Inflated prices. Right. A $250 jump from the same CPU/peripheral spec Dell Inspiron 530s, built on desktop components, as a baseline Mac Mini (plus a bigger hard drive to *try* to catch up,) which is built on miniaturized laptop components (aside from the RAM.)
It's not more expensive because it has a fancy logo on it. It's more expensive because IT USES MORE EXPENSIVE PARTS. Gripe about the design decisions all you'd like, but don't just throw out claims that their prices are somehow inflated.
(The MacBook as compared to the consumer-level Dell laptops also fall well within reason, with the Dells costing about $60 less for a bigger screen and fewer pixels-per-inch, another factor in the cost of a laptop.)
My theory from day one? The Wii-mote *should* have memory, to store the equivalent of your DS Wi-Fi Connection ID. That way, you visit your friend, who also has a Wii, but you bring your own controller, bringing over your scores, records, preferences, and (in Smash Bros.,) your automated handicaps. You don't need to store everything, either, just the ID, which would pull down the relevant info from WiiConnect.
Now, since it turns out that the controller does have the memory, I can only hope that my guess was right. (Mind you, the BT address would also be good enough, but maybe the extra space would also be used for caching some of the profile data.)
Weird Al was going to sell CDs regardless. People like album art, and hate DRM, at least when they understand what it does to them.
All of those 99-cent songs and $11.88 albums from iTunes are just gravy. He's making less per song, but he's selling MORE SONGS. The overhead is removed, some of the savings are passed on to the customer, and his label reaps the benefits. However, at the end of the day, Weird Al's still getting paid, and a lot of people are using iTunes at 99 cents per song who would have otherwise used Kazaa, Limewire, etc., for FREE. Even 100% of nothing is still nothing, and that's all the artists were seeing beforehand.
We always bitch about how broken the music industry is, and how they can't adapt to a global data distribution network where their content can be freely replicated. It sounds like they're adapting just fine. Why not ask the big questions? How many more fans does Weird Al reach this way? What's the breakdown of CD vs. iTunes sales? Sales of singles? As it stands, the minor reduction in profits via iTunes is a meaningless statistic.
So, it has a larger screen, a larger case, and a slower CPU. It is larger in every dimension than the laptop in question, and weighs 6.18 lbs, as compared to the MacBook's 5.6.
Miniaturization costs money. Faster CPUs cost more. And your numbers aren't valid, to boot. The $996 configuration has a 60GB drive and 512 MB of RAM. To bring it up to the configuration that you've mentioned, along with playing catchup on the CPU to the MacBook's 1.83 GHz, raises the price to $1,271. For $22 less, I get that same system, but smaller, and I can choose to go between MacOS and Windows.
If you're going to make a comparison, some level of fairness should be in order.
I'm referring to legitimate uses, though. If we want to talk about hacking the system, then yes, the PS2 and the XBox have a lot of amazing functionality.
As for the disc read error, it's a console. If you open it, you lose any support options. If you don't, you pay out the nose for repairs, or you buy a new one. Neither of those options really appeals to me.
Yeah, but the Xbox at least got a Media Center Extender option and had Live.
The PS2 phased out the IEEE 1394 ports, and the hard drive/LAN adapter was used for... Final Fantasy XI?
There's the problem. MS actually figured out how to sell more than just a console, Nintendo figured out how to make a profit selling just a console, and Sony... hyped up a piece of crap which was crippled more and more with each hardware revision.
And let's not talk about how many of those 100 million shipped PS2's were replacements for burnt-out DVD drives.
The voicemail came from within Vonage's own system. Check your voicemail from the web, and it'll point that out.
Granted, it might've made much more sense to have run everything through the vonage.com domain, but anyone who's sending a message from within the system probably has enough access to screw with my account already.
(On top of that, one the front page, they ask you to log in with your IPO site credentials, not your Vonage user account credentials. You don't get to set up a login on vonageipo.com until you tell them your account number and email address. I think you're jumping the gun by just a bit.)
