I'm not saying youre wrong to like Sony, I'm just saying that the other hardware manufacturers out there (Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Samsung, etc) are making hardware of equal and greater quality than Sony's, and at a lesser price.
This is going along with the line of thinking that if it costs more, it must be better. Many times that is truly the case, but the TV market in recent years has turned away from this model because it is no longer working. Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Samsung, and all the rest are competing with each other, while Sony prices themselves out of competition with them, perhaps because of quality, but many times it is simply because they think they can get away with it. Sony's top of the line TVs that garner accolades cost a lot, of course, but so do their low-end TVs that are outclassed by other manufacturers in price and performance. You do get what you pay for most of the time, but with all the competition in the home theatre market these days, you stand a better chance of getting so much more than your money's worth. The fact is that Sony is moving out of a market they could have been competitive in to this day, were it not for their sales tactics across their product lines, and moving into territory that they have no name in hoping that the very same name will carry them to the top.
PQ is subjective anyway, though I will admit the majority of people buying CRT sets arent having the store employees move a Panasonic next to a Sony so that they can calibrate each and carefully judge PQ side by side with a DVD they brought from home.
The response time is god awful
Plasma and newer LCD screens have fine response time, exhibiting no ghosting at all. Early-generation technology will never be that great, but it has gotten a lot better.
the resolution is god awful.
God-awful resolution? 720p is the same on a CRT than it is on an LCD/Plasma/DLP.
They just flat out suck... Not to mention the abysmally short life span of the LCD/plasma/whatever screens.
Modern plasma screens (at least Panasonics) have a life of 80,000 hours. That is approx 3333 hours, which is nine years of uninterrupted play. Sure, I have a CRT that is 14 years old that I still use today, but I also have a 52" Widescreen DLP because that CRT wasnt cutting it any more for me in the main TV-viewing area.
This nine years can be extended signifigantly by lowering the contrast to the proper level, as most TVs ship with it at max. This will also lower the risk of burn-in.
These were neq technologies and they all had major flaws, but they are all past their third gen (DLP being the newest, in its fourth generation right now) and these flaws are rapidly disappearing. The ones you cited were the first to be corrected.
I have a number of 21" Sony Trinitron CRT's stockpiled as backups.
My DLP will only last me about three years on its original bulb, but those can be purchased new from Mitsubishi for about $150. Not a problem to maintain a large television. I would rather spend $150 for a warranteed bulb every few years than have two or more CRTs taking up space somewhere.
My uncle is a big Sony fan (100% Sony in his home) and has several very large Sony Wega CRT sets in his home and man, I'm here to tell you those sets have magnificent pictures!
I can imagine they are very expensive but I expect the price to drop as Sony tries to push old stock out the door to make way for the dinky little flat screens that all the LEMMINGS just *have to* run out and buy. It's the "me too syndrome". You know, keeping up with the Jones and all that.
People are basically stupid and will buy stuff just because the voice on the idiot box tells them it's cool and trendy and that you MUST run out and get yours today.
That is a bit of a contridiction. The only reason Sony sells stuff now is because theyre a much bigger and trendier brand name. Their PQ is far outclassed by other manufacturers, even the budget ones, and they cost an arm extra compared to the other big names.
This article basically details that Sony's hype doesnt sell their products any more, as consumers are getting smarter and buying on picture/audio/feature quality and not brand-name. Sticking to Sony is fine for people, but they are limiting themselves to inferior products in a large majority of cases.
I dont know if this is a troll, a joke, or if you just dont know.
Sony may have been the benchmark for quality years ago, but they are far behind in pretty much every consumer technology they sell. Hell, I've seen APEX TVs with better picture quality than Wegas that cost three times as much.
The only product Sony makes that can be considered one of the best is their rear-projection CRT sets.
Panasonic owns the plasma market in both sales and quality.
Samsung and Mitsubishi own the DLP market in sales and quality.
The LCD market is the only one that has yet to be decided on a current far-and-away leader, and it looks like Sony is aware of that.
This is all ignoring their Incredible Shrinking receiver, personal music player, set-top cd player, and dvd player market shares. Their DVD players offer nothing (picture, features, overall quality) in comparison to offerings from Panasonic and even Chinese brands like Oppo and Momitsu.
