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Comment Re:Won't Help Big Three (Score 3, Insightful) 740

Yep exactly, 4 vouchers means 4 scrapped cars. He almost had the point, but got caught up in thinking the cars could be resold. A, B, and C could go out and buy used cars which may not be much better on fuel, and A buys new. But thats 3 used cars being scrapped, and 3 current market used being purchased. It IS good economics though because its ridding the market of used cars. If there are 3 million people driving used cars, and 1 million used cars on the market, all 3 million can't use the voucher on a used car obviously.

Now I have no clue of the actual numbers or averages, but I cant see this being bad. Even if everyone goes out and buys a used car with their vouchers you are still ridding the market of their previous used cars, and there is a good chance some would(or would have) to get a newer car. If you think of it, the only people that will go after the vouchers are people that will profit from it. For example they can get more money from the vouchers than selling the car. This means you will be getting rid of very low value cars which are most likely the bottom of the barrel for fuel usage (excluding vintage cars).

Anyways going back to the GP if you want to keep that example it would be A uses a voucher and buys off B, who in turns upgrades and buys off C, which pushes D to buy a new car. That would be 1 voucher for 2500-4500, and 1 car being scrapped, with 1 new car sale.

Comment Re:BluRay's Amazing Success (Score 1) 171

Because if you cant back up what you say with references, then you are just blowing smoke out your ass. It really comes down to what you were taught in grade 3 when you did your first research report and had to cite sources. Every fact had to be cited, and what wasn't was deemed to be fabricated. So it doesn't matter whether you care or not, you took the time to post a "fact" and should defend it.

That said a biased report was just released at CES 2009 showing that Blue-Rays 3 year adoption rate is actually 3% higher than the DVD at the 3 year mark. Good news for Blue Ray right? Well the problem comes when comparing DVD Movie sales to Blue Ray Movie Sales and the results aren't so close. The number of Blue Ray movies sold is 30 million after 3 years of sales. DVD movie sales however were at just under 130million movies sold after 3years. Why the difference in numbers?

Well I couldn't really find too many reliable explanations, most point out the fact (along with other posters in this thread) is that Blue Ray hardware is being given away for almost free. Buying an LCD TV? Take a Blue Ray player for 50bucks with 3 movies. The PS3 includes a Blue Ray player which COUNTS under the Blue Ray associations numbers. Much like the PS2 counted under the DVD sales numbers. Anyways this is all just speculation, but just thought Id do the GGP's homework for him/her as I was interested to see if he/she was actually correct.

Comment Re:Oh God... (Score 2, Insightful) 206

Guess you missed NPD numbers for the month of November.
Wii - 2.04 million
DS - 1.57 million
Xbox 360 - 836, 000
PSP - 421,000
PS3 - 378,000
PS2 - 206, 000

Gimmick or not, the Wii is still selling overwhelmingly well. Cant argue that. And the attach rate for the Wii is slightly higher than the PS3's (5.5 to 5.3) Personally I have played my Wii a total of 31 hours in 1.5 years, but it still sells well, so its not nearly a failure

The PS3 isn't bad, but like the parent said, Sony expected to ride the PS2 wave, and didn't spend nearly enough time getting a decent launch catalog. This wouldn't have been a problem, but the 360 had a year head start, so it became a determining factor for the early months of the PS3. I was able to easily buy my PS3 2 days before Christmas a month after launch. The only game I bought was Resistance (22 launch titles, but barely any exclusives that I couldn't have already gotten for my 360)

The 360 itself had fewer launch titles than the PS3 at 18 (22 for PS3) but over the course of the year, had an extensive library. The attach rate for the 360 is 8.1, but that's also because of the year head start. Its strong showing last month could be attributed to the massive price cuts, but even then November is the start of holiday shopping and could be a bad sign for the PS3. It will be interesting to see the holiday sales difference between the 2 consoles.

