The price you quote for Conroe is not a retail price, it's in 1000-unit quantities, as with all manufacturer pricing. The Newegg price is single-unit retail. I can't find figures on Conroe's die size; it's not small, but at 65nm it's likely smaller than the FX60. Still, Conroe is clearly going to be cheaper, barring something unforseen.
Regarding TDP, AMD usually quote maximum potential thermal dissipation, whereas Intel usually quote "typical" dissipation, around 75% of maximum, which would make the FX60's TDP only 82W by Intel's reckoning (Intel claim a TDP of 115W for their 3.6GHz P4, which is clearly a lot hotter than the FX60). Conroe is still coolest, but the difference is not that drastic.
AMD & IBM have been making good strides on their strained-silicon SiGe-based 65nm process, so it should provide performance & power improvements decent enough to keep AMD competitive when they get it into volume production early next year. We'll see how that turns out.
You're right of course, if a little abrasive. I assumed that everyone realised that Conroe was dual core. "Hardware threading" is a term I associate with Hyperthreading, which Conroe does not have. I should have said, "only one thread in hardware, per core".
I read somewhere yesterday, can't find it now, that Conroe platforms could use FB-DIMMs - but that may be just Woodcrest-based servers. I did say consumer boards would use ordinary DDR2. In any case, since the memory controller is in the motherboard chipset and not the CPU, Intel can pair it with whatever is appropriate.
If you're referring to "Hyperthreading", Conroe has none that I'm aware of. One thread at a time, in hardware (whatever you like in software of course).
the power consumption and with that the heat output
Conroe is supposed to have a Thermal Design Power of only 65W. Compare this to the current 3.6GHz P4's TDP of 115W. AMD rate the Athlon FX60's TDP at 110W; however AMD quote the maximum possible thermal dissipation while Intel quotes "typical", usually 75% of maximum (which would make the FX60 about 82W by Intel's reckoning) .
of course the expense of both the processor and the ram it needs
The 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz Conroes are expected to sell for US$316 and US$530 respectively, in 1000-unit quantities (the FX60 was released at US$1031). RAM is harder; reportedly Conroe chipsets will use DDR2, but possibly packaged as new FB-DIMMs. I don't have pricing for those yet, but they'll probably cost more. Consumer motherboards may just use standard DDR2 DIMMs.
According to this, the Athlon FX60 was released in Jan '06 at a price of US$1031, in 1000-unit quantities. The next FX-series chip (the 2.8GHz version) will probably debut around June, at somewhere near this price.
According to this, the 2.66 GHz Conroe will be released in Q3'06 at a price of US$530, in 1000-unit quantities.
With these prices, combined with the apparent performance and power differences (Conroe has a predicted TDP of 65W, compared to the FX60 at 110W), it looks to me like we'll finally see some heavy competition from Intel. Of course, a lot can happen between now and then - Intel have had manufacturing issues in the past, AMD have a new memory controller on the way and a 65nm die shrink due early next year, and can probably squeeze out two or even three speed bumps before Conroe really hits. Who knows, they might even drop their prices a bit.
Come Q3, I'll be sitting in the ringside seats with popcorn, ready to watch the fun:-)
I understand the difference. AFAICT, this guy is not claiming to have made anything that puts out more energy than you put in (force yes, in his example, but not energy). All he's saying is that he's found a way to make a more efficient electric motor, and apparently Boeing engineers (who are more qualified to judge than you or I, as they've seen it and spoken to him) appear to believe him.
I try not to automatically dismiss statements outside my fields of expertise unless I know for a fact that they directly contradict physical law. Since we personally have no reliable facts in this case, just some fairly vague claims on a few easily-misinterpreted webpages, I must therefore reserve final judgement until I a) see & examine it for myself (at least the precise claims and theory), or b) hear the opinion of reliable experts whom I trust, the set of which includes very few Slashdot readers.