Sony still sells stuff by their name alone, but apparently people are finally catching on that there are far better products for a ton less money.
A "Blockbuster" is a movie that grosses $100 Million or more.
Red Planet brought in $33 Million worldwide, nowhere near a blockbuster as it is defined.
But then I guess anything that comes out of hollywood (or even before it comes out) is considered a blockbuster these days, regardless of how bad it is. Hooray for marketing.
If MS were truly afraid of there being a shortage, they would delay the launch of the Xbox2. Arent they always touting how they will have such a headstart that will put them in an unbeatable lead?
Delay it for a month and fix your launch planning issues, an eleven-month lead can still be spun by marketing.
It is kind of funny that the guy who released this trojan for the DS is the same guy that has done some of the most important DS hacking in the homebrew scene.
Most notably:
He made the first PassMe to run homebrew code in DS mode.
He hacked and released the GBAMP firmware to allow.nds files to be run from a flash card.
This guy has done a HUGE amount of work and made homebrew (DSLinux, Moonshell, touchscreen ports of Doom, Heretic, etc) possible on the DS. He is easily the all-around most important person in the scene.
One season of 24 is $45: That is $1.85 an episode, plus they are on a convenient medium in a sexy box and have extras.
Of course this does not reflect the situation of all dvds... I dont think this will impact dvd sales signifigantly, at least not badly. I downloaded the entire season 3 of 24 and watched that in three sittings. Amazing show, I was shocked at how much I loved it. I then went to Amazon.com and purchased seasons 1-3 and preordered season 4 as I wait anxiously for season 5 to air.
If people can download episodes and check them out quickly and easily, I can see many other people deciding that they are better off giving in and owning the product. This is no new idea, though. I've seen it posted on/. plenty of times, I am just offering an example of how it works, even on someone who uses Usenet so much that they pay for access to a quality provider.
I think this will be a boon to dvds, not competition.
I buy a lot of Chinese DVDs.
No, not the bootleg kind -the legally manufactured and purchased new kind (yes, these exist).
So am I going to have to get a third DVD player for my home theatre exclusively to watch Chinese Cinema?
Crap, so in stead of watching good foreign films I will be stuck watching the effed-up American remakes. If anyone thinks that The Departed will be anything like Infernal Affairs, theyve got another thing coming...
For a large company looking to create software for Linux, all they need to do is write their own software and not link to any GPL'd code. This is no different than any other software (except that some might use win32 libs for gui, but I'm just guessing -I'm no programmer). There is no legal question in that, and I find it strange that a company would think there is one.
Part of the security comes from non-root logins being unknown.
One could try to use a non-root user to bruteforce their way into my system, but they'll either get one (probably created by an application) with/dev/null as a shell or they will be trying usernames that dont exist.
Wait until MS pushes a firmware patch or something over Live and claim the next day that over 90% of owners "use" Live.
Though to be fair, it would be retarded to not spin that for marketing.
In the shop I work in (a small part of a worldwide organization), we use automatic updating with WSUS.
Not because we want to, but because the ones who make those decisions do. They also dont want to test MS patches before sending them out.
Consequently, we currently have four different BSODs running rampant that we cannot find a fix for, and the shitty XP built-in cd burning (that our users are unfortunately quite fond of) has ceased working on about sixty workstations and counting.
Dell points at Microsoft, Microsoft points at Dell. I point at the geniuses that drop this shit on us without so much as a day of testing. Automatic updating is a terrible thing, especially when it is a microsoft product.
Slashdot Mirror
We HDers have been wanting HD games for a very long time. So far, the xbox has been the only system to provide them (very few though).
Personally, I have been wanting good and fun games. If they run in 720p, then that is just icing on the cake, not a requirement or a selling point.
I'm not saying youre wrong to like Sony, I'm just saying that the other hardware manufacturers out there (Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Samsung, etc) are making hardware of equal and greater quality than Sony's, and at a lesser price.