Technically, I don't think that this falls under criminal law. That doesn't make it right, nor does it make said actions legal, but it doesn't make them crimes, either. Of course, the RIAA can go about letting you think that it's a crime, since that leads to more settlements, and the cost of the settlement is often lower than the legal fees involved in one's defense.
It's also unclear if the author was actually distributing copyrighted material, or merely downloading it. There's a reason that cops will arrest the person selling bootleg DVDs and CDs on the street, but not the person buying said bootlegs. Downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder isn't victimless, but it's in the area of lawsuits, and not handcuffs. At the same time, the RIAA has to take into consideration the idea that their actions are quite questionable, aren't winning them any new customers, and amount to little more than extortion. At what point do we see a massive class-action countersuit for barratry?
He should have prepared a stage3 tarball from a similar server. In a redundant environment, this should be easy, since he'd just dupe it all from the existing box. Heck, if the systems have identical hardware, then you'd just clone the entire install, change the hostname, and walk away. At worst, that's a couple of hours, though if you've got a small base install, a fast disk array, and GigE (hell, pick two of the three,) you can wrap it up in half that time.
Even if this isn't an option, why isn't he bootstrapping with distcc, using Catalyst, or otherwise distributing/pre-building for the setup?
At any rate, a halfway decent workstation can go from stage1 to GUI with OO.org and all the crap in between in about 24 hours, if you know what you're doing, and that's with one CPU. Sure, that's a long wait, but that's what a home user might expect. For production use, it should never take that long. The hardware is simply far too unlikely to be that slow.
How does this indicate an inability to cope with the hacker mentality? Really, if you're such hot shit, then you'll get 10.4.n running on a beige box. Then 10.5. Then 10.6, and so on. Now they've decided that doing this can hurt them, mostly because it will. Their business model relies on a constant upgrade cycle, and the sales of hardware, not just an OS.
It's not our job to defend that business model, of course, but it is ours to accept what we're buying at face value. Is Apple going to sue you for dicking around with the CD that you paid for? Probably not. It's pointless, for one, since there's no money in it for them. However, if Michael Dell looks up one day, sees that Apple is taking the market by storm, and finds out that OS X is beige-box *friendly,* you'd better believe that we'll see a flood of OS X Optiplexes and Inspirons available direct from Dell. As it stands, however, these systems are cut off from a reliable upgrade path, and you give up any chance at getting official support. For a hacker, this isn't a big deal. We can sacrifice stability for geek cred. For Apple, that's marketing suicide. OS X can't run on every possible combination of hardware out there, simply because Apple can't afford to maintain that kind of compatibility matrix. Since OS X is synonymous with the Mac, if one seems weak, the other gets dragged down as a result.
I'm not saying that Apple is to be pitied here. I just fail to see how it's relevant. They're free to put whatever they want on their OS discs, and list a preferred method of usage. If you diverge from that, then your installation is an outlier, and will be treated accordingly. I think we're in agreement on this.
In the end, it's a pretty well known fact that OS X is meant to install solely on Apple hardware. Any method which they use to enforce this is perfectly fair so long as they don't start frying unauthorized hardware. At the same time, any method which *you* use to install the damned thing is equally legitimate, so long as you don't start illegally distributing it. You paid for your copy, and your license, and the appropriate fair use and backup clauses attached to that. You certainly should have every right to do whatever you want to your own single system with that disc, and I'd wager that while Apple isn't going to make it easy to ignore their recommendations, they're not going to send the hounds after you, either.
Well, the inherent spirit seems to lean more towards sharing, rather than selling, at least when it comes to code and binaries. That's a matter of opinion, at any rate.
That said, Apple's action in this case does seem to stick to that spirit. Not to mention, it makes them look good, and hands off shiny NEW development systems to the people most likely to give even more time to the project.
The real nice part, at any rate, is that these guys aren't being compensated, but are actually rewarded for work which they want to do. That's rare in this day and age, and even if Apple is doing this to serve their own needs, it's still great for the guys donating the time.
