ISA is pretty much completely abstracted that this point.
It would take almost zero actual silicon modification to take a Cortex A-15, switch out the microcode and have a x86 processor. You might have to add some new features to the instruction decoder logic but that's it. You wouldn't sell such a chip until after you optimize the A-15 design to efficiently execute x86 instead of ARM of course:)
Same thing on the Intel side. They could take an Ivybridge chip, write some new microcode and poof, its an ARM chip.
In essence, ISA really doesn't have much impact on power vs. performance anymore, its essentially the "API" that sits on top of the actual processor. What DOES matter is the chip design itself, and the process technology. ARM has spent 20 years optimizing their design for power, whereas Intel has spent 20 years optimizing their design for speed.
Now that the two markets are starting to overlap, Intel's designers are optimizing for power, and ARM's designers are optimizing for speed. The big question is which company is going succeed in the other company's home market first?
Seriously, lets stop pretending that the current state of affairs has anything to do with ISA./. is acting like a bunch of old techies that remember the CISC vs. RISC war and want a rematch.
MSFT's net income for 2012 is 26.6% lower than it was in 2011. Subscription Office is about 1 thing, bringing the income numbers back up.
Office 2010's home and student edition was $140, which licensed 3 PCs, and gave you the latest version for about 3 years. That works out to $46/year assuming you upgrade (which you don't have to do). Now they want $100/year with forced upgrades. This is for software that does the same thing it did 3 years ago.
Unfortunately this article lacks detail, it seems that Bernstein Research considers Intel's latest smartphone designs to be as energy efficient as competitors. Intel's latest smartphone chip is Medfield, which is 32nm. Unfortunately the article does not say what chips they compared... but it would be surprising if they didn't include the Qualcomm (Snapdragon S4 @ 28nm node) in their comparison.
So we at least have some indirect evidence that even when they are at the same technology node, Intel's design is still close to ARM's.
It will be interesting to see what Silvermont (22 nm) brings in 2013, at which point Intel SoCs will have LTE capability (instead of 3G GSM only) as well as Ivybridge graphics (instead of PowerVR), and they will be Quad-core. The smaller technology node paired with the new design features is probably going to yield an awesome smartphone/tablet platform.
Actually there was a bit of a fire sale on the Kin.
The Kin ONE went from $50 to $30 after a month. The Kin TWO went from $100 to $50 at the same time. The devices where then discontinued shortly after.
Verizon then sent the remaining unsold units back to Microsoft. After a year, that same inventory of unsold devices emerged with a firmware update that turned them into feature phones, named the Kin ONEm and the Kin TWOm.
Remember that Microsoft is shipping Windows RT with Office 2010 included... as in the DESKTOP version of Office running in the "Desktop app"! Windows RT is truly the complete Windows 8 stack from top to bottom with Win32 and everything else. The big difference is that Windows RT will only run code that is signed by Microsoft. As Mozilla has pointed out to quite a bit of fanfare Microsoft refuses to sign any 3rd party ARM desktop application.
Windows RT has been intentionally nerfed in the name of boosting Metro application development. Why you ask? Because Microsoft wants to leverage their dominant position in the PC market to create an ecosystem of applications for Windows Phone and the upcoming Xbox.
Have you noticed that they have gone to painstaking lengths to make is so Metro applications that use the WinRT API cannot access the win32 API or the full featured preemptive multitasking OS which WinRT is implemented on top of? Check out the WinRT API reference sometime, it gives you access to a very limited subset of what the full operating system can do. This is intentional, Metro applications are designed to be boxed in to only what Windows Phone 8 supports. Also, all Metro applications must be distributed by Microsoft's app store. How much you want to bet that once Windows Phone 8 comes out Microsoft suddenly announces that all your Metro apps for Windows 8 will run be instantly be available for download and use on Windows Phone 8 via the Microsoft app store?
Microsoft is up to the same tricks as usual. Trying to leverage their core Windows/Office monopoly to gain a dominant position in emerging market segments.
