You can probably figure this out based on sales of games released simultaneously on different platforms. It won't be 100% accurate for a variety of reasons, but given a sample of enough titles in different genres, it will probably be pretty close.

I haven't done this myself but it would be an interesting project. With this data, you could at least figure out an approximate relative number of systems in actual use.

For example, if Madden 10 sells 300,000 copies on the 360 in its first month, and 200,000 copies on the PS3, and if other games were selling at that same ratio, then you could reasonably conclude that there are 50% more Xbox 360's in use than PS3's (or at least that there's at least one 360 in 50% more households than PS3). You could then look at the hardware sales data and see if that matches the sales advantage the 360 has. If it does not, then you could pretty reasonably conclude that the additional 360's being sold are either replacements for broken systems, or second 360's being bought by someone who already owns one.

I remember I did do this just for kicks in the PS2 era, because at that time the tables were turned and it was de rigeur to claim that all of the PS2's sales (especially later in its lifespan) were people replacing broken systems. But the game sales didn't support this - sales of multiplatform games always showed almost the exact same sales ratio as you'd expect given the total installed base of all three systems on the market at the time.

If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.

First of all, why? MS's instructions if your Xbox 360 fails is to send it back to them. The retailer has nothing to do with it.

Second, we did hear from MS themselves that the Xbox 360 suffered from a series of design flaws leading to various types of breakdowns. It was a big story for a while, if you don't remember. MS set aside more than $1 billion to deal with it. I and others figured out that that kind of money would cover the repairs on every single Xbox sold to that point, leading me (and others) to conclude that the expected failure rate must be close to 100%.

If MS had instead asked Gamestop to foot the $1 billion bill for defective Xbox 360's, you're damn right we would have heard about it from the retailers before now.

Lifetime failure rates never go down. They only ever go up. In the 360's case, they are going up very, very fast.

Or are you saying that millions of PS3's will suddenly commit suicide this year, thereby equalizing the percentages at somewhere around 60%?

The failure rate for PS3s in this survey is 10 times higher than other published figures (reports have the actual PS3 failure rate at around 1%, which is in-line with normal manufacturing expectations).

No, it isn't. Where are you getting these figures from?

And you're the one that needs to learn what a control is. A control is simply a test designed to eliminate variables to validate comparison. That is exactly what having the Wii and PS3 in this same survey does. If you want to argue that there's self-selection bias going on here, then you're going to have to explain why it apparently only applies to the Xbox 360 and not the other two consoles. Are Xbox 360 owners just a bigger bunch of whiners?

Even if you're saying that all of the consoles suffer from the same self-selection bias, then you're still left with the Xbox 360 having a failure rate between 5 and 8 times that of the other two systems. Nothing changes that.

But I can tell you as someone who worked in the home electronics industry for many years, there has never been a product on the market in that industry with a failure rate of less than 1%. So I have no idea where you're getting this figure.

Except for a broken leg, a shattered skull and a gunshot to the heart, I'm completely uninjured!

The smoking gun is that the failure rate in this report, for the PS3 is above 10%. Previous reports have put the PS3 failure rate at less than 1%

1% is just as ridiculous a number as 54%, if not moreso, because we've all seen widespread reports of 360's failing. But a 1% failure rate of any electronic product is almost unheard-of, especially one with moving parts.

Generally speaking, a failure rate of 5-10% is considered normal. So the PS3's failure rate is slightly high, but I actually wouldn't expect different from a system that was so bleeding-edge at the time it was launched, and that generated such a massive amount of heat and had an unproven cooling system design.

Both the Wii and PS3 have numbers that are basically in the expected range. So those serve as your "control", and any self selection bias would be apparent in those numbers as well. The fact is the 360 numbers are coming from the same survey and are 5 times higher than the PS3 and about 8 times higher than the Wii. And this is not a small sample here either. This is meaningful.

The study was poorly done anyway, not so much because of the methods as the measurement used: lifetime failure rates, which will over time hit 100% on any console it's applied to.

I mentioned this in another reply, but the time scale you'd need for a normal console to reach a 100% failure rate would be something like 100-200 years. Seriously. I mean, I have every single major game console of the last 30 years in my house right now, and every single one of them works. The only system that has ever failed on me is the Dreamcast. And yes, I still play them all. (Ok, not equally, but they all get some play.) And I know I'm not alone - there are still many tens of thousands of working Atari 2600's, Coleco Visions, Intellivisions, etc. out there - and the ones that no longer exist are gone not because they broke, but because they just ended up in a landfill somewhere due to perceived obsolescence.

Most game consoles are going to work until they literally begin turning back to dust. If your system is failing due to dry rot, I think you can be pretty sure it's not a design issue that's at fault.