This is going along with the line of thinking that if it costs more, it must be better. Many times that is truly the case, but the TV market in recent years has turned away from this model because it is no longer working. Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Samsung, and all the rest are competing with each other, while Sony prices themselves out of competition with them, perhaps because of quality, but many times it is simply because they think they can get away with it. Sony's top of the line TVs that garner accolades cost a lot, of course, but so do their low-end TVs that are outclassed by other manufacturers in price and performance. You do get what you pay for most of the time, but with all the competition in the home theatre market these days, you stand a better chance of getting so much more than your money's worth. The fact is that Sony is moving out of a market they could have been competitive in to this day, were it not for their sales tactics across their product lines, and moving into territory that they have no name in hoping that the very same name will carry them to the top.
PQ is subjective anyway, though I will admit the majority of people buying CRT sets arent having the store employees move a Panasonic next to a Sony so that they can calibrate each and carefully judge PQ side by side with a DVD they brought from home.
sorry, 3333 days of uninterrupted play, though I suspect that you may have guessed that it was a typo/brainfart.
The response time is god awful
Plasma and newer LCD screens have fine response time, exhibiting no ghosting at all. Early-generation technology will never be that great, but it has gotten a lot better.
the resolution is god awful.
God-awful resolution? 720p is the same on a CRT than it is on an LCD/Plasma/DLP.
They just flat out suck... Not to mention the abysmally short life span of the LCD/plasma/whatever screens.
Modern plasma screens (at least Panasonics) have a life of 80,000 hours. That is approx 3333 hours, which is nine years of uninterrupted play. Sure, I have a CRT that is 14 years old that I still use today, but I also have a 52" Widescreen DLP because that CRT wasnt cutting it any more for me in the main TV-viewing area.
This nine years can be extended signifigantly by lowering the contrast to the proper level, as most TVs ship with it at max. This will also lower the risk of burn-in.
These were neq technologies and they all had major flaws, but they are all past their third gen (DLP being the newest, in its fourth generation right now) and these flaws are rapidly disappearing. The ones you cited were the first to be corrected.
I have a number of 21" Sony Trinitron CRT's stockpiled as backups.
My DLP will only last me about three years on its original bulb, but those can be purchased new from Mitsubishi for about $150. Not a problem to maintain a large television. I would rather spend $150 for a warranteed bulb every few years than have two or more CRTs taking up space somewhere.
My uncle is a big Sony fan (100% Sony in his home) and has several very large Sony Wega CRT sets in his home and man, I'm here to tell you those sets have magnificent pictures! I can imagine they are very expensive but I expect the price to drop as Sony tries to push old stock out the door to make way for the dinky little flat screens that all the LEMMINGS just *have to* run out and buy. It's the "me too syndrome". You know, keeping up with the Jones and all that.
People are basically stupid and will buy stuff just because the voice on the idiot box tells them it's cool and trendy and that you MUST run out and get yours today. That is a bit of a contridiction. The only reason Sony sells stuff now is because theyre a much bigger and trendier brand name. Their PQ is far outclassed by other manufacturers, even the budget ones, and they cost an arm extra compared to the other big names.
This article basically details that Sony's hype doesnt sell their products any more, as consumers are getting smarter and buying on picture/audio/feature quality and not brand-name. Sticking to Sony is fine for people, but they are limiting themselves to inferior products in a large majority of cases.
I dont know if this is a troll, a joke, or if you just dont know.
Sony may have been the benchmark for quality years ago, but they are far behind in pretty much every consumer technology they sell. Hell, I've seen APEX TVs with better picture quality than Wegas that cost three times as much.
The only product Sony makes that can be considered one of the best is their rear-projection CRT sets.
Panasonic owns the plasma market in both sales and quality.
Samsung and Mitsubishi own the DLP market in sales and quality.
The LCD market is the only one that has yet to be decided on a current far-and-away leader, and it looks like Sony is aware of that.
This is all ignoring their Incredible Shrinking receiver, personal music player, set-top cd player, and dvd player market shares. Their DVD players offer nothing (picture, features, overall quality) in comparison to offerings from Panasonic and even Chinese brands like Oppo and Momitsu.
Sony still sells stuff by their name alone, but apparently people are finally catching on that there are far better products for a ton less money.
Only on slashdot could trash like the parent be modded +4 Insightful.
Pretty off-topic, but whatever...
Hollywood Blockbusters
A "Blockbuster" is a movie that grosses $100 Million or more.
