http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250982/2013-year-on-year-sales-and-market-share-update-to-may-18th/

Relevant part being lifetime sales:

PS3: 77,313,472
Wii: 99,574,394
Xbox 360: 77,311,669

"Every gamer you know" is not a valid metric. Anecdotal evidence is not useful.

Also this is only the 7th gen. Step back to the previous one and the PS2 is the best selling console of all time, over 200 million sold.

Sorry if it shoots your off-the-cuff rant to shit, but Sony is a force to be reckoned with in the console area. So in Nintendo.

So my guess is the reason they did all this stupid shit is publishers. The game publishers are extremely whiny, and extremely dumb, when it comes to the idea of consumer rights. They seem to think that extreme DRM is needed to prevent piracy (not that it has ever worked) and that they'd have way more sales if only they could do that. So there's the "Check in once a day thing." They also HATE the used game market, they really, honestly, act like it is money taken right out of their pocket. So there's the resale restriction. Also they, of course, hate indies, since those guys sell games without publishers, sometimes very popular ones (Minecraft). So there's this latest shit.

Now the reason for MS to do this would be to make publishers happy and thus to try and bribe them in to exclusives. Convince them to release games only for the Xbox, or at least first for the Xbox. Get a library that nobody else has or can have.

Well if that happens, then who knows where it goes? Maybe people stay mad, they say "fuck you" don't buy the console and so on. Publishers will, of course, go where the money is in the long run and the Xbox will get largely abandoned. It'll be a big failure.

However maybe gamers decide they really want those games. They forget or rationalize away their anger and objections and buy the Xbox and the games. This makes publishers happy and the Xbox gets more games and so on.

Never underestimate how short people's memories can be or what a bunch of pansy-asses gamers can be. An instructive example was Modern Warfare 2. They badly fucked over the PC version of the game and it had a lot of gamers PISSED. There was a "Boycott Modern Warfare 2," Steam group. Had a lot of members. So what happened on release day? You guessed it: Tons of people in that group had bought it and were playing it. Their anger was not enough to keep them from doing what they wanted (http://dbzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Boycott-Modern-Warfare-2.jpg).

Personally I think MS is in for a world of hurt, but we'll see. If they appease the publishers, and the publishers in turn deliver what gamers want, well maybe it works out. I hope not, but it could happen.

You might want to look up your terms. MS is not anywhere near a monopoly on consoles. They have about a 30% market share, same as Sony. Nintendo has about a 40% share. This is for consoles, MS has no handheld.

So sorry, but you can't whine about monopoly here, because MS hasn't got one. They are only one player of three, and not the big one. That is not to say this is a smart move (it isn't) but this isn't some case of a big monopoly throwing their weight around. You aren't a monopoly unless you have total or near total control over a market and they don't.

More likely, this is MS trying to make publishers happy to get more exclusive games. The traditional publishers are extremely whiny about many of the things that the new Xbox is supposed to deal with, like reselling games, indy titles, DRM, and so on. The publishers probably told them all the things they wanted, and MS said "Sure!" That looks like it is going to bit them in the ass big time, but we'll see. Maybe MS ends up getting a lot of exclusives and gamers decide they want those, forget their anger, and buy it anyhow.

Either way, knock of the monopoly whining. A monopoly isn't a large company you don't like, it has a specific legal definition.

Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.

So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.

Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.

For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.

In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.

So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.

You can have nice, efficient, LED bulbs with no WiFi in them. Go to Amazon, Home Depot, pretty much wherever you like. The Philips L-Prize bulb is the one I'd recommend. Very nice spectrum, more efficient than most other LEDs, long life.

Or I suppose you could just whine on Slashdot about a product that isn't on the market yet.

Wire based Ethernet is spec'd at MAC layer throughput. It is talking about the data rate of Ethernet frames, the 8b/10b encoding overhead is already accounted for and all that. So you discover that, particularly with Jumbo Frames, you get real near that speed in actual throughput.

Wireless Ethernet, not so much. You find that effective throughput, even under basically ideal conditions, are way less than the listed speed.

So it leads to confusion for people. Basically wireless is over advertising the speed.

DECT 6.0 phones work on the 1900MHz band and more or less act like short-range cell phones with their protocols and compression. They work quite well, have decent penetration through walls, and are outside of the range used for computers.

Remember that the "overclocking" of the non-K chips actually isn't. Turboboost is precisely controlled. Intel gets to spec how high it can go, and under what conditions (thermal, electrical, etc). So the chip is tested and rated to work at that, they know the variables. With K series OCing, that is all out the window. The user gets to get all the variables. They can set max wattage draw, how fast it can go regular and turbo, all that shit.