While we are on the subject of Metro applications and traditional application development languages... As many others have pointed out, native code is not dead. If anything, WinRT represents a revival of native code. Microsoft has created a new language called C++/CX for WinRT just for the purpose of writing native code Metro applications. Metro applications written in C++/CX use the same APIs as Metro.Net applications, this has never been the case for desktop applications. This is the first time in over 10 years that native code developers have enjoyed feature parity with managed code developers on the Windows platform.
It still remains to be seen if lightpeak is vaporware or not. I suspect that Intel will find the power consumption of fiber optic interconnects to not be acceptable for a laptop battery.
I don't know much about this, but wouldn't you be able to use D3D10 in windowed mode for the same effect?
Using the MIL would give you access to the compositing engine, which you don't get with DirectX. Access to the compositing engine enables special effects that depend on the contents of multiple windows at once like glass. The MIL would enable someone to write a program that makes windows wobble for example.
If the answer to my earlier question is "no", then I guess it's true, but then you could just treat WPF as yet-another-Windows-API.
Well WPF isn't exactly meant to be a managed wrapper for the MIL, its meant to be a widget set. If one wanted to use it as such, one would likely need to dig in to WPF implementation details fairly deep.
For starters, all those frameworks that you've listed (and others which you did not) are layers on top of the core Win32 APIs, which can greatly simplify things, but don't really provide new capabilities.
Sadly that is not 100% true anymore. The MIL (Media Integration Layer) in Vista and later does not have a public API.
The MIL allows one to pass vertex data as well as pixel shaders instead of bitmaps to render a GUI. The MIL is used by the desktop window manager to create those pretty glass effects. WPF (a.NET only API) accesses the MIL directly and provides vertex data, there is no supported way of doing this from a native application. Thus you are forced to use Microsoft middleware to use that part of the OS.
The MIL is also used by Remote Desktop. Notice that if you remotely log in to a Vista/Win7 machine from another Vista/Win7 machine, you will still get the glass effects. This is because the MIL instance on the remote system is sending its data structures to the local system over the network, allowing your computer's MIL instance to render the content, including the pixel shaders for the glass effects. Because there is no public API for the MIL, VNC will never be able to copy this functionality, forcing you to buy the more expensive versions of Windows that have Remote Desktop for that feature.
First of all, between COM Interop and P/Invoke, it is very easy to inter operate with native code from managed. This can be very handy, it enabled easy ports of GTK, Win32 (via Windows.Forms), Qt, WxWidgets, SQLite and many others to.NET. But the biggest use for P/Invoke in typical.NET applications is to make calls to the Win32 API directly, because the framework doesn't have managed libraries for every Windows API. This of course creates applications that can only run under Windows. A lot of times.NET apps will run under Mono for Windows, but not Mono for Linux because of this.
Even of course there the fact that MS drives the direction of.NET, and the Microsoft implementation will always be ahead of the game because of that. Mono is missing most of the new features in.NET 3.5 WPF, WCF, etc. The main exception being an almost complete LINQ implementation. Moreover the DLR stuff will be coming with.NET 4.0 very soon, which will just put them even further behind. And Mono is likely to never have support for XNA applications.
In summary the total common feature set between both implementations is less than the total feature set, and a lot of what is missing is cool new stuff. So apps that only work on the MS implementation are common. This is exactly what they want, its technically an open platform, but not really in practice.
Microsoft sueing the mono project and forcing it underground through software patents would be an enormous shoot to the foot. Mono does nothing more and proliferate the.NET platform, often at the expense of Java. The thing that Microsoft likes so much about.NET is that while mono and Portable.NET provide a way to make true cross platform apps, there are many, many Microsoft specific extensions to the core, which makes it very easy to make a.NET app that is not portable. In the late 90s Java was the same way thanks to Microsoft's JVM with builtin COM support, and various other Microsoft technologies. The Java of today however is designed in such a way that it is difficult to make a Java app that is not cross platform, which is why that hate it so much.
