Slashdot Mirror

There is a firmware update ( Link ) to fix the input lag.

Unfortunately Sony did not make it available to all TVs using the same chip for marketing reasons (only higher end TVs get lower input lag). I am sad as I have one of those (X8005C). Shame on Sony.

Hopefully now all TV manufacturers will pay more attention to input lag in general.

http://www.sony.co.uk/pro/prod... From desk models to Petasite. It uses cartridges of blu-ray discs, UDF.

Sony Viao L-series all-in-one desktops PCs.

http://www.sony.co.uk/product/...

Fujitsu (no longer Fujitsu-Siemens) Esprimo desktop PCs.

http://www.fujitsu.com/uk/prod...

Panasonic tablet-based PCs running Windows 8.1

http://www.panasonic.com/busin...

ODS-D77U specs are 780 Mbps write once and 1.15 Gbps read. This is in the same neighborhood as LTO-6. But yeah, the ODA drive price is 3 times higher.

The other speed issue to look at is seek time to recover files, which is going to be much longer on tape (often a minute for LTO-6) than disk. The value of low seek time will depend on use case.

I'm not sure where you get 35-50 Mbps from - you may be confusing ODA with Sony XDCAM, which is an older, single disk system.

So you are anticipating the company that took away a highly touted software feature (the "Other OS" feature) via a required system update (as in required if you ever wanted to play another game on your system) is going to add new capabilities to the PS4 that they went to special effort to prevent upon launch?

On a completely unrelated note, I have this really great bridge that I need to sell for a bargain basement price. Are you interested?

Nowhere did I say I would buy the PS4, so no, not interested in your bridge either. I might buy it though begin 2016 or so. I understand this might be hard for you, but try to put yourself in the mind of Sony. Who is using DLNA? Is Sony, apart from selling the PS4, earning money with that? Would it have much impact on selling the PS4? Can we make deals with netflix, local cable companies, ...., to offer movies for rent? Can our televisions not do DLNA directly? Hey, yeah, who knew, our televesions do that http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/lcd-television/benefits/article/id/1237477951736, why would the PS4 be needed for an extra bridge?

Sony is a consumer electronics company. What they are doing does not seem to go counter to that.

Isn't this similar to the 3D Sweep Panorama feature that has been available in some Sony cameras and smartphones since 2010?
http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/cyber-shot-digital-cameras/technology/article/3d-sweep-panorama

The sheet battery weighs only 290 g,

You are all getting ripped off in the size department, the only fondle slab you need today is a Sony Tap20

Soon the BBC, ITV, et al will come begging for decent recording equipment...

I doubt it

Another way to check the law is to complain to them about a Sony device, the NAS-SC500PK for instance. http://www.sony.co.uk/product/hdd-audio/nas-sc500pk is the page advertising it. I've sent in a complaint to the ASA about it - let's see if we can get Sony to fight the ASA to make format shifting declared legal.

Facilitating copyright infringement is doing something that helps others infringe copyright? Well then Sony need to get their own house in order before they go after anyone else.

Facilitating copyright infringement is doing something that helps others infringe copyright? Well then Sony need to get their own house in order before they go after anyone else.

Facilitating copyright infringement is doing something that helps others infringe copyright? Well then Sony need to get their own house in order before they go after anyone else.

not just that, if you have a Sony BDP-s370 blu-ray player, you can (apart from play blueray discs of course), plug a USB HDD into it and play movies on that (even in mkv format), or stream vids from your PC (using a DNLA server like PS3MediaServer, Tversity, Twonky, Mezzmo or any of the others). Or you can stream video from iPlayer, GoogleTV or similar, and even LoveFilm (not sure if you get some of these in the USA, but there's bound to be alternatives).

Nice review here.

LoveFilm for example, is £10 a month and you get a bluray disc in the post whenever you send the old one back, but you can also stream movies for free (once you're a subscriber, that is)

And its £120 for the device, which is $134 in the USA :(

Hmm, with that resolution we could do the science fiction standard nonsense:

The fascinating part of that scene is that it actually is extremely close to reality. We already have tons of gigapixel images floating around on the net and in terms of resolution they seem to be quite up on par with the Bladerunner image (i.e. 10 gigapixel or so). The Bladerunner image gets a bit further in that it is not only 2D, but actually a bit 3D, but even that is possible with lightfield photography. Now today those gigapixel images are produced by cameras mounted on robots, but when you look at Sweep Panorama it is not hard to imagine that in a few years down the road we will be shooting those images with regular consumer gear. The final issue one might complain about is that he scans what looks like an actual analog photo for all that, but it is not hard to imagine that the picture itself might not contain all that data, but instead contain it on an embedded chip (see MicroSD) or the printed picture could just act as key to the full-res picture stored on the cloud. Or of course, maybe print resolution just got better, after all a 10 gigabyte image should fit nicely on a BluRay and thats about the same size as a photo.

