSAs that let you get tax free payroll deductions into an investment account to pay for health care and getting more educated about what treatment you really need and what you don't (you might not need that drug the Doctor is being paid to prescribe--sometimes you do). Here's a fact: health care costs are rising exponentially and well beyond the capacity of our insu
As one of the posters above pointed out, one of the key valuations in the analysis is a $350 Blue-Ray premium. A technology that Sony owns. $350 is a large portion of the estimated cost to Sony and there is no justification in the analysis. Similarly for the $230 cost on the Cell processor.
If you read the introduction, the entire analysis was motivated by commentary from one of Merrill Lynch's Japanese analysts. In other words, an industry knowledgeable person proposed a "What if?" scenario and ostensibly provided some corroborating analysis which is also not provided.
Sony is not stupid. They're not likely to sell a console at a $400 (~50%) loss, but they very well might sell it at a $150 or $200 loss, which might happen if the cost of the Cell and Blue-Ray components is $200 below the hand waving analysis in that report. There's deplorably little information about why a 6 month delay is a possibility and there's no line item breakdown of the $350 Blue-Ray cost. It's just a single aggregated line item with no supporting evidence other than "we think" in their material analysis.
Smoke and mirrors.
PS3 = NeXT. Technology ahead of its time and a market not ready to bite. How much will a 360 cost by the time the PS3 comes out? If you are looking for a new system for yourself or your kids and the choice is a $900 machine with cutting edge technology that most of the market is not quite ready for or a $400 machine with an extensive library of games and a more market proven online experience, what will you do?
Now you see the genius of United States economic policy. We are consuming oil as fast as we can and producing all kinds of polymerizable materials so that when we do hit the point of diminishing returns for oil from the easy sources, we can turn around and sell all that oil we stockpiled in our Big Wheels (plastic 3-wheeler with a rear wheel brake--vintage drag racing, baby!). There you have it. Now I see the brilliance of our rampant and unsustainable consumption of petroleum products.