To go around calling people fools or con artists based on incomplete facts is not an exercise of "critical faculties" so much as an unscientific belief that you know it all already, and a malicious one at that. Skepticism may indeed be warranted, but I recommend avoiding complete dismissal until you know more about what is actually being claimed. Hence my original recommendation to simply read more than just a non-scientific journalist's article summary.
Anyway, I enjoy an argument as much as the next geek, but this one has taken enough of my time already and is just degenerating into name-calling.
The "alternative viewpoint" he gives is that the extra force is coming from the permanent magnets (which doesn't happen with traditional motors), and thus does not violate conservation.
Now, maybe that only applies to the simple example on this page, and actual PPMT motors don't draw energy from the permanent magnets at all. Maybe his FAQ is incorrect, and it does drain the magnets. Perhaps, as you say, he is deceiving himself and/or others (well enough to fool the aforemention Boeing engineers). Or perhaps TFA was a lie from start to finish, just to waste all our time.
I can draw no further conclusions from a couple of webpages, only opinions. But at least you read past TFA summary:-)
...it appears to violate conservation; this is only true when observed from a traditional view point. The system contains three flux producing sources (2 magnets and an electromagnet) which together are capable of producing a far greater force than is actually produced.
I.e. the extra energy supply comes from the permanent magnets (which store a limited amount of energy - presumably these would run out in time).
Why not just wait 2 weeks until the AACS patch can be applied
Because a) it could easily be longer than 2 weeks, and b) they need to start production ASAP, if they want to launch in spring and still meet supply. Even if it costs a bit more to stockpile and revisit them in between.
fairly unsuccessfull overhyped launch of the 360
I dunno, PS3 fans probably think that, but given that MS sold everything they could make (outside Japan at least) and still have pre-orders for more, I don't imagine they're unhappy with it (perhaps with their supply efforts however).
yes, they may lose a few fence sitters to the 360. But on launch day, and the surge of advertising, everyone will completely forget about the lack of hype before-hand, go out and buy it.
Except the fence sitters who already bought the 360. That's my point.
The fans of each will buy each, those rich enough will buy both, but it's the fence sitters that MS and Sony are competing for. And if Sony cannot convince those people that PS3 is worth waiting for, some will not bother waiting and buy a 360 now. As MS get their supply problems under control and newer & better 360 games get released, the 360 looks more & more attractive to those people. If Sony doesn't counter that by showing off PS3 now, they lose those sales now - and the longer they wait the more sales they lose.
If 360 wasn't already out there tempting consumers, if Sony had a reason to hide their secrets from their competitor, what you say would make perfect sense. But as it stands, Sony are losing sales for no reason, and I'm sure they know that. The question remains, why didn't they show the current state of the hardware at the Tapei Games Show? Why aren't they at least trickling out a few more details of the hardware, showing a few new tech demos, a completed & playable level, rather than just the same pre-rendered trailers and empty cases as they did 9 months ago?
Ignore all the "perpetual motion - bogus!" remarks, and read the rest of the article. Misinterpreted summary aside, they don't claim it produces more energy than you give it, they specifically point out that the law of conservation prevents this. They merely claim it results in a more efficient motor.
What's more, TFA says Boeing Phantom Works has seen it, and backs it. Who do you think is more likely to be correct, Boeing engineers who have seen it for themselves, or Slashdot Armchair Experts? Read the patent. At least read the inventor's website, it's more likely to represent the actual invention.
Hell, even some Slashdot readers have seen it, and report that it exists, it really works, and it delivers 98% efficiency.
That's like, what, 12 metres? Holy crap. What do you consider to be "large sized"?
nVidia says no PS3 production until at least May
on
Sony Denies PS3 Delay
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· Score: 1
Well, they wouldn't comment directly on the PS3 schedule, but they did say that they won't receive any royalties from Sony this fiscal quarter, until the end of April at least.