Mono makes.NET exactly what Microsoft wants it to be, technically open yet easily locked to thier platform.
The memristor could potentially add 10-20 years to Moore's Law and the iPhone app store is worth more than it? These idiots don't even know what it is, memory RESISTOR not transistor.
Everyone in the computing industry these days seems to be mesmerized by multiple core computers. What about improving single core performance? There has been many papers published back in the 1970s showing that multiple cores are really not effective at improving performance of a single application assuming that it has more than 1% non-parallizable code. Moreover as the number of cores increase it has been shown that thread management starts consuming the majority of the system's time, not the actual application. So even though it looks busier its not actually doing anything useful.
You know there is still people working on increasing single core performance. What about Professor John McDonald at RPI, one of the industry's smartest and most regarded researchers, hes attempting to build a 32GHz single core right now.
Its important to remember that a lot of those PS2 titles don't even work on newer PS2's, they where breaking backwards compatibility even before the slim PS2 came out, in order to play EVERY PS2 title, you will need a SCPH-30001. Given how many of those titles are completely forgotten this isn't too big of a deal.
There isn't much of a market for a $600 game console. My expectation is that only the hardcore gamers that MUST have a PS3 will buy it.
But I personally think that most of the industry is shortchanging Sony, I think they have much more market insight than they let on. What if even though it launches at $600, the price of the console follows a steep negative slope as time goes on? What if the price is down to $300 by March? Sure call me crazy, but I can cite a few reasons why this might be the stragy.
First consider something called the learning curve, the general idea is that as you manufacture a specific good, over time you make your process more effiecient, lowering the cost of production. Given all we have heard about diode shortages, there is probably a large oportunity for cutting costs as time goes on. The fact that the Japanese release will be this much cheaper provides further evidence for this, since the console is coming to Japan later than the US release.
Second consider the idea of consumer surplus. Consumer surplus has to do with your maximum willingness to pay for a paticular good. Let say you see an apple being sold for $1, the maximum you would be willing to pay for such an apple is $1.50, therefore, (assuming you are hungry) you will buy the apple, and hence not only get the apple but a consumer surplus of $0.50 as well, because you paid $0.50 less than what you would had paid if you needed to. By setting the price of the PS3 at $600 at the beginning, only the people who would be willing to pay $600 or more for a PS3 will buy one (not that many people.) By steadily lowering the price over time, you begin to reach more and more consumers, since the price is now at their maximum willingness to pay. This way, everyone ends up paying close to the absolute maximum that they would be willing to spend on a PS3, and hence Sony milks all the consumer surplus out of thier customers, and make as much as they can on thier new console.
At this point you are probably saying "damn those Sony bastard, what a ripoff!" But realize this kind of marketting tactic is used in many more places, look at Inkjet Printer (Or rather, the price of the cartridges,) look at cell phones, razors with replacable blades, electric toothbrushes... Ripping your customers off and making them think they are getting a good deal at the same time happens a lot more than you think.
I think your quite right, there isn't much of a market for a $600 game console. My expectation is that only the hardcore gamers that MUST have a PS3 will buy it.
But I personally think that most of the industry is shortchanging Sony, I think they have much more market insight than they let on. What if even though it launches at $600, the price of the console follows a steep negative slope as time goes on? What if the price is down to $300 by March? Sure call me crazy, but I can cite a few reasons why this might be the stragy.
First consider something called the learning curve, the general idea is that as you manufacture a specific good, over time you make your process more effiecient, lowering the cost of production. Given all we have heard about diode shortages, there is probably a large oportunity for cutting costs as time goes on.
Second consider the idea of consumer surplus. Consumer surplus has to do with your maximum willingness to pay for a paticular good. Let say you see an apple being sold for $1, the maximum you would be willing to pay for such an apple is $1.50, therefore, (assuming you are hungry) you will buy the apple, and hence not only get the apple but a consumer surplus of $0.50 as well, because you paid $0.50 less than what you would had paid if you needed to. By setting the price of the PS3 at $600 at the beginning, only the people who would be willing to pay $600 or more for a PS3 will buy one (not that many people.) By steadily lowering the price over time, you begin to reach more and more consumers, since the price is now at their maximum willingness to pay. This way, everyone ends up paying close to the absolute maximum that they would be willing to spend on a PS3, and hence Sony milks all the consumer surplus out of thier customers, and make as much as they can on thier new console.