As I recall, the GBA, while equipped with a z80, also had enough power to emulate a GBC, and someone wrote an emulator for that purpose. It's a lot easier to slap all the GBC games on one GBA Flashcart and carry them than keep track of your older carts.::Googling...::
Ah, here. http://www.gbafan.com/game_boy.html There's a list of GB emulators, although proper GBC support may not be there. It's as good a start as I've got, though.
Within 10 days, someone will install Windows AND Linux on the Macintel.
However, the Xbox is basically a PC, right? Why hasn't anyone made a PC run the Xbox OS so that they can play the games without buying the system?
(Hint: It's hard to port closed-source software to similar platforms. Mac OS X may have an Open core in Darwin, but the parts that make it a Mac aren't even remotely open.)
PPC970 Macs use Hypertransport, Intel x86 systems (probably) do not. There's a whole bunch of glue between the CPU, the RAM, the PCI bus, and the various interfaces that might as well be completely alien between your Wintel box and your modern Mac.
While the Mac shares a common expansion bus, RAM spec, and disk interface with many modern PCs, in reality, the Mac is closer to an Athlon 64 based system than an Intel PC.
Drop in an Apple-manufactured BIOS, since they're dropping OpenFirmware, eliminate any lingering ISA cruft, and you end up with a system that isn't a PC. Heck, dropping the BIOS means that certain assumptions go right out the window in terms of writable address ranges, making it a cinch to make OS X/x86 locked into Apple-manufactured platforms, copyright-infringing motherboards, and a theoretical x86 version of MacOnLinux, which is also probably going to raise some questions over at Apple.
I doubt anyone's going to bother making it run natively on their beige box.
What they *might* do, though, and this seems far easier, in a sense, is get an x86 version of MacOnLinux going, and install Leopard on THAT. Why try to hack a closed-source system to fit in an Apple-designed x86 box (OpenFirmware, custom bridges, etc.) when you can just lie to the OS about the underlying components just enough to make it all work?
The big problem here, of course, is that you'd still need an Intel chip, at least until AMD can fully implement Intel's additional instruction sets, such as SSE2 and any of its successors, properly.
Yeah, the standby mode is pretty much required, and it doesn't help when you're swapping games, or loading up new levels.
Honestly? I think that Lumines is the only PSP game to get it *right.* Don't push tons of polygons, don't load up massive tracks, just get a simple game that gets yanked off the disc in the background, and keep those loading messages to a minimum. If I'm consistently in standby mode, it's just about perfect for Lumines.
Yes? Then of course you don't want a Micro. The only real draw is the screen, unless you feel that you'd be happier with a smaller GBA.
No? Well, here's the top of the line model. Properly backlit screen, fits in your pocket, plays all your favorite games. If you don't want it now, you probably never did, and therefore, Nintendo hasn't lost anything.
The thing that people forget is that there's room for more than one console these days. Many people have at least two of the three big consoles. The GBA is still the bridge system to the Gamecube, as the DS can't connect to it. And yes, the Gamecube can't pump as many texturemapped polys per second. Yes, Gamecube discs hold less data than the competition. Yes, you might lose out on some fancy visual effects.
However, the one thing that Nintendo tends to get right is the biggest one. The games are fun. They take a known formula, update it for the new console, and knock it out of the park. Then they take something completely off the wall, like Pikmin, and somehow manage to get people addicted to it. And the Gamecube is the system people prefer to bring over to a friend's place, usually for Smash Brothers, sometimes for Mario Party. Four players, one system, and fun games.
Sure, the PS2 probably has a bigger library. Sure, the Xbox has those edgier, bloodier games. But somehow, too many of them just aren't fun, and that keeps those games from leading console sales. Aside from the N64, Nintendo's done a pretty impressive job of releasing systems with tons of great games, and that's really what keeps them going. A bit of expertise in delivering the minimum hardware in the optimum form factor doesn't seem to hurt, either.
And really, the Game Boy micro is no worse than the Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light (only in Japan, I think,) and Game Boy Color. Three functionally identical handhelds, and then one with a minor upgrade and a non-backlit color screen. Not very exciting, but enough of a change to get new customers, as well as getting a few sales from people who just wanted a more compact system. They don't have to be groundbreaking, they just have to impress those people who wanted a handheld that they could carry around in a pocket or a purse.