For the Xbox 360 to reach 54% failure in the span of 3 years is pretty unbelievable. I can't think of another product in the history of, well, products to reach that high a percentage. Even when Nintendo did its massive recall of Japanese Famicoms due to a design flaw, the actual failure rate to that point was quite low - under 10%. In most industries, a 54% failure rate would lead to involuntary recall, much less voluntary action. (I'm sure that MS's warranty extension was a bid to head this off. It was done out of fear, not kindness.)

Yeah but the difference they noted between the PS3 and 360 for playability was 3%, while the difference in failure rate is about 40%. That's huge.

Actually, the difference between play time between 360 and PS3 is more like 8%, while the difference between failure rates is more like 500%. You don't just subtract when you're talking percentage difference. So there's way more of a differential than even you're saying. There's no way wear and tear even comes close to explaining these different failure rates. This is a design issue.

I posited after MS first started to come clean about their quality issues that, given the statements MS was making about why these failures were occuring, the 360 failure rate would eventually approach 100%. (Obviously this is true of anything given enough time, but I meant within the expected timeframe before obsolescence.) The original system suffered from a "series of flaws" (MS's words) in its design that led to various potential failures, not just one. Given that all 360's suffered from these same flaws, and that by MS's admission it did not matter what steps you took to "protect" your system, it did not seem logical to me that the failures would be confined to only a few systems.

Simply put, MS designed and sold a defective product that should not have been on the market. Even a 54% failure rate is completely unacceptable, but my bet is that this will continue to inch higher over the next few years as whatever initial-design systems remaining out there fail. I'm also not convinced that the new systems have solved every problem (remember, MS themselves said it was "a series of flaws"), although they may have solved a few so the failure rate of the new systems may be lower, though probably still pretty unacceptable by any reasonable standard.

I personally care about quality, and the lack of such is pretty much the only reason I haven't bought a 360 at this point, nor do I plan to. Even since the supposed internal redesign, there are still reports and surveys like this being released seemingly on a monthly basis. I keep waiting for the day when it seems like MS has this stuff finally solved, but that day just never seems to come.

As an airline passenger, this is not making me feel like this is a plane I can trust or should want to fly on. And yes I can choose to fly airlines that haven't ordered and won't use the 787. Pretty easy since it's not exactly selling like wild anyway.

Huh? Boeing has 800 orders for it before its launch. That is basically unheard-of in the industry. Name any successful airplane - none of them had that many orders prior to launch.

As for your "not gonna fly it because it's got pre-production problems" stance, I'd like to know what airliners you do feel comfortable on so I can list all the incidents and accidents they were involved in prior to launch, and see if you still feel as comfortable flying them afterwards.

The existing fuselage wrinkles might not compromise the flight safety of the 787s, but they will weigh and cost a lot more than planned because of the extra layers of carbon composite material. The added weight will reduce fuel efficiency for the entire lifetime of the airplane, which further increases the cost of use of these planes for the airlines that will be buying them.

And this kind of thing happens all the time with new airplanes, and the first few airplanes are then just given at a slight discount. It's no big deal to the airlines. These are carbon panels about 1/8 inch thick; they don't weigh a tremendous amount.

You can bet this means all future 787s will weigh more than Boeing told their investors they would, which means some companies who slightly prefered 787s over an alternative by, say, Airbus, might also cancel their orders and buy from the competition instead.

If you were talking tons of extra weight, yes. But the fix Boeing has come up with is literally a couple of extra kilograms. (I'm talking about the second issue now; the fixes for both issues are literally about 10kg total.) That's not going to drive anybody to a competitor's airplane, and the total weight penalty is going to be negligible. About the same as carrying an extra food cart on the plane on every trip.

That changed when the plane was landing. At first I thought people were applauding, which was a bit surprising, but then I realized that the sound was that of the entire roof shaking, you could actually see the roof plates moving against each other.

Are you talking about the cabin interior panels? That's not the "roof". Those are just panels hung from the frame around the fuselage. They're not designed to be entirely rigid. In fact, in most airliners you can see that the holes cut in the panels where the various framing parts are designed to fit in are not round, they're oval. That's so that the panels can move back and forth.

It used to freak me out too when I saw interior panels move, but then I looked more closely and read up on how these things are actually attached to the fuselage, and now I realize it's just normal. It happens on every plane too - if you look closely at the interior panels in any airplane, even an American-made one, you will see the panels flex and move on takeoff and landing, and during turbulence. Some of this is caused by the airplane itself flexing - airplanes are designed to flex - but most of it is just caused by the panels themselves not being 100% rigid in how they're attached. It's nothing to worry about.

