The Wii and the PS3 are impossible to get right now.  Rewind a year, so was the XBox 360, rewind further and so was the PS2 and the Xbox before that.

What is the point of launching to HUGE customer demand with an infinitesimal numbers of units, then spending marketing dollars on top of that, as if you needed to stir up demand?   What is the point of making the launch for the holidays when all you have to offer is a small quantity of units that you would have sold out of anyway?

I'm chewing on the idea that its done on purpose.  Think about it: you have a new console, possibly a new online service, they are almost certainly going to have some bugs at first despite all your testing efforts.  Why not produce only a limited # of consoles so that any errors are caught and fixed in 200,000 consoles instead of 2,000,000 consoles.  The first people to buy are essentially un-paid beta testers. By releasing in such limited quantities, you are also being assured that only the people who want your product very, very badly are going to get it.  No one is going to casually walk in off the street and buy your new console on a whim and be upset.  The guy who camped out in front of best buy to get his new console isn't going to say "screw it" and take it back if it overheats or has some quirks.

Thoughts?

Why, oh why, is it that I cannot get a version of dotnetfx.exe that does not include the ASP.Net runtime and such?  It would be nice for my end users if such a thing existed.

http://www.petitiononline.com/hobfilm/petition.html

http://feeds.cinematical.com/~r/weblogsinc/cinematical/~3/51505052/

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?  Hollywood continues to suck.  Hollywood is a great example of a bunch of old idiots who are living in a meticulously constructed fantasy world of their own, then blaming movie downloads on their malaise, rather than the fact that they they make terrible decisions over and over again.

I am a Lord of the Rings nerd, and I don't mind saying so.  Hell, I'm even an armchair Tolkein Scholar, if that gives you any idea how much of a nerd I am.  I don't speak any made up languages but I really enjoy the depth of the mythology.  The LOTR movies directed by Peter Jackson are among the best films to come out of Hollywood in recent memory.

Reading here
http://feeds.cinematical.com/~r/weblogsinc/cinematical/~3/49649575/

You can see that The Hobbit is indeed on track to become a movie, though it may be a few years before production begins.

Glas tulo na min oh hé siniath!

I spent a bit of time yesterday hacking Codus to work on .NET 2.0 and generate generic classes and collections for data access.  Talking to Sean from Adapdev a bit it looks like I'm going to try to clean this up and contribute the changes so they're available in future Codus and Adapdev.Net releases.  So, if you have been looking for .Net 2 support in these excellent tools, it seems its on the way.

Despite being a Microsoft FanBoy, I have long enjoyed the Playstation franchise.  While I don't have the time to procure one by camping out the video of Final Fantasy XIII has convinced me that the PS3 is going to ultimately be the dominant platform yet again.  There aren't any launch games I'm interested in but if I saw one sitting on the shelf at Target I'd probably pick it up just for a BluRay player.

Note to Sony and MSFT: you suck when it comes to releasing your consoles.  Sony expects to sell 7,000,000 units as quickly as they can make them and I see no reason to doubt it.  Why, then, launch with only 400,000 units in the US?  That's 8,000 per state if distributed evenly, and how many BestBuy, KMart, Target, Walmart, EBGames, Toys 'R Us are they then split between?  What's the point of advertising and such when not even half of the "very hard core gamers" will be able to get one. 

Note the strange silence after yesterday's elections.

Where are the broken voting machines and screams of foul play?
Where are the people turned away from the voting booth by scary people?
Where are the misleading ballots that trick you into voting for the wrong candidate?
The hanging chads?
The hacked-into diebold machines?
I guess those only happen when the republicans win the day.  How did we get through yesterday with only a single recount?  I guess those things only happen when the republicans win the day.  A republican victory, we should believe, is a sham, a proof of foul play, an abomination impossible to conceive.  A democratic victory is an affirmation, a proof of the righteous mandate of the people.

Oh well, back to writing code.

In Wisconsin here, we re-elected our Governor, and across the nation democrats are exhalted in their wins in House and Senate.  Somehow, I don't expect much to change.  The democrats have gotten more conservative and the republicans have started spending more money and thumping the bible.  They both serve the same corporate masters anyway.  Politics has turned into a footbal game beneath a 3-ring big top where team loyalty drives most discussion.  For my part, I don't vote for the DemoPublicans/Republocrats anymore.  I voted for 3rd party or independent candidates across the board yesterday.

My perspective on the democrat wins: I'm glad that flying cars, global happiness, unprecedented prosperity, meals in pill form, and universal harmony are just around the corner now!  I don't know which I shoud do first: go ahead and go out to spend $$ against the increased prosperity that is undoubtedly a few months away now, or maybe book my honeymoon in Iraq since it is probably about to be super-peaceful and friendly to westerners in a few weeks, or hell, I think I'll just go lick some doorknobs since the price of health care will be plummeting in a few hours, those doorknobs will be in Grand Central Station since the 85-cent-per-gallon-gas that's about to go on sale will make my roadtrip very affordable!

If I can get everything squared away with borrowing the knockdown finish texturing device, carpet, and final inspection my theater will launch on November 29th.  The projector and screen came in yesterday and everything is coming together.  This has been a long time in the planning and development.