Two people with no prior console ownership buying an overpriced gimmicky handheld with games which have nothing to do with portable gaming? Yeah, Nintendo's really crying over that lost revenue.
Newsflash: They also don't have an NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, any form of a Game Boy, or a DS. As far as Nintendo's concerned, they're either small children with very deep pockets, or people who probably weren't buying a game system in the first place.
They still have a commanding lead, as the opposition is new to the market, has no previously existing game library to fall back to, and designed a system focused on delivering the complete home console experience to your handheld, slow loading times and all. (Really, look at Wipeout. It's abysmally slow to load tracks, and that's just suicide on a handheld.)
Sure, I have a PSP. I even play games on it. But it feels more like I bought Lumines, and a PSP for it, than when I bought my GBA, and Castlevania, Metroid, and a few other titles for that. The handheld experience I'm used to, including a lightning-fast startup and seconds-to-gameplay, just aren't there, and as a result, it's going to take some truly spectacular titles to make the whole thing worth the wait between levels.
Emulating a 700MHz x86 shouldn't be too hard for a decently featured PPC970 variant.
In addition, if all the XBox software was built against DirectX, the emulator should be able to handle any graphics issues between ATI and Nvidia in software. I'd expect the games to look a little different, sure, but I can't imagine any major loss in functionality.
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Thank God I'm not alone. 20 years down the line, we'll all be living under a bridge, chanting "God, Country, and the 12" Powerbook!"
Okay, maybe that makes us crazy, but hey, the 12" PB was just *that* good.
Inflated prices. Right. A $250 jump from the same CPU/peripheral spec Dell Inspiron 530s, built on desktop components, as a baseline Mac Mini (plus a bigger hard drive to *try* to catch up,) which is built on miniaturized laptop components (aside from the RAM.)
It's not more expensive because it has a fancy logo on it. It's more expensive because IT USES MORE EXPENSIVE PARTS. Gripe about the design decisions all you'd like, but don't just throw out claims that their prices are somehow inflated.
(The MacBook as compared to the consumer-level Dell laptops also fall well within reason, with the Dells costing about $60 less for a bigger screen and fewer pixels-per-inch, another factor in the cost of a laptop.)
If the end result of DRM was that I'd have a live band following me at all times, I'd be all for it.
Live beneath the sea, Homer? That's your solution to everything!
My theory from day one? The Wii-mote *should* have memory, to store the equivalent of your DS Wi-Fi Connection ID. That way, you visit your friend, who also has a Wii, but you bring your own controller, bringing over your scores, records, preferences, and (in Smash Bros.,) your automated handicaps. You don't need to store everything, either, just the ID, which would pull down the relevant info from WiiConnect.
Now, since it turns out that the controller does have the memory, I can only hope that my guess was right. (Mind you, the BT address would also be good enough, but maybe the extra space would also be used for caching some of the profile data.)
It's a volume play.
Weird Al was going to sell CDs regardless. People like album art, and hate DRM, at least when they understand what it does to them.
All of those 99-cent songs and $11.88 albums from iTunes are just gravy. He's making less per song, but he's selling MORE SONGS. The overhead is removed, some of the savings are passed on to the customer, and his label reaps the benefits. However, at the end of the day, Weird Al's still getting paid, and a lot of people are using iTunes at 99 cents per song who would have otherwise used Kazaa, Limewire, etc., for FREE. Even 100% of nothing is still nothing, and that's all the artists were seeing beforehand.
We always bitch about how broken the music industry is, and how they can't adapt to a global data distribution network where their content can be freely replicated. It sounds like they're adapting just fine. Why not ask the big questions? How many more fans does Weird Al reach this way? What's the breakdown of CD vs. iTunes sales? Sales of singles? As it stands, the minor reduction in profits via iTunes is a meaningless statistic.
