Back in 2006 both Nintendo and Sony stated in public that they were switching to reporting actual sales to customer numbers. Googling only finds references to the original statements by Nintendo and Sony and not the original statements.

However, just a month or so ago Sony once again reiterated that they only report actual sales:

http://news.spong.com/article/19131/SCEE-Clarifies-PS3-Install-Base-Maths

"We calculate our install base by 'sell through' and have done for the last four years I believe", we asked for a little additional clarification...

"We classify 'sell through' as the number of units consumers have actually purchased from retail. 'Sell in' is the number of units we've sold to retail."

Didn't check for a recent statement by Nintendo, but I assume they still report actual sales.

Microsoft remains the only one who still tries to pass off their shipments of stock to retailers as actual sales to customers. Basically pads the worldwide installed base of the Xbox 360 by a couple million units.

100 million dollars did nothing to stop Bing from failing. This next desperation move by Ballmer won't save the floundering Bing.

"recommended that government agencies dump Microsoft"

The contract win is good for Google. But the recomendation to dump Microsoft across the board is huge.

Microsoft appears to be taking this path for exiting the console market:

1. Close down existing first party studios

2. Stop putting any but the minimum resources into the existing 360

3. Retarget Rare and Lionhead into Wii/casual focused developers

4. Use existing 360 online and other fees to pay for the relauch of the same 360 hardware with motion controls add on

5. Hype the motion control like mad until late 2010 since they really have almost nothing coming out on the 360

Microsoft isn't Nintendo anymore than Apple. There just isn't the culture and people there to create a wildly popular device and ecosystem like the iPod and Wii. But going up against Sony has been a costly many billion dollar disaster for Microsoft. Even something as basic as deciding the next gen movie format couldn't be won with the Xbox 360 as when Sony whiped Toshiba and Microsoft's HD-DVD right out of the market. So much for 'owning the living room'.

The execs up in Redmond must have looked back and billions in losses over the last eight years and said "Enough." Time to move on. Leave the console market to Sony. Losing to Nintendo is much cheaper than losing to Sony.

Nintendo -> Apple
Wii -> iPod
Xbox 360 with motion controls -> Zune

"What is the real use of getting a man to Mars"

There isn't.

Thankfully the people running our space program are grown ups and are only giving the idiotic 'send people to Mars so we can all watch them plant a flag' bullshit lip service and focusing on actually important space goals.

The exciting near term space technology and goals are orbital manned/robotic construction/repair and eventual manufacturing and a permanent manned base on the Moon.

Stupid fanboys.

Cell is being used by:

Sony in the 140-150 million PS3s that will be sold over the next 7 years of its life. And in future Sony products like their TVs and other media devices.

IBM is using huge number of Cell chips in their servers for media, aerospace, and other high performance computing clients

And Toshiba is using Cell chips for their media hardware in many of the same ways Sony is for everything but the PS3.

It is funny to see Intel scrambling to come up with their own Cell type chips. From their roadmap they are only about 5-7 years behind STI. Really shouldn't have wasted so much effort trying to keep that Itanium junk alive.

"And honestly, the speed of the media the console is reading from is a much larger bottleneck than its CPU."

Boggle...

Ignoring any Dreamcast Xbox similarities, when a console has been on the market like the 360 has and all it only has a game running a multiplatform engine and faked/rigged comparisions at sites like gametrailers something went terribly wrong with your console's graphics hardware design.

Every previous console generation even the weaker console like the 360 is this gen still had stand out first party titles. The 360 is the first console ever, at least since the move to disc based media, to have such an enormous graphical power disadvantage compared to its competitor. There isn't a single first party 360 game that isn't considered a joke graphically: Halo 3, Forza 2, Banjoo, Perfect Dark...

The 360 has been living off fake Epic 5000x5000k 16xAA photomode marketing bullshots as the single thing that is supposed to demonstrate its 'power'.

There are two main reasons for why the 360 is so weak graphically compared to the PS3.

