Late newsbits

[unixronin]

Honda has just issued the first private lease of the FCX fuel-cell-powered car in the US, to a Los Angeles family (Honda has previously leased FCX cars to several cities).  For $500 a month, you too could be the first person on your block to own a hydrogen-fueled car ... getting fuel for it might be a problem at present, though.

Norway has pledged to move towards open source, stating that "proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government."  The Mozilla Foundation's Asa Dotzler apparently took this as an opportunity to tweak the creators of Opera...  I say, bad form, what?

Speaking of browsers, juiceenewsdaily is speculating that Google may seize upon the planned release of Firefox 1.1 in July to buy the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox.  Google has already hired Ben Goodger, the lead engineer behind Firefox.

"Follow the money," they say.  LXer.com follows Microsoft's Linux attack money....

Speaking of Microsoft, MS just released a security-patch rollup for Windows 2000, two days before the scheduled end of mainstream Windows 2000 support on June 30.  The security rollup "replaces Windows 2000 SP5" -- so why didn't they just call it SP5?  It requires prior installation of SP4, and is available from Windows Update as a high-priority update (look for KB891861), but won't be installed by automatic updating until early July after a new version of Windows Update is distributed.

New York City has released an updated design for the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower planned to be the centerpiece of the rebuilt World Trade Center site, after revising the design to improve hardening against truck bombs.  The new design sets the base of the tower back 90 feet from West Street instead of 25, and its base will be a reinforced concrete wall clad in steel and titanium.  The redesigned tower will have a smaller, 200-foot-square footprint, the same as the World Trade Center towers; the roof of its observation deck will be the height of the South Tower, at 1,362 feet, while a glass wall will rise six feet higher to match the height of the North Tower.  The plan calls for frame top-out in 2009 and opening for occupancy by 2010, but no tenants have as yet expressed interest in moving into the new tower.

And just to bring Japan into the fold, it's been calculated that Sony will take almost a $100 loss on every Playstation 3 sold, with a planned sale price of $399 and an estimated production cost of $494.

Comments

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

Consoles have long been a loss-leader. The console manufacturers make up the difference in licensing fees from the game developers, and sales of games they publish themselves. I don't even know if the XBox division at MS has ever made a profit. XBox 360 looks to be very impressive, however, and could reverse that situation.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. Sony lost, what, $51B their first year on the PS2? Then made $89B in profit selling games for it in year 2....

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

And just to be clear, the XBox 360 will also be sold at a loss. I'm going to make a rough guess that it will cost at least 400 bucks to make one and they'll have to sell it, again at a rough guess, for no more than 300.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup, I believe the oft-quoted number is $299.