At this point you are probably saying "damn those Sony bastard, what a ripoff!" But realize this kind of marketting tactic is used in many more places, look at Inkjet Printer (Or rather, the price of the cartridges,) look at cell phones, razors with replacable blades, electric toothbrushes... Ripping your customers off and making them think they are getting a good deal at the same time happens a lot more than you think.
OK here is the difference between HDMI and Component video. Both are able to trasmit HDTV signals up to the 1080 resolutions. The only difference between 1080i and 1080p is that one is interlaced and one is progressive.
What interlacing means in the context of video is that each frame transmitted is actually only half an image. The frame contains every other line of the entire picture. The next frame after this contains the lines that the previous one did not. Back in the 60s when color analog TVs where being designed, they built them to refresh only the lines that data was received for when drawing the current frame, leaving the previous frame still on the screen, filling in the lines that were not received with the current frame. The advantage of this is that you effectively double your screen resolution without using any additional bandwidth. Progessive on the other hand simply means redrawing the screen completely every frame, which is how computer monitors work.
Generally we consider interalacing to be a bad thing these days, since recent HDTV's natively use a progressive method for refreshing the screen (i.e. They don't use electron guns that can draw half of the screen at a time.) Becausse of this, in order to display an interlaced signal on a progressive, the signal must first be deinterlaced. Deinterlacing is *VERY* complicated, because you can't just take two frames and combine them into one, since despite containing only half an image, each frame still represents a different point in time hence any movement on the screen between the two time shoots will look very wierd using this method. Most of the time deinterlacing mechanisms these days are not very well made because of the difficulty.
Component takes advantage of interlacing to get from 720p to 1080i (again the same amount of bandwidth can be used to transmit a double resolution image.) Whereas HDMI is pretty much DVI with the following additions: Audio is sent with video and a method for encryption exists to prevent you from recording images off the cable (DRM basically.) Most modern HDTVs will be able to handle both.
I can understand completely the desire to centralize computing resources so that you can cut desktop maintainance costs, but even if you have gigabit to all the desktop systems, thats still nowhere near the speed of an internal hard disk, also what happens for laptop users? Perhaps you could solve this using a replication system of some kind that just checks if the images on the server are different than the locally stored ones, and if so use a binary patching system to update the local version, but that in of itself likely would be a maintainence nightmere.
Also my personal experience with VMware, Virtual PC and Qemu has consistently been that its there is a noticable difference in speed between native hardware and the VM. In the interest of customer satisfaction (users get pissed with slow systems) I would keep using native hardware personally. Of couse you can minimize driver/HAL problems by keeping your hardware as standardized as possible (buy the same model from the same company for everyone as much as you can.)
I've read slashdot for years and I have noticed over time there has been an increasing lefist trend in the stories posted. I don't care if its a right or left swing, because any bias in journalism is wrong. If you disagree with me, try to find a "story" on a Democrat astroturf campaign in the older stuff. When was this news that parties use astroturf to garner support?
Announcing the new Microsoft Robot - Ballmer edition, equipped with patented Fucking Death Rays(TM). As with all Microsoft products an automatic update feature is included and enabled by default, which will download new listings of people/objects to Fucking Kill(TM) along with other secuity updates. Microsoft Robot, for all your Fucking Bury(TM)ing needs!
Some are honest some are not: like everywhere else
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 1
I work at Fairchild Semiconductor, a fairly large corporation, a most people I've met there are truely nice, honest people, including upper level management. You do find the ocassional person who screws everyone else for his/her own benefit, but that happens everywhere, not just in the US.
I think that you will find that the private sector is much more effiecient than govornment, we actually have competition in the private sector, last I checked there is no competing govornment tried to take control of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
ISA is pretty much completely abstracted that this point.