Well, maybe that kind of thing causes problems with these technologies. I can for sure see it with VT-d, since that is offering hardware access to VMs.

I have trouble believing Intel is doing it to be dicks. They like people buying the K series CPUs, more money for them. They only offer the K series at the high end so it isn't like people buy them instead of buying the higher end chips, they ARE the higher end chips. If anything, I would expect intel to do the opposite and disable it on lower end stuff to try and get people to spend more.

More cores are useful if, and only if, you have software threaded out enough to use it. Some workloads are, many are not. This "OMG moar cores lol," attitude is silly, and to me reeks of fanboyism. "My chosen holy grail platform does this, therefore everyone should want it!"

Also more cores aren't necessarily useful if things over all are too much slower. For example, you'd expect a T1100 to be faster than a 2600 at x264 encoding. I mean it is all kinds of multi-threaded, and the T1100 has 50% more cores. Maybe the FX-8350 too. While it isn't 6 core, it does have 8 modules so 8 threads.

Well, the reality it that they are not (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/27). The T1100 and FX-8350 are behind pretty much all modern Intel CPUs. An i5-2400 beats them out. Despite the core advantage, the speed disadvantage per core is too much.

But go ahead and keep telling yourself that you are the only TRUE kind of computer user because you care more about cores than actual performance.

You seem to think this is somehow an amusing contradiction, but it isn't. It was my entire point: I have not had to buy a complete new system in like 8 years, yet I still have current hardware. The reason is I keep upgrading pieces. There is almost nothing in it that is original. The case is, but that's it. Everything else has been replaced at least once, most things more than once. However that is doable. That's upgradability. When you can upgrade any component, without needing to upgrade the others.

One of the problems with "very large video files" is they are, well, very large. This lil' PCIe SSD isn't (480GB likely). So you'll be needing external storage, since there aren't drive bays, and then you are back to where you started. Also with video files, you need enough speed to stream them in realtime, more doesn't make it magically better. Unless you are doing 4:2:2 uncompressed or something, you don't need that kind of throughput. REDCode is only like 42MB/sec, AVCUltra is 55MB/sec max. A regular SATA 3 SSD is enough to easily stream 6+ of them. At that point, your system will be swamped anyhow with the decoding, you'd probably build proxies for editing.

Also it is rather amusing that you bring up video since anyone who has something like an AJA Kona, Blackmagic Decklink, MOTU HDX-SDI, Avid Nitris DX, or the like is straight fucked. No PCIe slots. So you get to rebuy your hardware if you can get it in Thunderbolt (like the HDX-SDI) or you get to go and find something new if you can't (like the Kona).

This is NOT some well reasoned design to make video pros happy. This is Apple wanting a new toy to wave around and say "Oooo, look how fast this is!" For most uses, useless. If you actually have the need for that kind of speed, you probably also need more capacity than it can deliver. That and PCIe was the chones interface for most video gear, and either PCIe or FW for audio. None of that to be found, so you get to get new gear on top of a new system. Well isn't that fun.

Heck, in this thread even. SSDs are all more than fast enough for today's usage on desktops. They aren't the bottleneck. With the lower latency, and good random access, they all seem to work well.

There's a difference between synthetic benchmarks and what you notice on the wall clock, and just because it is faster doesn't mean it is needed. Another area you see it is RAM. DDR3 scales up to 2133MHz by the spec, and you can find stuff of to 3000MHz. The Sandy/Ivy bridge controllers support RAM speeds async with the CPU bus, so it can scale up. When you drop a synthetic RAM speed test on it, you see the results. The faster RAM scales nearly linearly, as you'd expect. However then you test actual computation, including synthetic CPU benchmarks, and the difference vanishes. Anything past 1600MHz makes essentially no difference and even 1333MHz->1600MHz isn't that big. The RAM speed just isn't the limiting factor on the CPU.

That's what people need to understand about any data access kind of benchmark: There is such thing as enough. Once whatever processing you are doing isn't limited by it, more doesn't help. Now as processing speed increases, so can bandwidth requirements, but at a given level, you can hit "enough".

SSDs really are that point (past it really) for desktop tasks. You just don't wait on them. They can get data as fast as is needed, if there's any waiting it is on other things.

So while I don't hate on faster SSDs, I don't care either. I've played with RAIDing them, I've used fast and slow ones, none of it matters in terms of how long it takes for things to happen, or my ability to work in parallel. SSDs are just faster than I require.

Now this is not true in all applications, you can find server setups (NAS, DB, VM, that kind of thing) where indeed an SSD might not be fast enough and you need more than one ganged together, or you need them on a faster interface like PCIe or maybe FC.