Boeing pulled out the 787 after scrapping the Sonic Cruiser. It had nothing to do with the A380. Boeing had already been down the VLA route before Airbus had and decided there was no market.

You could say the A380 was a reaction to Boeing's "challenge" offered by the 747-700X, which was first offered in 1996. Boeing received no interest from airlines, leading them to explore smaller airplanes. The A380 had nothing to do with it.

The 747-8 could be considered a reaction to the A380, although it is obviously smaller than both the A380 and the proposed 747-700X. But that was Boeing saying "ok, look, you guys said you didn't want this in 1996, but if you've all now changed your mind about wanting a bigger plane with a better cost per seat mile, here it is."

The article you linked says the A380 is "sold out until 2014", seems like a pretty good position to be in during a recession to me.

But they need to be sold out until something like 2030 before the airplane turns a profit. That's the problem. When you design a product in such a way that it's questionable whether you'll ever turn a profit even if you sell every single one you can make for the next 20 years, then something's wrong.

That tells me it's Boeing's fault that the problem exists, not the Italian manufacturers.

No, it's Alenia's.

There are two issues here. The first is that the wing body join failed earlier than it was supposed to - that's a design fault on Boeing's part. The second is that starting with the seventh frame, the fuselage skin was wrinkled. That's a production fault.

Alenia has since admitted that they changed production processes after the seventh frame, and something having to do with that change caused the faults. This issue has already been resolved. The information in this article is apparently a bit old, although the issues it brings up are still at least somewhat valid... though there is honestly no practical way of building an airliner these days without using offshore suppliers. But it highlights the dangers of lowest-bidder contracts.

My arguement in this case is that the machine would have to be smarter not than a single person, but than an entire group of people, all with different expertise and internal creative processes, combined, to result in an intilligence explosion. That's a very different conclusion.

But it's the wrong conclusion. This is a mistake (IMO) that I see a lot of people make when talking about machine intelligence in comparison to humans.

The thing is, these machines that are smarter than men are still machines. They are not humans. When you say a machine is "as smart as a human", people seem to automatically assume that means they're as fallible as humans too. That's not necessarily going to be the case and I would argue it likely will not be the case. It's not necessary, nor is it probably the easiest route, to reach a human level of intelligence by designing a machine brain exactly like a human's. More likely, we'll design it in some brute force digital way so that it is computationally as or more powerful than a human brain, but neither has some of our capacity for creative thought nor any of our problems with memory or senses or whatever. (The former is not guaranteed, though; creative thought and intelligence are linked, so a "smart" machine may be just as creative as we are, especially if pre-programmed with a set of overriding directives, as it no doubt would be because otherwise what's the point?)

So yes, a single machine "smarter" than a human could have its own designs in memory and could probably fairly easily teach itself how to build a copy of itself simply by studying how to do it. It would never forget anything until it ran out of memory, it would never be distracted by thoughts of love or sex or by being too tired or bored, it would presumably be built with the precision and dexterity of a robot, so that's not an issue. It wouldn't need to worry about experience, as a human does, because its limbs will just do whatever its "brain" tells them to - unlike a human. It could also pretty easily build machines smarter than itself, either by just adding more computing power or by linking itself to the copies it produces.

Humans are usually not limited in what they can do by their intelligence, but by all of their fallibilities, not to mention a desire for leisure time. We don't want to just be working all the time, and we want to do what we love to do, even if it means we can only build one part of a robot instead of the whole thing. If your field is welding, maybe you don't have any interest in learning how to design memory chips. A robot or android is not going to have that "problem"; it will learn to do whatever it needs to do in order to build whatever it needs to build to satisfy whatever directives it's programmed with. And it'll do it without any leisure time short of stopping to literally recharge its batteries.

*That* is what's really dangerous about all this, IMO. I don't even think robots need to be *as* smart as humans to cause us real problems. A robot with an IQ equivalent of about 50 (which is still far beyond where we are today) but a large amount of memory and good basic dexterity could probably replicate itself and then defend itself (with its buddies) if programmed with an innocuous directive like self-preservation. We are counting on the fact that our higher intelligence will protect us against dumber machines because we will be able to think more creatively and keep one step ahead, but all they really need to do is go to a library and get the right books to study, then hide out in the woods for a while building up a dumb but formidable army.

Even a single semi-intelligent machine programmed poorly could just waltz into a gun store, take a gun off the rack and start shooting people. And it'd probably require an RPG to take it down. We are already almost there - autonomous gun robots have already gone berzerk and killed people. Someday these things are gonna be roaming the streets.

The "singularity" and runaway machine intelligence is not even necessary for things to start spiraling out of control. A *little* bit of intelligence combined with the law of unintended consequences is all that's necessary.