It would take almost zero actual silicon modification to take a Cortex A-15, switch out the microcode and have a x86 processor. You might have to add some new features to the instruction decoder logic but that's it. You wouldn't sell such a chip until after you optimize the A-15 design to efficiently execute x86 instead of ARM of course :)
Same thing on the Intel side. They could take an Ivybridge chip, write some new microcode and poof, its an ARM chip.
In essence, ISA really doesn't have much impact on power vs. performance anymore, its essentially the "API" that sits on top of the actual processor. What DOES matter is the chip design itself, and the process technology. ARM has spent 20 years optimizing their design for power, whereas Intel has spent 20 years optimizing their design for speed.
Now that the two markets are starting to overlap, Intel's designers are optimizing for power, and ARM's designers are optimizing for speed. The big question is which company is going succeed in the other company's home market first?
Seriously, lets stop pretending that the current state of affairs has anything to do with ISA. /. is acting like a bunch of old techies that remember the CISC vs. RISC war and want a rematch.
MSFT's net income for 2012 is 26.6% lower than it was in 2011. Subscription Office is about 1 thing, bringing the income numbers back up.
Office 2010's home and student edition was $140, which licensed 3 PCs, and gave you the latest version for about 3 years. That works out to $46/year assuming you upgrade (which you don't have to do). Now they want $100/year with forced upgrades. This is for software that does the same thing it did 3 years ago.
Unfortunately this article lacks detail, it seems that Bernstein Research considers Intel's latest smartphone designs to be as energy efficient as competitors. Intel's latest smartphone chip is Medfield, which is 32nm. Unfortunately the article does not say what chips they compared... but it would be surprising if they didn't include the Qualcomm (Snapdragon S4 @ 28nm node) in their comparison. So we at least have some indirect evidence that even when they are at the same technology node, Intel's design is still close to ARM's. It will be interesting to see what Silvermont (22 nm) brings in 2013, at which point Intel SoCs will have LTE capability (instead of 3G GSM only) as well as Ivybridge graphics (instead of PowerVR), and they will be Quad-core. The smaller technology node paired with the new design features is probably going to yield an awesome smartphone/tablet platform.
Actually there was a bit of a fire sale on the Kin.
The Kin ONE went from $50 to $30 after a month. The Kin TWO went from $100 to $50 at the same time. The devices where then discontinued shortly after.
Verizon then sent the remaining unsold units back to Microsoft. After a year, that same inventory of unsold devices emerged with a firmware update that turned them into feature phones, named the Kin ONEm and the Kin TWOm.
Remember that Microsoft is shipping Windows RT with Office 2010 included... as in the DESKTOP version of Office running in the "Desktop app"! Windows RT is truly the complete Windows 8 stack from top to bottom with Win32 and everything else. The big difference is that Windows RT will only run code that is signed by Microsoft. As Mozilla has pointed out to quite a bit of fanfare Microsoft refuses to sign any 3rd party ARM desktop application.
Windows RT has been intentionally nerfed in the name of boosting Metro application development. Why you ask? Because Microsoft wants to leverage their dominant position in the PC market to create an ecosystem of applications for Windows Phone and the upcoming Xbox.
Have you noticed that they have gone to painstaking lengths to make is so Metro applications that use the WinRT API cannot access the win32 API or the full featured preemptive multitasking OS which WinRT is implemented on top of? Check out the WinRT API reference sometime, it gives you access to a very limited subset of what the full operating system can do. This is intentional, Metro applications are designed to be boxed in to only what Windows Phone 8 supports. Also, all Metro applications must be distributed by Microsoft's app store. How much you want to bet that once Windows Phone 8 comes out Microsoft suddenly announces that all your Metro apps for Windows 8 will run be instantly be available for download and use on Windows Phone 8 via the Microsoft app store?
Microsoft is up to the same tricks as usual. Trying to leverage their core Windows/Office monopoly to gain a dominant position in emerging market segments.