So, it has a larger screen, a larger case, and a slower CPU. It is larger in every dimension than the laptop in question, and weighs 6.18 lbs, as compared to the MacBook's 5.6.
Miniaturization costs money. Faster CPUs cost more. And your numbers aren't valid, to boot. The $996 configuration has a 60GB drive and 512 MB of RAM. To bring it up to the configuration that you've mentioned, along with playing catchup on the CPU to the MacBook's 1.83 GHz, raises the price to $1,271. For $22 less, I get that same system, but smaller, and I can choose to go between MacOS and Windows.
If you're going to make a comparison, some level of fairness should be in order.
I'm referring to legitimate uses, though. If we want to talk about hacking the system, then yes, the PS2 and the XBox have a lot of amazing functionality.
As for the disc read error, it's a console. If you open it, you lose any support options. If you don't, you pay out the nose for repairs, or you buy a new one. Neither of those options really appeals to me.
Yeah, but the Xbox at least got a Media Center Extender option and had Live.
The PS2 phased out the IEEE 1394 ports, and the hard drive/LAN adapter was used for... Final Fantasy XI?
There's the problem. MS actually figured out how to sell more than just a console, Nintendo figured out how to make a profit selling just a console, and Sony... hyped up a piece of crap which was crippled more and more with each hardware revision.
And let's not talk about how many of those 100 million shipped PS2's were replacements for burnt-out DVD drives.
The voicemail came from within Vonage's own system. Check your voicemail from the web, and it'll point that out.
Granted, it might've made much more sense to have run everything through the vonage.com domain, but anyone who's sending a message from within the system probably has enough access to screw with my account already.
(On top of that, one the front page, they ask you to log in with your IPO site credentials, not your Vonage user account credentials. You don't get to set up a login on vonageipo.com until you tell them your account number and email address. I think you're jumping the gun by just a bit.)
Technically, I don't think that this falls under criminal law. That doesn't make it right, nor does it make said actions legal, but it doesn't make them crimes, either. Of course, the RIAA can go about letting you think that it's a crime, since that leads to more settlements, and the cost of the settlement is often lower than the legal fees involved in one's defense.
It's also unclear if the author was actually distributing copyrighted material, or merely downloading it. There's a reason that cops will arrest the person selling bootleg DVDs and CDs on the street, but not the person buying said bootlegs. Downloading music without the permission of the copyright holder isn't victimless, but it's in the area of lawsuits, and not handcuffs. At the same time, the RIAA has to take into consideration the idea that their actions are quite questionable, aren't winning them any new customers, and amount to little more than extortion. At what point do we see a massive class-action countersuit for barratry?
That gentoo admin isn't very good, then.
He should have prepared a stage3 tarball from a similar server. In a redundant environment, this should be easy, since he'd just dupe it all from the existing box. Heck, if the systems have identical hardware, then you'd just clone the entire install, change the hostname, and walk away. At worst, that's a couple of hours, though if you've got a small base install, a fast disk array, and GigE (hell, pick two of the three,) you can wrap it up in half that time.
Even if this isn't an option, why isn't he bootstrapping with distcc, using Catalyst, or otherwise distributing/pre-building for the setup?
At any rate, a halfway decent workstation can go from stage1 to GUI with OO.org and all the crap in between in about 24 hours, if you know what you're doing, and that's with one CPU. Sure, that's a long wait, but that's what a home user might expect. For production use, it should never take that long. The hardware is simply far too unlikely to be that slow.
How does this indicate an inability to cope with the hacker mentality? Really, if you're such hot shit, then you'll get 10.4.n running on a beige box. Then 10.5. Then 10.6, and so on. Now they've decided that doing this can hurt them, mostly because it will. Their business model relies on a constant upgrade cycle, and the sales of hardware, not just an OS.