The teachers where I work simply refuse to use the cameras I've just bought them. Instead, they're sticking with these

What they don't know is that the new workstations don't have floppy drives... >:-)

When I bought my wife her Sony Network Walkman she decided to try Puretracks so that she could get digital music legally. After a week and the realization that "we won't let you copy the songs *you bought* off your computer", she dropped them like a hot rock.

"I'd rather get my music illegally, and have them work on my MP3 player," she said.

Here aqre the affected ones; (from http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.action?sect ion=en_GB_Support&articlesection=2&article=1128075 116465&site=odw_en_GB)

F717
DSC-M1
DSC-P10
DSC-P12
DSC-P2
DSC-P31
DSC-P32
DSC-P51
DSC-P52
DSC-P7
DSC-P71
DSC-P72
DSC-P8
DSC-P92
DSC-T1
DSC-T3
DSC-T11
DSC-T33
DSC-U10
DSC-U20
DSC-U30
DSC-U40
DSC-U50
DSC-U60
DSC-V1
MVC-CD400
MVC-CD500
MVC-FD200

I'm not karma whoring, I actually own one of these pieces of shit (DSC-P72). I bought a replacement camera (non-sony) 2 weeks ago. Bastards. I'm still going to ensure they fix the piece of crap.

http://www2.sony.co.uk/feedback/feedbackform.asp

Sony has stated previoulsy that the PS3 will be able to run Linux and even Mac OS X from it's HDD. Plug in your USB keyboard and mouse, and although it doesn't have 1 or 2 gigs of ram like a modern PC, it has a processor that power wise crushes most modern PCs. I remember reading earlier tests from IBM that it had running at something comparable to 4 x 3.4 GHz Pentium 4s.

So if this dream does come true, the PS3 will be a _powerful_ open-source console/pc for $600. He's a link to an article, but it's in turn referencing an official Sony PDF that was released last year.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/08/04/sony.cpu.ti ger.compatible/
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/06/ 1820217
http://www.sony.co.uk/view/ShowArticle.action?arti cle=1121156666920

Now wouldn't that be cool? :)

Where are you looking? I've got three different players from three different product lines that all play MP3s.

My first searches mainly turned up stuff here. Maybe it's just a UK thing, but few of those listed players jump up and say MP3 support. Even in the details it is unclear if they do or they just transcode. Sony marketing just sucks if a NW-E505 does support MP3 but a NW-E507 doesn't (or does or might or whatever!)

Well sadly I can't seem to be able to email Sony by using their site - I've had a small try but it's a circular process whereby clicking on "contact us" takes me to a "select a category" page and clicking on a category takes me back to a Flash home page (Sorry I won't install Flash on my computers)

But a quick google did turn up the following feedback form which would appear to be for Sony UK

http://www2.sony.co.uk/feedback/feedbackform.asp

So if anoyone has a better contact email address for a Sony "bigwig" ? I think a few milllion irate emails from Slashdotters will show them what we think of their evil schemes.

Presonally I'm now boycotting all Sony products 'cause they're "Evil, incompetent, bastards".

Sony is expected to offer optional hard drives for the PS3 with potential memory capacity of 80 or 120 GB. It remains to be decided whether the standard version of the PS3 will come complete with a hard drive. The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger).

Just this very week they been advertising one of their products quite heavily on UK TV... the Sony DVD Handycam. I can't think of a better example where the man on the Clapham omnibus would reasonably expect to be allowed to use software to get at footage that he's shot, on (finalised) discs that he's bought, as he wants to.

When I were a lad, we had portables that could barely play Adventure let alone this new fangled Zork thing.

Kids these days don't know how good they have it.

Oh wait! Tt says 'incomparable listening experience'... (second picture on the site)

Sony's SCEE group.

One key stat from two years of games (the preso's copyright 2003): Average poly's/sec: 52,000 (max 145,000). (The specs talk about 60-75 million poly's/sec...)

Well, I've got a Sony CDX-R3300 in my car, which plays MP3 files off shiny round things.