Even then, SAS is advancing. HGST has 12G SAS SSDs on the market, and that'll get you 1.2GB/s of throughput, and do on in a hot-pluggable, RAID-able, setup and with more drives. There are reasons to want to hang drives off of a storage bus rather than right on the system bus.

While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.

The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.

Also please note SAS 12g is coming out soon, and that means SATA at the same speed is soon to come as well.

It just really isn't that big a deal on the desktop. For SANs, databases, other high performance shit? Sure, there are cases where you need more IO or iops then you can get out of a SAS interface and then PCIe or the like may be an answer. But for user systems, SSDs are already more than fast enough, additional speed gains don't seem to translate in to wall time gains.

It is just something you have to be pragmatic about. You have three options with samples:

1) Good sounding, playable samples for a reasonable price of professional quality that have DRM. It is either direct DRM, in the case of soft synths, or effective DRM in the case of hardware (there's no direct access to the internal banks or generation engines so it is tied to the hardware).

2) Crap samples for free/cheap with no DRM. Well I take that back, I have found a couple good commercial sample banks that are not DRM'd. Native Instrument's now discontinued Bandstand is composed on just WAV files and unencrypted NKI definitions. It is ok, sound wise.

3) Make your own non-DRM samples for a ton of money. Doing samples right is amazingly expensive. 6-7 figures easy. It requires a good bit of facilities, and trained individuals (musicians and engineers) to make.

So, of those, I choose #1. I'm not happy, but it is the only realistic choice if I want good sound. I can't afford to make a sample set, even if I wanted to, I just don't have that kind of money. I'm also not willing to deal with the poor quality of non DRM'd sets. Now if someone comes out with a pro quality open sample set, I'll be all over that shit, even if it is a duplication of what I already have. However, until that day, here I am.

In terms of opening, it depends on the case. There are some very easy no-tools PC cases out there. All Dell servers, for example, are just a lever to open (I mention them since we buy a lot).

However that aside easy of upgradeability isn't about how easy you can get the side off, I mean really if a thumb screw vexes you, you are being silly. It is about component availability and this has always been a massive Mac problem. Things like custom powersupplies, custom video card BIOSes, that sort of thing, and of course fuck-all available from Apple. When you get a PC, particularly a high end one, you've got all kinds of options. With a good manufacturer, they will sell you the stuff, as well as your ability to get it aftermarket. Like with a Dell workstation Dell will sell you, after the fact, addon processors, memory, GPUs, HDDs, SSDs, RAID controllers, HBAs, network adapters, power supplies, and so on for your system. All of them come with full warranty support though Dell, of course.

They don't have what you want, or don't have it for a good price? No problem, you can get it all aftermarket. Nothing special needed, buy the regular stuff from any vendor.

You can really upgrade the hell out of a PC, and keep doing it, if you want. I haven't bought a new desktop in like 8 years, yet it is still very much top of the line. What happens is I just replace components as needed. I get a new GPU every 18ish months, new HDDs if I run out of space or if something is faster enough to catch my interest (like my SSD), a new audio card when I see one with features I want, a new motherboard/CPU every 2ish years, new RAM if the motherboard needs it, new PSU should power requirements change (hasn't happened) and a new case never because I like mine. So even when the core, the CPU and motherboard, get upgraded it isn't a new system. I can keep the case, PSU, GPU, sound card, drives, and all that jazz.

Now I'm not saying this is how people should do it, but that is a demonstration of what real upgradeability means. It is the ability to upgrade any component when a new one comes out more or less, and to do so with anything as much as needed. Not the ability to take the case off and put in more RAM.

In terms of network storage I suppose... But what? OS-X can't act as an iSCSI initiator so you can't use any of the nice high end iSCSI arrays (like an Equallogic) or something. No 10gig so no FCoE. Apple doesn't make storage arrays and nothing else seems to support AFP. So... You buy a Windows server and use CIFS? Last I tried, CIFS performance wasn't great on the Mac, but whatever.

Macs really aren't that well designed for network storage on account of not having anything out there for them. I mean generally for network storage you either want a NAS that speaks the protocol your OS likes, and for OS-X that's AFP which is not popular, or for higher performance/lower latency you hook up using iSCSI or FCoE. iSCSI is real popular because gig (and bonded gig) are options and you can run it over your regular network, even over the Internet if necessary. Most OSes (Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, VMWare) can act as initiators and talk to an iSCSI target (most of them can be targets too if you want), but not OS-X, it has no iSCSI support.

I mean they'll talk to a CIFS share if you are just looking for a place to put stuff, but given the lack of space I presume you are talking about networked storage in a high performance capacity, using it online like local storage. That really only works well with high performance stuff and that they do not seem to have.