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Why the Sony PSP Had To "Go"
We recently discussed the release of the PSP Go, which drew criticism for many design choices that were of dubious value to consumers. Now, Phaethon360 sends in a story about why Sony felt the need to improve upon the old PSP. "As a format, the UMD was holding the entire platform back. Few people (if anyone) bought into the UMD movie hype Sony attempted to thrust back in 2005. Very soon after that, people realized they could rip their DVDs to a memory stick with the same quality. It's ironic how, as the price of Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo dropped and size increased, PSP UMD sales decreased along with it. It doesn't take too many Howard Stringers to figure out what the problem was." Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time. They cited "legal and technical issues" for not supporting the transfer of UMD games onto the PSP Go; undoubtedly they couldn't find a way to keep pirated games from being copied.
With hard copy disc based games you can sell them on to friends or a shop once you're done. A bit more difficult with a download - people will just want it for free and what shop will buy a memory stick off you that may or may not work and may or may not have viruses etc embedded on it?
I've a cracked PSP & can honestly say I've never pirated a single PSP UMD game. I do however have emulators & ROMs on it for every NES, SNES, Gameboy, SMS & Genesis game I've ever owned. As well as all of my PS1 games which run natively after a little tweaking. I also have PSP versions of Tyrian, Quake & a E-Book reader on there.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Indeed, Sony was complaining of rampant PSP piracy for quite some time.
With games, they arguably have a fair point.
With movies ripped from DVD... WTF, Sony? Did you really think that people would buy the same movie on both DVD and UMD? Seriously? Fire the moron who thought that would fly.
People bought CDs of music they already had on vinyl or cassette or what-have-you because they had noticeably better quality (don't give me that vinyl-beats-CD crap, which even if it did hold true on a virgin record, doesn't once a diamond needle has ripped down all those those nice soft grooves). Once you talk about the same quality in 20 different physical formats, however, don't expect people to subsidize you for the rest of eternity rebuying your existing library in incrementally better formats.
Both the Wii and DS are far more piracy ridden, and simpler to mod to allow copied games. I can't think why both of these are the #1 sellers by large margins in consoles and portables... It's certainly not the quality of titles. Just maybe people buy them knowing they have access to a huge library knowing they won't have to buy?
> on a console where they are locked up tighter than a stereotypical tight-ass' asshole.
"tighter than ..."? What console's DRM hasn't been broken, except for maybe the PS3 (IBM did the security there, I think)?
This makes no sense. Think about it. Seriously, two-second consideration here. First, this is a platform based solely on downloadable games. If they have problems with piracy, especially rampant piracy cutting into game sales, it makes no sense to develop this platform. So either they have means to prevent it, or it doesn't matter because it applies to everything else on the platform. Second, since it either exists or doesn't matter, it can't be that particularly difficult to have someone insert a UMD into their old PSP, verify a signature, then provide a downloadable version with whatever anti-piracy measures are in place.
Really this almost certainly comes down to licensing and legal issues, who's allowed to distribute and how. Tracking down and getting agreements from every single publisher for all titles would definitely be a bit of a legal and technical issue.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Sure it is. You would expect someone referencing the song to know who sings/wrote it. In this case, they did not. There is a difference between what one would expect and what actually happened. That IS dramatic/situational irony.
You not knowing that is also situationally ironic, because when complaining about whether or not something is ironic, you should know the various accepted definitions of irony and have a grasp of what situations can fulfill those definitions. In this case, you did not, which led to another difference between what one would expect (your competence) and reality (the complete lack thereof).
Just because you don't like the truth, does not make it false.
It's madness no such device exists since without it (or a robust universal exchange program) Sony has just pissed off millions of potential customers. Who exactly is going to pay more money for a device that is essentially crippled? The only other way I can see a UMD-less working in the short term is if it were packed with phone functionality (and camera) and its cost was then subsidized by the phone networks.
Not to start this same argument all over again, but the diamond needle only rips down all those those nice soft grooves if you have a cheap turntable with a 25 gram weight on that stylus. Earlier turntables and records were even worse; the old shellack platters wore out quickly. But I have decades-old LPs you would think were virgin, played on a 1/2 gram pressure.
If the title originally came out in analog, the LP will sound better than the CD (again, given a good enough turntable. One of digital's advantages is except for speakers, more money doesn't buy better sound). If it was originally mastered digitally, the CD will sound better than the LP.
Any time you mix analog with digital you get the worst of both worlds, with the advantages of neither. Many titles that originally were LP will have the CD sound better than the LP, because the LP was digitally mastered. Don't bother buying the LP version of any new music, because the new music will have been mastered digitally.
Free Martian Whores!
South Park is computer generated. Some of the shorts they made (and maybe the pilot episode?) were done on construction paper but every episode since has been generated on computers.
And yeah, South Park rocks. I love when they do political commentary. They even spawned a movement of sorts. To quote Stone, "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Nintendo said, repeatably, the DS was not a replacement for the GBA, they will exist concurrently and continue to have game developed on them. One year later, the GBA was dead. I can see Sony completely killing the "old" PSP model in favor of the 100% Sony controlled PSP Go, even if it is an utter failure. They will take my PSP-2001 from my old dead hands.
You are supposed to read into it. The intention was to point out that Sony's attempt to increase sales by reducing the price of 1 item, correlated with reduced sales of another item. By referring to it as irony, there is an implied causation as well as correlation.
The irony being Sonys efforts had an opposite in meaning effect for them.
That holds up with your definition as well - just have to read backwards from the irony, rather than imply a mistake was made when it isn't spelled out for you.
Compact Flash is similarly much more expensive than SD. I have no idea why Canon stuck to CF for their EOS 400D camera, years after SD "won" the format war (for phones/cameras etc).
Speed, in a word. In my experience, with a good reader/writer, CF cards are much faster than SD cards. SD is great for cameras which were designed with a priority on small form factor, but it would be absurd to use it in a full size SLR body--especially one that is expected to generate 10 megapixel raw files--It's important to empty the buffer to storage quickly, and equally important download hundreds of raw files quickly.
The caveat I understand is that some newer SD interfaces can rival CF read/write speeds, but the cards are just as expensive as the equivalent CF card, and this generation of cameras aren't known to support those speeds anyway. Secondly, they don't want to totally re-engineer their camera bodies between the professional and pro-consumer lines, and bluntly, professionals aren't likely to accept a non-CF storage medium at this moment. I know I wouldn't.
The damn things would be way too easy to lose, are too fragile to swap out regularly--and it wouldn't matter if they made them in 16 or 32GB+ sizes. I will NEVER fill up a 16GB+ drive with an important photo shoot, until I get a camera which makes 16GB seem small. It only makes it too easy to lose the entire shoot should a drive succumb to some kind of fault. I'll happily swap out a few 4 or 6GB cards if I need that much. If something happens to one card, I'll probably still have my ass covered.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The truth is probably somewhere in between. Unless Sony gets its act together, it is destined to exit the hardware business and become a pure media conglomerate. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.
It took the Japanese 30 years to dominate the US Auto industry despite the fact that year in / year out they were delivering significantly better value to the consumer. It happened, but not overnight because big brands have a tremendous amount of momentum. It takes the combination of HUGE management mistakes over LONG amounts of time to kill dominant companies. Few people seem to remember these days when GM had like 70% market share and was the envy of the world.