It's not our job to defend that business model, of course, but it is ours to accept what we're buying at face value. Is Apple going to sue you for dicking around with the CD that you paid for? Probably not. It's pointless, for one, since there's no money in it for them. However, if Michael Dell looks up one day, sees that Apple is taking the market by storm, and finds out that OS X is beige-box *friendly,* you'd better believe that we'll see a flood of OS X Optiplexes and Inspirons available direct from Dell. As it stands, however, these systems are cut off from a reliable upgrade path, and you give up any chance at getting official support. For a hacker, this isn't a big deal. We can sacrifice stability for geek cred. For Apple, that's marketing suicide. OS X can't run on every possible combination of hardware out there, simply because Apple can't afford to maintain that kind of compatibility matrix. Since OS X is synonymous with the Mac, if one seems weak, the other gets dragged down as a result.
I'm not saying that Apple is to be pitied here. I just fail to see how it's relevant. They're free to put whatever they want on their OS discs, and list a preferred method of usage. If you diverge from that, then your installation is an outlier, and will be treated accordingly. I think we're in agreement on this.
In the end, it's a pretty well known fact that OS X is meant to install solely on Apple hardware. Any method which they use to enforce this is perfectly fair so long as they don't start frying unauthorized hardware. At the same time, any method which *you* use to install the damned thing is equally legitimate, so long as you don't start illegally distributing it. You paid for your copy, and your license, and the appropriate fair use and backup clauses attached to that. You certainly should have every right to do whatever you want to your own single system with that disc, and I'd wager that while Apple isn't going to make it easy to ignore their recommendations, they're not going to send the hounds after you, either.
Well, the inherent spirit seems to lean more towards sharing, rather than selling, at least when it comes to code and binaries. That's a matter of opinion, at any rate.
That said, Apple's action in this case does seem to stick to that spirit. Not to mention, it makes them look good, and hands off shiny NEW development systems to the people most likely to give even more time to the project.
The real nice part, at any rate, is that these guys aren't being compensated, but are actually rewarded for work which they want to do. That's rare in this day and age, and even if Apple is doing this to serve their own needs, it's still great for the guys donating the time.
RingDev wouldn't know. He misspelled "neighbour."
Why not transcode down to a lossy format for the iPod? You're already sucking up 200GB, what's 50 or 60 more?
Lossless is great for home, backups, and so on. For portability, MP3/AAC/Vorbis is usually acceptable.
Wake me up when someone converts a PSP keyboard to work on a PC. Preferably via the PS/2 port.
(All I want is a tiny, cheap keyboard for a wearable computer. Is that too much to ask for?)
As I recall, the GBA, while equipped with a z80, also had enough power to emulate a GBC, and someone wrote an emulator for that purpose. It's a lot easier to slap all the GBC games on one GBA Flashcart and carry them than keep track of your older carts. ::Googling...::
Ah, here. http://www.gbafan.com/game_boy.html
There's a list of GB emulators, although proper GBC support may not be there. It's as good a start as I've got, though.
You've got it backwards.
Within 10 days, someone will install Windows AND Linux on the Macintel.
However, the Xbox is basically a PC, right? Why hasn't anyone made a PC run the Xbox OS so that they can play the games without buying the system?
(Hint: It's hard to port closed-source software to similar platforms. Mac OS X may have an Open core in Darwin, but the parts that make it a Mac aren't even remotely open.)
PPC970 Macs use Hypertransport, Intel x86 systems (probably) do not. There's a whole bunch of glue between the CPU, the RAM, the PCI bus, and the various interfaces that might as well be completely alien between your Wintel box and your modern Mac.
While the Mac shares a common expansion bus, RAM spec, and disk interface with many modern PCs, in reality, the Mac is closer to an Athlon 64 based system than an Intel PC.
Drop in an Apple-manufactured BIOS, since they're dropping OpenFirmware, eliminate any lingering ISA cruft, and you end up with a system that isn't a PC. Heck, dropping the BIOS means that certain assumptions go right out the window in terms of writable address ranges, making it a cinch to make OS X/x86 locked into Apple-manufactured platforms, copyright-infringing motherboards, and a theoretical x86 version of MacOnLinux, which is also probably going to raise some questions over at Apple.
I doubt anyone's going to bother making it run natively on their beige box.