Sadly Im a tech nerd that "needs" to have the latest gadgets, and has a job that can support my habit haha. I personally like all 3 consoles, but the Wii is more of a party console, the PS3's online service sucks and Home just made it worse and forced installs bug me, and the 360 always has me fearing the RROD. That said I spend much more time on my 360 than the other two, but that could change when Heavy Rain comes out (previews look awsome, guess we'll know more as it comes closure to launch). But sadly there just aren't that many more exclusives coming out for it. All of my co-workers have 360's and only a few ps3's so part of the reason my 360 gets more use, is due to playing online with them. So all multi-console game releases that I buy, I buy for the 360.

This is just my take on all 3 consoles, I own all 3 and play all 3 (although mostly just the PS3 and 360). Im sorry I dont like Home, and you will probably call me a fanboy of Nintendo/MS for saying that. But lets face it, Home is a pretty large letdown, and the loss of many exclusive series for the PS3 is also a large hit (Resident evil for example). So from one PS3 owner to another, lets not pretend the PS3 has already won the generation, and just admit Sony hasn't been perfect.

Comment Re:28 MPH is not fast enough for realistic street. (Score 3, Insightful) 173

The article says there are 4 other models planned, with one reaching speeds of 70mph... It also seems to hint that the initial models are being used as maintenance vehicles and such. Their first major test buyer is Air France. Its more like their initial models are looking to replace electric cars in the workplace, not for high way driving. But of course you knew all of this, because no one comments without first reading the article.
Software

Casting Doubt On the Hawkeye Ball-Calling System 220

Human judgment by referees is increasingly being supplemented (and sometimes overridden) by computerized observation systems. nuke-alwin writes "It is obvious that any model is only as accurate as the data in it, and technologies such as Hawkeye can never remove all doubt about the position of a ball. Wimbledon appears to accept the Hawkeye prediction as absolute, but researchers at Cardiff University will soon publish a paper disputing the accuracy of the system."
Unix

Submission + - SCO Goes Private with $100 Million Backing 1

AmIAnAi writes: Just when you thought it was all over, the SCO story takes a new twist.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that SCO have received $100 million financing from Stephen Norris Capital Partners to take tehm out of Chapter 11 and go private.

The move gives Stephen Norris, whose namesake founder was a co-founder of private equity giant The Carlyle Group, a controlling interest in SCO, which now has a platform to continue its court battle with Novell Inc. over royalties from the Unix server operating system, SCO's main business.
Games

Games That Could Have Been 99

Gamespot, to accompany a piece on the art of pitching a game has up a companion article on a few good pitches from talented developers that never quite made it into games. My favorite of the three, from Will Wright: "I've always been fascinated with airships, and I wanted to do a game about the Hindenburg. And it was originally conceived as a cross between Myst and a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. You basically wake up on the Hindenburg. You're all alone. It's flying toward Lakehurst, New Jersey. You can walk anywhere on the ship. You can turn lights on and off. You can steer. You can adjust the engines. But every time you come into Lakehurst, it blows up. And you have to figure out why, and it becomes like this weird mystery flight simulator thing. I'd still love to do that."
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Only 2 activations of Bioshock ever?

Tinman_au writes: Theres a lot of people posting on the 2k Games forums that the copy protection used in Bioshock, (SecuROM), only allows 2 activations.

How many installs do we get? Transfer of ownership?
Re-use of activation code on new PC?

I'm all for companies protecting their income/IP, but only allowing 2 activations seems a tad draconian.

The company has yet to respond to anyone in the forums about the activation issue (though they have responded that they are looking into some of the other problems that usually go with a new release).

