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Comment Re:As someone who... (Score 1) 154

How does making the handsets in China reduce the cost to ship them to American customers? Seriously

Easy. You americans charge 20 times more for the shipping than the chinese.

Simple like that.

Last year I got some arduino spare parts costing about 40USD. I got free shipping, It took 3 months to get delivered at my home, but the shipping was free.

The same parts on eBay would cost me 45, 47 USD. Not bad. But the cheapest shipping would cost me another 50USD.

Do your math.

Comment Re:Sounds like the eBay I knew... (Score 1) 60

Hmm? Brazil and Argentina have "mercado livre" for years, and AFAICT they're ebay with a different name (same platform).

Yep. Until not that much time ago, M.L. was a fine place to buy and sell. But from some years to now, things changed - user's support is near zero, you just can't make a complaint online. Too much rules are relaxed, what favors bad faith sellers.

EBay was a partner until recently, but what we heard is that eBay got fed with all that and decided to do business directly around here. What is one of the best noticies we got in years : we *need* competition around here.

I found something here to supports what I'm saying. Google translating here.

Comment Re:PS4 hardware (Score 1) 152

More people are still buying PS3s than 360s worldwide. The 360 has only dominated (and is still selling relatively well) in the US and UK.

Oh, you mean the countries where people buy the most [legitimately licensed] game consoles? Please, do go on.

Yes, exactly that countries. Now, keep in your mind that only a tiny fraction of PS3 are currently "jailfree", as only the first models (the "Fat PS/3") run the firmware version that allowed the hack, and only a even smaller fraction of that fraction was never updated (downgrading the firmware is risky - usually bricks the console).

On the other hand, the hacked XBox "installed based" is huge. Every single friend of mine that are XBox users has a hacked console to play pirated games. About half has also an original XBox to play Network.

The other half that are PS3 owners, I'm not aware of a single one that has a pirate capable PS3. We all buy our games (most of the time, second hand) or download them (legally) from PSN.

And Yes, we're doing this on a country where pirating goes unchecked for decades (no, I'm not chinese! =D).

That's something to think on.

Submission + - Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Just weeks after the retailing giant began pressuring the publisher on pricing by delaying shipping and cutting discounts, it is now refusing orders for coming books. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.” In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher.

Comment Re:double (triple?) replying (Score 1) 152

As a mater of fact, your (almost desperate) counter-arguments to every single and minimal "goofy" of mine just demonstrates how difficult are being to you to simply present some facts that proves me wrong.

Let me tell you something: inside your Intel chip, there're not only three "integer coprocessor", but a entire array of ALUs.

From Pentium and ahead (if I remember correctly), Intel decided to o "RISC" style and invested a lot of efforts on pipelining the thing, in order to achieve a better instruction per cycle ratio. By the nature of pipelining make it hard to fully use all internal "coprocessors", they discovered that unless the programmer do very specialized techniques while programming, 20% (at the very best) of the chip stays unused all the time. A pretty waste.

They managed to overcome the industry incapacity to get rid of ancient programming habits (please read it right: I said ancient, not wrong) with hiperthreading. They just sacked another pipelined Control Unit inside the core, carefully crafter to use the chips parts that the first pipeline leaves unused. Each Control Unit appears to the Operating System as a CPU core (but make no mistake: it's just ONE core, faking it is two).

There's no problem with this solution, but one (sane - or at least non stupid) person can not just tag "stupid" anything that decides to be a better idea avoiding all that "faking two CPUs" thing, saving the money or the chip space, leaving space to yet more features.

The ordinary Intel chip nowadays has a lot more cores than the CELL. But you don't see it, because you choose to learn programming on a eco-system that uses customer money to make things easier to you. There's no problem with it, it's a valid way of doing things.

But what's wrong is just calling everybody that thinks that it's better to make developer's life a bit more complicated in order to save money on the long run. Doing this is not just wrong, its plain stupid (or bad faith).

Games have a different development cycle : the game maker (software) spends a lot, but a really lot of money building the game to one platform, but when the thing is done, the thing is done. For the rest of the product's lifecycle, development is at minimum. It's not a continuous development cycle that we're used on PCs - the hardware does not change! Again, when the thing is done, it's done.

It totally makes sense on saving money on hardware, what is hard and costly to "duplicate" (and the manufacture sinks money during all the product's lifecycle), even if by doing it, you make the developer's life harder as their product has a shorter development lifecycle, but it's easier to "duplicate" and have the same lifespan as the hardware.

Developers are not the core business in this industry. We're a important part of the business, but that's it.

(grow up!)

Comment Re:PS4 hardware (Score 1) 152

Car analogy time: it's like giving a bunch of drivers who don't know how to use manual transmissions a manual car. Yes, manual transmission is faster than automatic, but if your drivers don't know how to use it properly, it's always going to end up being slower in practice.

No if *you* hire the good drivers, and use them to take a edge on your competitors - what's pretty feasible when you get the market leadership (of near it).

Anyway,I never stated that CELL or Emotion Engine were *easier*, I stated that they were *faster* at their time.

Yes, PlayStation One got the developer's heart because Sony did a pretty good job on make the developer's life easier. But then Sony throwed this through the window on PS/2, an excellent but totally awkward machine at that time: fast as hell, but not compatible with nothing in this God's land.

Things didn't get prettier on PS3.

Why? Because this simply wasn't a concern anymore. Exactly like nowadays.

(I like it? I don't like it? It doesn't matter, what I like it's irrelevant!)

Comment Re:PS4 hardware (Score 1) 152

No, it was not. =D

You make a very poor judgment of the last decade developers. And somewhat lack of history knowledge.

What did PS3 a good start was the huge Microsoft failure on delivering a faithfully working hardware (that Red Ring of Death issue, remember?). Any other company would had fold, but Microsoft had (and still has) a huge cash cow to milk (Microsoft Office), and that was the sorely reason XBox didn't fold at that time.

But Microsoft people aren't stupid (for the most part, at least), and XBox was fixed. And they did a really big thing: the Microsoft Live. This really changed the game, and Sony got a really nasty bite in the ass. Sony took too much time to get the PSN up to the Live level (still doing it by the way).

By the way, The XBox 360 is also a PowerPC machine - the same core used on sony's PS3. And the NIntendo Wii (and also the WIi-U). And also on GameCube, Apple's failed Pippin and a lot of others dead on arrived videgames. There's absolutely nothing weird on PowerPC being used on videogames. Sony made things complicated for developers by tacking 6 specialized coprocessors inside its chip - what, for programmers used to have just one (MMX, 3DNow!, etc), was clearly a new level of computing. However, parallel computing appears to be here to stay (look at the ARM chips) - and having EIGHT general purposes CPUs competing for the same resources is not for the faint of the heart (Microsoft took years to learn, look at that crappy piece os software called Microsoft Windows). The complexity is still there - we just shifted it to another side.

Videogame Makers choose their hardware based on price, power and next years availability. Power PC had won the maker's heart in the past, but by some reasons IBM choose to abandon this race, giving the PowerPc a low priority on to research and development. AMD, on the other hand, spend a lot of efforts and money by upscaling their CPU to the current levels. The decision on using AMD's x64 over the previous PowerPC one was taken based on CURRENT chip power, CURRENT chip pricing and guarantees for chip supply for the product's lifetime.

The current new chip is easier to program? Beneficial side effect, nothing more. Not a single videogame maker will sacrifice any of the previous requirements to make the developer's life easier. We are not in the 90's anymore, there's a lot more people with programming skills nowadays, and a lot of them will be willing to deal with any extra complexity to take your job from you. (sad but true)

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