Windows RT comes with a copy of Office 2010 bundled in. That's the reason for the $88 price tag.
While we are on the subject of Metro applications and traditional application development languages... As many others have pointed out, native code is not dead. If anything, WinRT represents a revival of native code. Microsoft has created a new language called C++/CX for WinRT just for the purpose of writing native code Metro applications. Metro applications written in C++/CX use the same APIs as Metro .Net applications, this has never been the case for desktop applications. This is the first time in over 10 years that native code developers have enjoyed feature parity with managed code developers on the Windows platform.
It still remains to be seen if lightpeak is vaporware or not. I suspect that Intel will find the power consumption of fiber optic interconnects to not be acceptable for a laptop battery.
Using the MIL would give you access to the compositing engine, which you don't get with DirectX. Access to the compositing engine enables special effects that depend on the contents of multiple windows at once like glass. The MIL would enable someone to write a program that makes windows wobble for example.
Well WPF isn't exactly meant to be a managed wrapper for the MIL, its meant to be a widget set. If one wanted to use it as such, one would likely need to dig in to WPF implementation details fairly deep.
Sadly that is not 100% true anymore. The MIL (Media Integration Layer) in Vista and later does not have a public API.
The MIL allows one to pass vertex data as well as pixel shaders instead of bitmaps to render a GUI. The MIL is used by the desktop window manager to create those pretty glass effects. WPF (a .NET only API) accesses the MIL directly and provides vertex data, there is no supported way of doing this from a native application. Thus you are forced to use Microsoft middleware to use that part of the OS.
The MIL is also used by Remote Desktop. Notice that if you remotely log in to a Vista/Win7 machine from another Vista/Win7 machine, you will still get the glass effects. This is because the MIL instance on the remote system is sending its data structures to the local system over the network, allowing your computer's MIL instance to render the content, including the pixel shaders for the glass effects. Because there is no public API for the MIL, VNC will never be able to copy this functionality, forcing you to buy the more expensive versions of Windows that have Remote Desktop for that feature.
First of all, between COM Interop and P/Invoke, it is very easy to inter operate with native code from managed. This can be very handy, it enabled easy ports of GTK, Win32 (via Windows.Forms), Qt, WxWidgets, SQLite and many others to .NET. But the biggest use for P/Invoke in typical .NET applications is to make calls to the Win32 API directly, because the framework doesn't have managed libraries for every Windows API. This of course creates applications that can only run under Windows. A lot of times .NET apps will run under Mono for Windows, but not Mono for Linux because of this.
Even of course there the fact that MS drives the direction of .NET, and the Microsoft implementation will always be ahead of the game because of that. Mono is missing most of the new features in .NET 3.5 WPF, WCF, etc. The main exception being an almost complete LINQ implementation. Moreover the DLR stuff will be coming with .NET 4.0 very soon, which will just put them even further behind. And Mono is likely to never have support for XNA applications.
In summary the total common feature set between both implementations is less than the total feature set, and a lot of what is missing is cool new stuff. So apps that only work on the MS implementation are common. This is exactly what they want, its technically an open platform, but not really in practice.
Microsoft sueing the mono project and forcing it underground through software patents would be an enormous shoot to the foot. Mono does nothing more and proliferate the .NET platform, often at the expense of Java. The thing that Microsoft likes so much about .NET is that while mono and Portable.NET provide a way to make true cross platform apps, there are many, many Microsoft specific extensions to the core, which makes it very easy to make a .NET app that is not portable. In the late 90s Java was the same way thanks to Microsoft's JVM with builtin COM support, and various other Microsoft technologies. The Java of today however is designed in such a way that it is difficult to make a Java app that is not cross platform, which is why that hate it so much.
Mono makes .NET exactly what Microsoft wants it to be, technically open yet easily locked to thier platform.
You can't give EEStor any credit until they publicly demonstrate a working device.
The memristor could potentially add 10-20 years to Moore's Law and the iPhone app store is worth more than it? These idiots don't even know what it is, memory RESISTOR not transistor.
