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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.
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.
I'm not sure how UMD-to-flash transfer helps people copy pirated games. I mean, the pirated games are disk images on flash memory. An actual physical UMD isn't involved.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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 think you may be confusing the media for the PSP.
UMD = Little bitty optical disc in a protective case. Not writable. I think they can hold 1.4GiB of data.
Memory Stick = Sony's proprietary Flash-type media. I think these go up to 16GiB now.
There is a war going on for your mind.
No, it's not.
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Sony can only blame itself for the failure of UMD movies. When the PSP first came out I was looking forward to having portable movies, but they cost significantly more than DVD's even though they were lower quality and could only be viewed on one device (the PSP 1000 had no video out), it was no wonder they didn't sell.
Personally, I think all films should be made as puppet shows but with stunning plots. People who do not like puppet shows with stunning plots are uneducated heathens.
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.
Lolwut? The Wii sold almost entirely on stuff like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, neither of which is vulnerable to piracy and both reach out to many people who were not interested in gaming before. IF you're seriously going to argue that the DS has no good games I can only stare in disbelief.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Minidiscs are still extremely popular here in Japan. I don't really understand why, but virtually everybody I know has a minidisc system. I sometimes think Sony lives in a Japan-centric bubble. They make decisions based on what they can get away with in Japan (quite a lot) and figure it will work for the rest of the world. It really doesn't. Slowly, though, I see things changing. The high school students I teach here are moving away from Sony as far as I can tell. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years Sony collapses based on their inability to see reality.
> 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)?
Nonsense.
Piracy is rampant and easy on the PSP at present, but not everyone does it.
I use hacked firmware on my PSP, sure, because I rip my games to MemStick. I hate having to carry the UMDs around, loading times improve and the battery life is better. I also have a genesis emulator on their and some ROMS of games I used to own as a kid. That may or may not be considered piracy I guess.
But I still pay for games and will continue to do so. I will also crack the Go if I ever get one because you can bet your ass that there won't be a mechanism to resell games you've bought, plus I would feel the moral right to transfer my current UMD based games.
Many people (including you apparently) don't get the fact that the PSPGo is not meant to be a replacement for the PSP-3000. The UMD-friendly PSP will still be available after the PSPGo's launch, so the comparison with the PS3 is not really relevant
Actually Sony are quite permissive when it comes to user control of downloaded content. You can install content you've purchased on up to five PS3's and every user account, whether on PSN or not, can use any content downloaded by another account on the same PS3.
It's pretty sad when the indoctrination has reached even /. and we think that it's "quite permissive" for a company to allow you to use the content you purchased on devices that you own. How nice of them to be that "permissive".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.