The fact that they were addons actually made them even bigger disasters. Because they required custom software, they behaved like they were standalone systems (a Sega CD game was useless to a purely Sega Genesis owner). But at the same time, the maximum possible market for the SegaCD was existing Genesis owners.

The Saturn was the biggest component of why the industry was pissed at Sega, but their scattershot console strategy leading up to the Saturn was definitely a factor on peoples minds.

Microsoft went in expecting the Xbox to fail. They knew perfectly well what they were doing, which was buying their way into a well established an entrenched market. The money they dumped into the original Xbox was the cost of entry, so obviously they knew what they were getting into.

The strategy worked, too. The Xbox 360 was a strong contender in the market, and captured nearly a third of a three-system market. Of course, they blew it this generation, but that doesn't say anything about their original strategy at the beginning.

Sega had problems getting developers for the Dreamcast long before there were any piracy problems. They alienated developers by spitting out new incompatible hardware in a rapidfire format. The 32X was released shortly before the Saturn, and then the Saturn was abandoned early into its lifespan in favour of the Dreamcast. Between 1991 and 1998, Sega had a total of five different and incompatible hardware platforms on the market, six if you include the GameGear.

By the time the Dreamcast rolled around, many developers had had enough of Sega's schizophrenic console strategy, and avoided them.

A 35 degree diagonal field of view isn't a virtual reality headset, it's a portable personal display. If the manufacturer is citing "equivalent to an X inch screen at a distance of Y feet away", then it's not for VR.

You're still moving that mass, regardless of how it's mounted on the head.

MP3 is a compression codec. OGG is a container format. MPEG-DASH is a standard for how to do bitrate-adaptive streaming over HTTP. They're all completely different things.

MPEG-DASH is codec-agnostic, and does not require or imply any specific codec. However, since it's intended for audiovisual streaming (rather than just audio), and since it's done under the auspices of the MPEG, h.264/AAC are the obvious codec pair to choose. There is nothing stopping MPEG-DASH from being used to stream something like VP8/Vorbis or VP9/Opus... and in fact the WebM project has documentation detailing exactly that.

They became obsolete when naval warfare stopped being about shelling things and started being about launching aircraft, missiles, and torpedoes. They haven't really been relevant since the second world war, and even then their utility was questionable: aircraft carriers dominated naval battles of the 1930s and 1940s. Nobody has built one in more than 70 years.

Betteridge says the likely answer is no. Looking at the article, there's a whole lot of predictions and guesses in there. LEDs and lasers? Water is very good at attenuating light, and even a ship directly on top of a submersed vessel wouldn't be able to detect anything using light... and coastal water attenuates light MUCH faster than open ocean, due to all the extra stuff in the water...

Ironically, the places with the least amount of natural water today will do just fine, because they're already investing heavily in desalination. Since they're already investing in that infrastructure, as their demand for water increases, they simply build more plants.

The places with abundant water and very little water end up fine, it's the places in the middle that will be screwed if they don't plan ahead.

Tons of huge rockets are already being launched from KSC (with plans to launch far louder ones in the future), and have been for half a century. Landing rockets is unlikely to produce much more noise than that already does...

It's not a valid comparison to compare the price of 1kg of rice to the bulk price...

For example, looking at WalMart Canada, they'll sell you 8kg of rice for C$1.06 per kilo, or they'll sell you 900g for C$2.52 per kilo.

Of course, the 900g price is decently lower than the prices that Numbeo is quoting, but the basic premise holds true: food has different prices in different places. For one thing, the ability and willingness of people to pay more can drive prices up. For another thing, the cost of transport can too. And I can tell you that people in a country with a per-capita GDP of $6,985 are probably not willing to pay as much for stuff as people in a country with a per-capita GDP of $50,577.

It really doesn't. One kilo of rice costs C$3.67 in Montreal. One kilo of rice costs C$0.98 in Havana. Not everything is cheaper, but many things are.

You can see the direct comparison here:

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-...

Satellite internet should work fine for Netflix. It's not latency sensitive, and while Satellite is typically not blazingly fast, it works fine at lower speeds, and the dynamic scaling is pretty seamless.

Could you talk to why a more traditional fire suppression system (such as sprinklers) wouldn't work? It seems like building something into the ship itself, which would take up little space compared to a big bulky robot that needs to wander the ship, would be an enormously simpler problem to solve. I realize that fire in a warship is going to often be accompanied by structural damage (while in a building the structural damage would probably be a result of the fire rather than the cause of it), but you'd think that sufficient redundancy and resiliency built into the system could accommodate for that.

My S95 didn't do much in the way of bokeh in the first place, so the limited amount of depth of field permitted by the smartphone isn't much less than the S95. Of course, for most people, limiting depth of field is not really something they care about (or even necessarily want).

Obviously cameras with large sensors are going to be much more capable, my argument is more that smartphone cameras have passed a threshold of "good enough", the point where the pictures that they take are sufficiently good to essentially eliminate the P&S market. Cameras like the RX100 are great, but at $500-600 you're not going to find many people buying them. IIRC the entire global market for all mirrorless cameras is only like 3.5 million a year, whereas smartphones are nearing 400 million. And the mirrorless figure is dropping while the smartphone figure is increasing.