What they *might* do, though, and this seems far easier, in a sense, is get an x86 version of MacOnLinux going, and install Leopard on THAT. Why try to hack a closed-source system to fit in an Apple-designed x86 box (OpenFirmware, custom bridges, etc.) when you can just lie to the OS about the underlying components just enough to make it all work?
The big problem here, of course, is that you'd still need an Intel chip, at least until AMD can fully implement Intel's additional instruction sets, such as SSE2 and any of its successors, properly.
Yeah, the standby mode is pretty much required, and it doesn't help when you're swapping games, or loading up new levels.
Honestly? I think that Lumines is the only PSP game to get it *right.* Don't push tons of polygons, don't load up massive tracks, just get a simple game that gets yanked off the disc in the background, and keep those loading messages to a minimum. If I'm consistently in standby mode, it's just about perfect for Lumines.
Do you have a GBA?
Yes? Then of course you don't want a Micro. The only real draw is the screen, unless you feel that you'd be happier with a smaller GBA.
No? Well, here's the top of the line model. Properly backlit screen, fits in your pocket, plays all your favorite games. If you don't want it now, you probably never did, and therefore, Nintendo hasn't lost anything.
The thing that people forget is that there's room for more than one console these days. Many people have at least two of the three big consoles. The GBA is still the bridge system to the Gamecube, as the DS can't connect to it. And yes, the Gamecube can't pump as many texturemapped polys per second. Yes, Gamecube discs hold less data than the competition. Yes, you might lose out on some fancy visual effects.
However, the one thing that Nintendo tends to get right is the biggest one. The games are fun. They take a known formula, update it for the new console, and knock it out of the park. Then they take something completely off the wall, like Pikmin, and somehow manage to get people addicted to it. And the Gamecube is the system people prefer to bring over to a friend's place, usually for Smash Brothers, sometimes for Mario Party. Four players, one system, and fun games.
Sure, the PS2 probably has a bigger library. Sure, the Xbox has those edgier, bloodier games. But somehow, too many of them just aren't fun, and that keeps those games from leading console sales. Aside from the N64, Nintendo's done a pretty impressive job of releasing systems with tons of great games, and that's really what keeps them going. A bit of expertise in delivering the minimum hardware in the optimum form factor doesn't seem to hurt, either.
And really, the Game Boy micro is no worse than the Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Light (only in Japan, I think,) and Game Boy Color. Three functionally identical handhelds, and then one with a minor upgrade and a non-backlit color screen. Not very exciting, but enough of a change to get new customers, as well as getting a few sales from people who just wanted a more compact system. They don't have to be groundbreaking, they just have to impress those people who wanted a handheld that they could carry around in a pocket or a purse.
Two people with no prior console ownership buying an overpriced gimmicky handheld with games which have nothing to do with portable gaming? Yeah, Nintendo's really crying over that lost revenue.
Newsflash: They also don't have an NES, Sega Master System, SNES, Genesis, Playstation, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, any form of a Game Boy, or a DS. As far as Nintendo's concerned, they're either small children with very deep pockets, or people who probably weren't buying a game system in the first place.
They still have a commanding lead, as the opposition is new to the market, has no previously existing game library to fall back to, and designed a system focused on delivering the complete home console experience to your handheld, slow loading times and all. (Really, look at Wipeout. It's abysmally slow to load tracks, and that's just suicide on a handheld.)
Sure, I have a PSP. I even play games on it. But it feels more like I bought Lumines, and a PSP for it, than when I bought my GBA, and Castlevania, Metroid, and a few other titles for that. The handheld experience I'm used to, including a lightning-fast startup and seconds-to-gameplay, just aren't there, and as a result, it's going to take some truly spectacular titles to make the whole thing worth the wait between levels.
Emulating a 700MHz x86 shouldn't be too hard for a decently featured PPC970 variant.
In addition, if all the XBox software was built against DirectX, the emulator should be able to handle any graphics issues between ATI and Nvidia in software. I'd expect the games to look a little different, sure, but I can't imagine any major loss in functionality.
Steel Battalion's probably right out, however.