Red Planet brought in $33 Million worldwide, nowhere near a blockbuster as it is defined.
But then I guess anything that comes out of hollywood (or even before it comes out) is considered a blockbuster these days, regardless of how bad it is. Hooray for marketing.
It reminds me of the same Call of Duty 2 you can play on the Xbox, Gamecube, and PS2 only with less impressive graphics and $400 cheaper.
If MS were truly afraid of there being a shortage, they would delay the launch of the Xbox2. Arent they always touting how they will have such a headstart that will put them in an unbeatable lead?
Delay it for a month and fix your launch planning issues, an eleven-month lead can still be spun by marketing.
It is kind of funny that the guy who released this trojan for the DS is the same guy that has done some of the most important DS hacking in the homebrew scene.
.nds files to be run from a flash card.
Most notably:
He made the first PassMe to run homebrew code in DS mode.
He hacked and released the GBAMP firmware to allow
This guy has done a HUGE amount of work and made homebrew (DSLinux, Moonshell, touchscreen ports of Doom, Heretic, etc) possible on the DS. He is easily the all-around most important person in the scene.
Not to defend the article, but this is just nit-picking.
Very few people = no retail demand
The saddest thing about your post is that it will be modded +5 Interesting or Funny in stead of -5 Flamebait.
Mind that some DVDs beat this rather handily.
/. plenty of times, I am just offering an example of how it works, even on someone who uses Usenet so much that they pay for access to a quality provider.
One season of 24 is $45: That is $1.85 an episode, plus they are on a convenient medium in a sexy box and have extras.
Of course this does not reflect the situation of all dvds... I dont think this will impact dvd sales signifigantly, at least not badly.
I downloaded the entire season 3 of 24 and watched that in three sittings. Amazing show, I was shocked at how much I loved it. I then went to Amazon.com and purchased seasons 1-3 and preordered season 4 as I wait anxiously for season 5 to air.
If people can download episodes and check them out quickly and easily, I can see many other people deciding that they are better off giving in and owning the product. This is no new idea, though. I've seen it posted on
I think this will be a boon to dvds, not competition.
I read this and was reminded to do my once-weekly check of ds.ign.com.
IGN is a HUGE offender in regards to giant ads that take over your screen or obscure an article.
I buy a lot of Chinese DVDs.
No, not the bootleg kind -the legally manufactured and purchased new kind (yes, these exist).
So am I going to have to get a third DVD player for my home theatre exclusively to watch Chinese Cinema?
Crap, so in stead of watching good foreign films I will be stuck watching the effed-up American remakes. If anyone thinks that The Departed will be anything like Infernal Affairs, theyve got another thing coming...
Good for this guy and all the suckers he ropes in.
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Microsoft Invents A 'Rip-Once Only' DVD
For a large company looking to create software for Linux, all they need to do is write their own software and not link to any GPL'd code. This is no different than any other software (except that some might use win32 libs for gui, but I'm just guessing -I'm no programmer). There is no legal question in that, and I find it strange that a company would think there is one.
Part of the security comes from non-root logins being unknown.
/dev/null as a shell or they will be trying usernames that dont exist.
One could try to use a non-root user to bruteforce their way into my system, but they'll either get one (probably created by an application) with
Wait until MS pushes a firmware patch or something over Live and claim the next day that over 90% of owners "use" Live.
Though to be fair, it would be retarded to not spin that for marketing.
It also destroys the competition if they are placed close.
The Final Sonylution
Maybe the place on Dagobah was his summer home?
In the shop I work in (a small part of a worldwide organization), we use automatic updating with WSUS.
Not because we want to, but because the ones who make those decisions do. They also dont want to test MS patches before sending them out.
Consequently, we currently have four different BSODs running rampant that we cannot find a fix for, and the shitty XP built-in cd burning (that our users are unfortunately quite fond of) has ceased working on about sixty workstations and counting.
Dell points at Microsoft, Microsoft points at Dell. I point at the geniuses that drop this shit on us without so much as a day of testing. Automatic updating is a terrible thing, especially when it is a microsoft product.
is how Windows BSOD's all over the place because it turns out their hardware was crap.
If they can sell three or four of those Xbox2 bundles, they should be set.