1. The gimped storage format. The 360 only has 7GB per DVD of storage. That is actually 1.5 GBs smaller than the PS2 and Xbos had last gen. The 360 is the only console ever to have less storage space than a previous gen.

2. The 480p graphics system being forced to try to be used as a 720p system. The 360's graphics system is designed around a 480p 4xAA framebuffer. Anything more than that and you have to waste time writing tedious to write and implement tile rendering code that degrades overall performance. It is the result of grabbing whatever ATI had available back in mid 2005 when the Xbox died in the market and throwing it in the 360 for release just a few months later.

The only positive outlook for the 360 on the graphics front is that with such a weak first party lineup the system is relying almost entirely on PC ports for exclusives and Microsoft can use the high rez screenshots and footage of the PC versions of games running on high end hardware and make the claim that you are looking at the 360 version or that the 360 version is going to look just as good. Most likely that is what we are going to start seeing with Alan Wake.

In retrospective it wasn't the botched hardware design that was the real fiasco for the Xbox 360 since Xbox owners showed that they will put up with defective hardware and continue to fork out hundreds of bucks over and over again for replacement consoles. It will be the shockingly bad graphics hardware design. It has become sadly hilarious to still hear Xbox owners clinging to Gears of War.

In a sense that is like Dreamcast owners and that game Shenmue.

That rambling Penny Arcade fanboy drivel is hilarious in its desperation to try trash Home. Home does generate an insane amount of terror in the fanboys of other platforms where they start lashing out incoherently.

The scope of Home and the amount of work Sony has done is staggering.

There are 18 million PS3 already worldwide with 14 million PSN accounts. So the massive amount of traffic on the Home servers yesterday was understandable. No other MMORPG or online world has ever been build to handle such a gigantic userbase.

So other than the initial login servers getting swamped for the first few hours the service went live it was incredibly smooth and lagfree even though every single space in Home was maxed out with people. It has been one gigantic party going on for since yesterday.

Everyone is filling out their friends list with people they've met. People are playing the in Home games together, checking out the initial game spaces for Uncharted and Far Cry 2, dancing in the social music area, or just hanging out chatting with their old or new friends.

There are things to unlock in the various games throughout Home for your avatar or personal spaces. And of course there are things you can buy if you wish to.

The party/matchmaking/game launching is incredibly cool - although more games need to patched for support. There are about 10 right now.

If you are a solo player you can setup up an online game and then invite or have people join you while you are in Home. It shows which game you have setup under your name for other to see. Once you are ready you all launch together right into the game as a party. When you are done you all drop right back to where you were in Home together. So if you have a group of friends you can all hang out at your personal space before and after games or anywhere inside of Home.

But for clans it is even cooler. You can setup a clubhouse for your clan and everyone can come and go when they want. For clan gaming nights everyone goes to the club and you are all able to jump into games together and come right back to your clan clubhouse. Eventually you will be able to stream movies up on your wall or screenshots of various games up on the wall of your clanhouse in addition to having it decked out in the style of your clan.

And then there are the third party game spaces that almost every console developer is in the process of creating. You don't have to have the game to enter these areas. Each of these spaces look just like the real game and give you a feel for what the game is like with the overall art style of the space, pictures from the games up on the walls, and movies streaming from the game.

Companies like EA are creating entire pavilions for their sports games with every game having separate areas inside the space. There are mini-games inside of the game spaces that unlock items for you or let you into special areas. Anything you can do in a game you can do inside of Home.

And there are already third party non-game Spaces going into Home like Red Bull's space that is going live next week.

A year from now it looks like there will be easily more than a hundred different Sony, third party game, and third party non-game company spaces in Home.

Sony has been working on this amazing world since the early PS2 days and it shows. Looking over at it right now with people everywhere inside of Home running around having a blast already, it is hard to imagine how insanely cool Home will be as it continues to grow with the huge number of additional spaces and content over the next five years.