It's a great unit; however, as it doesn't handle OGG files, I'm still using MP3 as my file format du jour.

As an aside, it's probably one of the best purchases I've ever made for my car (I'm no petrolhead - as far as I'm concerned it's a box that gets me from A to B). I have a two hour commute to work, and so having several albums encoded onto one CD is a godsend. Coupled with the steering wheel controls, I never have to take my eyes off the road to switch album, change to radio reception, switch to Radio 4 to get that annoying Chris Moyles twat off...

What apple really understand is how to use a huge marketing budget well. Over the years since the iPod came out, they've made sure they got the maximum press publicity, amounting to many thousands of mentions; they've made sure that lots of cool people have been seen in public wearing iPods, in pop videos, TV appearances and elsewhere; and they've run a huge, award-winning advertising campaign ("silhouette"), that is probably one of the most recognizable of recent times. Fair play to them. Nothing wrong with running a good marketing campaign.
Most of Apple's rivals, such as Creative, iRiver and Rio are relatively small companies that don't have the budget for that kind of thing. Some of them don't understand cool: the styling of the iRiver products is based on traditional electronic gizmo styling, and compared to an iPod looks very uncool (but they're good on features). On the other hand, I think Creative do understand cool, and so do new entrants Neuros. This can be seen in the efforts they've put into the styling of their latest products. However, a large percentage of cool comes from the buzz you can create around your product, and nothing to do with the physical product itself. In that event, a small company that understands cool is always at a disadvantage against a big company that understands cool.
Sony is a big company that understands cool. The big problem for them is that their record company arm doesn't want their gadget arm to support MP3. After a struggle, it seems the gadget arm has won, and they've just released their first MP3-compatible HD player. There's a rather negative review by someone called "mavis" on the web, but most of the reviews on Amazon UK, where the product has been sold for a couple of weeks now, are very positive. It comes on sale in the US in February, so by late Spring, we'll be sure to know if Sony have created an "iPod killer". (Realistically, the word "killer" is inappropriate, since people like Sony and Creative are competing for a share of a growing market, not to destroy the iPod.)
Toshiba is another big company that understands cool. They have a product the could probably challenge Apple (the Gigabeat) on features and style, but they seem to have done a deal whereby they only sell it in Japan. (Toshiba make hard disks for the iPod, so it makes sense).
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/12/preview_to sh_giga_60gb/
http://products.sony.co.uk/sony_nw-dh3.asp

You're talking fill rates while I'm talking the texturing and mapping abilities of the consoles.
What the hell do you think fill rate measures? It measures how many textured pixels the console can draw at once.

The PS2, in this regard, simply can't handle it.
Yes, the PS2 supports less special effects. But that doesn't change the fact that the PS2 has more computational capability.

Like the Xbox, though, the GC can use it's main system RAM for graphics as well.
So can the PS2. It's designed to be a streaming architecture.

The GC has a faster CPU
The PS2's CPU is faster. The "CPU" is the main CPU + VU0. Heck, VU0 by itself is more powerful than the core CPU in the gamecube.

faster GPU
The PS2's GPU has 1.2-2.4 gpixels/sec compared to the GC's 600 mpixels/sec. The pixels don't look as good, because the PS2 doesn't have the dedicated hardware to do extra special effects, but it has much more pixel throughput.

and more main system RAM
The main system ram on the GC is 24MB, and the PS2's main system memory is 32MB. The 16MB of A-RAM on the GC is so slow (81MB/sec), it's really only fast enough to use for storing fmv and audio.

only site that seems to magically have the numbers that Nintendo has never released to the press
The numbers are from the gamecube's SDK. I think ArsTechnica had them too. There is a PDF of part of the docs floating around on the internet, and there is a PDF of the PS2 manual as well.

And, as per your other comment: if you aren't a gamer, why are you so adamant about touting the PS2's raw power?
Because the original comment was about power, not about how games look.

It's been shown that the PS2 is the WEAKEST console in this gen many times over.
The main cause of performance problems is underutilization of the hardware. An SCEE study showed that most games only utilizes 8% of VU0. That's wasting a huge fraction of the console's power.
Good study of PS2's performance.