What why exactly such a confusing voting process?
Everyone in the computing industry these days seems to be mesmerized by multiple core computers. What about improving single core performance? There has been many papers published back in the 1970s showing that multiple cores are really not effective at improving performance of a single application assuming that it has more than 1% non-parallizable code. Moreover as the number of cores increase it has been shown that thread management starts consuming the majority of the system's time, not the actual application. So even though it looks busier its not actually doing anything useful.
You know there is still people working on increasing single core performance. What about Professor John McDonald at RPI, one of the industry's smartest and most regarded researchers, hes attempting to build a 32GHz single core right now.
Its important to remember that a lot of those PS2 titles don't even work on newer PS2's, they where breaking backwards compatibility even before the slim PS2 came out, in order to play EVERY PS2 title, you will need a SCPH-30001. Given how many of those titles are completely forgotten this isn't too big of a deal.
There isn't much of a market for a $600 game console. My expectation is that only the hardcore gamers that MUST have a PS3 will buy it. But I personally think that most of the industry is shortchanging Sony, I think they have much more market insight than they let on. What if even though it launches at $600, the price of the console follows a steep negative slope as time goes on? What if the price is down to $300 by March? Sure call me crazy, but I can cite a few reasons why this might be the stragy. First consider something called the learning curve, the general idea is that as you manufacture a specific good, over time you make your process more effiecient, lowering the cost of production. Given all we have heard about diode shortages, there is probably a large oportunity for cutting costs as time goes on. The fact that the Japanese release will be this much cheaper provides further evidence for this, since the console is coming to Japan later than the US release. Second consider the idea of consumer surplus. Consumer surplus has to do with your maximum willingness to pay for a paticular good. Let say you see an apple being sold for $1, the maximum you would be willing to pay for such an apple is $1.50, therefore, (assuming you are hungry) you will buy the apple, and hence not only get the apple but a consumer surplus of $0.50 as well, because you paid $0.50 less than what you would had paid if you needed to. By setting the price of the PS3 at $600 at the beginning, only the people who would be willing to pay $600 or more for a PS3 will buy one (not that many people.) By steadily lowering the price over time, you begin to reach more and more consumers, since the price is now at their maximum willingness to pay. This way, everyone ends up paying close to the absolute maximum that they would be willing to spend on a PS3, and hence Sony milks all the consumer surplus out of thier customers, and make as much as they can on thier new console. At this point you are probably saying "damn those Sony bastard, what a ripoff!" But realize this kind of marketting tactic is used in many more places, look at Inkjet Printer (Or rather, the price of the cartridges,) look at cell phones, razors with replacable blades, electric toothbrushes... Ripping your customers off and making them think they are getting a good deal at the same time happens a lot more than you think.
I think your quite right, there isn't much of a market for a $600 game console. My expectation is that only the hardcore gamers that MUST have a PS3 will buy it.
But I personally think that most of the industry is shortchanging Sony, I think they have much more market insight than they let on. What if even though it launches at $600, the price of the console follows a steep negative slope as time goes on? What if the price is down to $300 by March? Sure call me crazy, but I can cite a few reasons why this might be the stragy.
First consider something called the learning curve, the general idea is that as you manufacture a specific good, over time you make your process more effiecient, lowering the cost of production. Given all we have heard about diode shortages, there is probably a large oportunity for cutting costs as time goes on.
Second consider the idea of consumer surplus. Consumer surplus has to do with your maximum willingness to pay for a paticular good. Let say you see an apple being sold for $1, the maximum you would be willing to pay for such an apple is $1.50, therefore, (assuming you are hungry) you will buy the apple, and hence not only get the apple but a consumer surplus of $0.50 as well, because you paid $0.50 less than what you would had paid if you needed to. By setting the price of the PS3 at $600 at the beginning, only the people who would be willing to pay $600 or more for a PS3 will buy one (not that many people.) By steadily lowering the price over time, you begin to reach more and more consumers, since the price is now at their maximum willingness to pay. This way, everyone ends up paying close to the absolute maximum that they would be willing to spend on a PS3, and hence Sony milks all the consumer surplus out of thier customers, and make as much as they can on thier new console.