Hopefully they'll address the "2 activation's" issue somehow, as it's the only reason I'll be waiting before getting a copy of what looks like an absolute cracker of a game otherwise.
Portables

Submission + - PSP custom firmware team fights back against theft

Brianech writes: What happens when a a website steals credit for a software release, and the release team makes modifications to recent revisions to prevent such theft at the cost of end user? In recent days M33, a PSP custom firmware team, modified their firmware to include an encryption scheme based off of the md5 hash. This was done to prevent sites, namely PS3News.com (WARNING:A LOT OF ADS) from editing their release. The problem was that once the ps3news did edit the firmware, it became useless, and resulted in the site's user's PSP's being "bricked," a term to describe a nearly ruined PSP. The debate over whether the action taken by the M33 team was ethical is raging on in PSP community sites such as PSP Hacks , and MaxConsole . The M33 team also included the name of the owner of ps3news.com site, and the name and home address of the person who receives advertising payments from the site, in their firmware's readme file. They also included a warning not download the firware from the above mentioned site, along with accusations that ps3news.com posted IP addresses and full names of well known PSP hackers Lan.st . These accusations can no longer be validated as ps3news have taken their PSP forums and files offline for the time being.

Feed Engadget: Michael Bay "drinks the Kool Aid," now supports HD DVD (engadget.com)

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Ha, so much for standing up to the boss-man. Michael's latest post now says that, "I drank the Kool Aid" blah blah blah "so I think I might be back on to do Transformers 2!" Whatever, wuss.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!


IBM

Award of $200M Supercomputer To IBM Proving Controversial 114

An anonymous reader writes "According to documents accidentally placed on a federal government Web site for a short time last week the national science foundation (NSF) will award the contract to buy a $200M supercomputer in 2011 to IBM. The machine is designed to perform scientific calculations at sustained speed of 1 petaflop. The award is already proving controversial however, with questions being raised about the correctness of the bidding procedure. Similar concerns have also been raised about the award of a smaller machine to Oak Ridge national lab, which is a Department of Energy laboratory, not a site one would expect to house an NSF machine."
AMD

Inside AMD's Phenom Architecture 191

An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek has uncovered some documentation which provides some details amid today's hype for AMD's announcement of its upcoming Phenom quad-core (previously code-named Agena). AMD's 10h architecture will be used in both the desktop Phenom and the Barcelona (Opteron) quads. The architecture supports wider floating-point units, can fully retire three long instructions per cycle, and has virtual machine optimizations. While the design is solid, Intel will still be first to market with 45nm quads (the first AMD's will be 65nm). Do you think this architecture will help AMD regain the lead in its multicore battle with Intel?"
Google

Businesses Scramble To Stay Out of Google Hell 303

whoever57 writes "Forbes has up an article on the consequences of being dumped into a claimed 'supplemental index', also known as 'Google Hell'. It uses the example of Skyfacet, a site selling diamonds rings and other jewelery, which has dropped in Google's rankings and saw a $500,000 drop in revenue in only three months after the site owner paid a marketing consultant to improve the sites. The article claims that sites in the supposed 'supplemental index' may be visited by Google's spiders as infrequently as once per year. The problem? Google's cache shows that Google's spiders visited the site ss recently as late April. 'Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. Getting stuck there means most users will never see the site, or at least many of the site's pages, when they enter certain keywords. And getting out can be next to impossible--because site operators often don't know what they did to get placed there.'"
Movies

Kaleidescape Triumphant in Court Case, DVD Ripping Ruled Legal 213

Jim Buzbee writes "Ever wanted to rip all your DVDs to a big network server so that you could select and play them back to your TV? Up until now, manufacturers have been wary of building a device to allow this type of usage because they've been afraid a lawsuit. The DVD Copy Control Association had claimed this was contractually forbidden, but now a judge says otherwise stating, 'nothing in the agreement prevents you from making copies of DVDs. Nothing requires that a DVD be present during playback.' Kaleidescape has finally won their long-standing lawsuit, a case we first talked about early in 2005."
Microsoft

Microsoft Is Sued For Patent Violation Over .NET 288

randomErr writes "As reported by Info World, Microsoft was issued a cease and desist order on February 7 of this year by Vertical Computer Systems. The order was for patent infringement by the current implementations of the .NET framework. Both the .NET framework and Vertical Computer Systems' SiteFlash use XML to create component-based structures that are used to build and operate web sites. Vertical Computer Systems is requesting a full jury trial. If VCS prevails, .NET technology implementations as we know them may completely change and Microsoft would probably have to pay out a hefty sum."

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