A better development kit isn't going to fix that. PS2 developers can code in C++ and a higher level graphic sdk, but that isn't going to get them anywhere near good performance.
The problem is the very ambitious architecture of the PS2. The GS (graphic synthesizer) got just 4mb of very fast ram. While that enabled Sony to have extremely high theoretical fill rate by embeding the RAM into the GS and connecting it with a 2560-Bit bus, it is also not nearly enough to store all the textures and the framebuffer. That results in the PS2 having to spend a lot of time transfering textures between GS and regular RAM. Because changing out the texture takes a lot of time, you need to order your triangles in a way that minimizes the texture changes, which is a lot of trouble and hurts performance for sure. The PS2 EE (the main CPU) also got just 16kb cache, which is clearly not enough. Memory access to stuff not in the cache is extremely expensive and the Rambus RAM with its high-bandwidth but also high-latency access profile isn't going to help. Because of that a PS2 coder needs to spend a lot of time on optimizing algorithms for ordered local data access and rewriting stuff in assembler to be able to fit the whole routine into the cache.

A interessting document from Sony about PS2 performance is here: (PDF only sorry)
http://www.scee.sony.co.uk/sceesite/files/presenta tions/PSP/HowFarHaveWeGot.pdf
While marketing said 66 million polys/second, even after all these years the fastest real world Sony seems to know about is 125k polys @ 60 Hz, which translates into 7.5 million polys/second while the average recent game seems to do just 3 million polys/s
Better SDKs aren't able to help here. The problem are hardware limitations. And while the hard-to-optimize-for design will sure enable programmers to squeeze out quite a bit of additional performance, but it will never be able to reach the real-world performance of XBox and Gamecube.
And Sony even has better DevKits now, but as you can see their feature isn't C++ or something similiar to DirectX but instead tools to analyse how the cpus is stalled by cache misses etc.
Imho the PS2 is similiar in design to the first Pentium 4, ambitious, marketing-driven design with very high theoretical peak performance but low real world performance.
BTW: Gamecubes marketing is exactly the opposite, Nintendo claimed 7-12 million polys/second while one of their launch games 'Rogue Leader' was pushing 15 million polys/second in some scenes.

anyone remember the Sony Yazoo (or whatever it was called) for the PSX - a home development system

It was called Net Yaroze, and it wasn't a true homebrew system, because only other people with a Net Yaroze devkit could play the games you made. I think one or two pro PSX developers honed their skills on Yaroze, tho', so while you couldn't release the software, you could at least use it for demos in a job interview.

IMHO it would be possible to match, if not improve on the GBA SP battery life of 10 hours.

Personally, I find Sony have the nicest remote to put on your coffee table. Slim, pretty, learning, easy to set up. Mini LCD display is customisable. No combination buttons, but that's not a feature I cry over. Take a look at the RMVZ950T

They're also screwing up the market for really nice hardware like this. Which is a shame, too, as I was thinking of buying one.

I'm not American (I'm English and Australian) and from what I see available to me all the stuff I have is (or possibly was, in case of the camera which is a bit old now, it's a DSC-P1) pretty close to being the best I could buy. I have this Network Walkman and the PCG-GRX316MP as my Vaio, both about a month old now.

Perhaps you have some alternate suggestions?

Sony have been producing Picturebooks with Bluetooth support for many months. They run Windows XP, are a fraction of the size of an I-Book, I'd even say they look better :)

I've seen a couple of Sony widescreen (anologue) PAL+ sets from about 1995, they were pretty smart, however as you said, it really ate up the spectrum. And the amorphic cropping didn#t look too smart when a standard PAL 4:3 channel was displayed.

The modern Sony WEGA 16:9 sets with intergrated digital tuners look way smoother, and the Dolby surrond beats the pants of NICAM. PAL+ obviously didn't have DigitalText either, but I think there was an incremental update to the old Teletext standard.

The Japanese HDTV standard from the early 90's was originally anologue just like PAL+, it flopped and a bunch of government back research went down the pan. However, they've seen sense and now use MPEG2 based broadcasts, but the US and Japan aren't using the COFDM encoding scheme thought because of the spectrum issues, IBOC sounds good, if the encoding actually works.

Digital WideScreen TV's in the UK have a smartcard slot in the set like the ones found in DVB satellite recievers, even if you don't want to subscribe to an OnDigital (like cable or satellite, but just thru an ariel), you still need a smartcard to watch the free-to-air BBC channels.

The reason is to enforce licensing, however the SmartCard issued will only work with the transmitter in your area, so say you moved from Birmingham to London... the smartcard would stop working :/

The Sony WEGA DTV sets also have a PCMCIA slot :) neat.