At this point you are probably saying "damn those Sony bastard, what a ripoff!" But realize this kind of marketting tactic is used in many more places, look at Inkjet Printer (Or rather, the price of the cartridges,) look at cell phones, razors with replacable blades, electric toothbrushes... Ripping your customers off and making them think they are getting a good deal at the same time happens a lot more than you think.
OK here is the difference between HDMI and Component video. Both are able to trasmit HDTV signals up to the 1080 resolutions. The only difference between 1080i and 1080p is that one is interlaced and one is progressive.
What interlacing means in the context of video is that each frame transmitted is actually only half an image. The frame contains every other line of the entire picture. The next frame after this contains the lines that the previous one did not. Back in the 60s when color analog TVs where being designed, they built them to refresh only the lines that data was received for when drawing the current frame, leaving the previous frame still on the screen, filling in the lines that were not received with the current frame. The advantage of this is that you effectively double your screen resolution without using any additional bandwidth. Progessive on the other hand simply means redrawing the screen completely every frame, which is how computer monitors work.
Generally we consider interalacing to be a bad thing these days, since recent HDTV's natively use a progressive method for refreshing the screen (i.e. They don't use electron guns that can draw half of the screen at a time.) Becausse of this, in order to display an interlaced signal on a progressive, the signal must first be deinterlaced. Deinterlacing is *VERY* complicated, because you can't just take two frames and combine them into one, since despite containing only half an image, each frame still represents a different point in time hence any movement on the screen between the two time shoots will look very wierd using this method. Most of the time deinterlacing mechanisms these days are not very well made because of the difficulty.
Component takes advantage of interlacing to get from 720p to 1080i (again the same amount of bandwidth can be used to transmit a double resolution image.) Whereas HDMI is pretty much DVI with the following additions: Audio is sent with video and a method for encryption exists to prevent you from recording images off the cable (DRM basically.) Most modern HDTVs will be able to handle both.
I can understand completely the desire to centralize computing resources so that you can cut desktop maintainance costs, but even if you have gigabit to all the desktop systems, thats still nowhere near the speed of an internal hard disk, also what happens for laptop users? Perhaps you could solve this using a replication system of some kind that just checks if the images on the server are different than the locally stored ones, and if so use a binary patching system to update the local version, but that in of itself likely would be a maintainence nightmere.
Also my personal experience with VMware, Virtual PC and Qemu has consistently been that its there is a noticable difference in speed between native hardware and the VM. In the interest of customer satisfaction (users get pissed with slow systems) I would keep using native hardware personally. Of couse you can minimize driver/HAL problems by keeping your hardware as standardized as possible (buy the same model from the same company for everyone as much as you can.)
In short my humble opinion is keep it simple.
I've read slashdot for years and I have noticed over time there has been an increasing lefist trend in the stories posted. I don't care if its a right or left swing, because any bias in journalism is wrong. If you disagree with me, try to find a "story" on a Democrat astroturf campaign in the older stuff. When was this news that parties use astroturf to garner support?
Remember that its not only Republicans taking campaign donations, democrats take them too.
Announcing the new Microsoft Robot - Ballmer edition, equipped with patented Fucking Death Rays(TM). As with all Microsoft products an automatic update feature is included and enabled by default, which will download new listings of people/objects to Fucking Kill(TM) along with other secuity updates. Microsoft Robot, for all your Fucking Bury(TM)ing needs!
(For the uninformed: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer )
I work at Fairchild Semiconductor, a fairly large corporation, a most people I've met there are truely nice, honest people, including upper level management. You do find the ocassional person who screws everyone else for his/her own benefit, but that happens everywhere, not just in the US. I think that you will find that the private sector is much more effiecient than govornment, we actually have competition in the private sector, last I checked there is no competing govornment tried to take control of the US.