Slashdot Mirror
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.
4) Just like before because piracy is not that big of a problem and only gets pointed at to tell shareholders "with the right DRM we'll see MASSIVE GROWTH and be rich!"
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Memory Stick = Sony's proprietary Flash-type media.
How is Memory Stick more proprietary than SD? Both are patented, and both include DRM (that next to nothing actually uses).
I think these go up to 16GiB now.
In practice, 16 GB stick holds 16 GB of data. About 7% of the sectors (which happens to equal the difference between a GB and a GiB) are reserved as spares to replace sectors that are defective at manufacturing or have been erased too much.