That leaves Sony at most two months, May and June, to get the PS3 into production & still release it in "spring". Assuming there are no (further) unforseen delays. How many do they hope to have on shelves? Where are they going to release it, Mauritius?
I dunno, maybe Sony are trying to fool people into thinking they're going to be late so they can suprise us all, but how will that do anything except drive more people to Xbox 360 in the meantime? It's as silly as claiming MS deliberately restricted supply of the 360 - it'll only cost them sales.
I would have thought AACS support was something they could patch the final hardware to do, and thus not prevent them actually going into production. Finished machines could be stockpiled and patched before being boxed.
But even assuming this isn't the case, missing AACS still wouldn't stop them giving otherwise-complete hardware to developers (who require it ASAP for finishing their launch titles), or showing it at tradeshows etc. If your statement is true, everything else is complete, so why not show how awesomely great it all is?
Instead, we've heard no releases from Sony about completing any milestones whatsoever. Perhaps they're just keeping mum. We've heard nothing, no comments or leaks or anything, from any PS3 developer. Perhaps they're just showing unusual respect for their NDAs.
But most tellingly, we're seeing nothing new whatsoever in the tradeshows. At the Tapei Game Show that was just on, there were no new "live" demos, no playable games, just the same old pre-rendered trailers and empty cases under glass. They even had the same old boomerang controller concept - are they actually going to launch with that, after the reception it got? Wouldn't they want to show a newer concept at least, to gauge the reaction to it? Why aren't they saying anything, except "We will launch in spring. Somewhere" ??
What happened to the infamous Sony hype machine? Don't they realise that the greater the market's uncertainty about PS3, the more sales will go to the Xbox 360? Oh that's right, they don't care, "it's not a competitor".
OK, so they're asserting that the rumours are baseless and they'll get lots of PS3s out this year. No suprises there, of course they'd say that. But this bit:
Sony does not regard Xbox as a competitor. Rather, the company may even consider working with Microsoft to develop games together, Yasuda noted.
Are they really that confident that they don't even consider Xbox to be a competitor? Well, good luck with that.
Did you? The numbers shown in the pretty diagram add up to $800 - but what about the rest of the console? The controller? The PSU? The case? The cables? The assembly, testing & shipping costs?
If they're roughly correct with the numbers they do show, US$900 total cost would be conservative.
Same in Australia. After a certain period of living together, you're considered as good as married anyway. The legal & tax benefits and liabilities are pretty much identical.
I swore I'd never get married, who needs the complications if you break up? Then I realised it made no difference. I eventually got married a few years later, for the extra commitment factor & to provide a slightly more "normal" family for my upcoming children. 12 years on, no regrets.
Compare Old Snake from MGS4 which we know to be realtime with the Killzone demo shown
Well of course, when you show the whole power of the machine focussed on a single head & shoulders, it looks pretty nice. The individual faces in the Killzone demo may not have looked that good, but there was so much more going on (multiple fullbody characters, detailed outdoor environment, explosions etc), it's not really comparable. Regardless, neither of them were finished games running on final hardware, so it's still way too early to make claims about quality.
If the games look like what Sony claimed (see Project Offset...), what else matters?
Um, Project Offset is an in-development PC game that may at some time be ported to consoles. Neither Sony nor anyone else (other than you) are claiming it's relevant. What else matters? Price matters.
it's already been confirmed long ago that the PS3 will launch at the same price-point the PS2 and PS1 did
That link is hardly "confirmation" of a US$299 launch price - "hint" is the word used, of a claim that a different site had heard (somewhere) that "SCE had been telling its partners to expect" a certain price level. 12-18 months before launch. Kutaragi himself is on record as saying PS3 could be more expensive than the average console.
All we know is that, from the included hardware, the PS3 will be more expensive to build than any other console (probably ever). We can speculate that Sony might be concerned enough about Xbox 360 to try and undercut it on price, despite Microsoft's deeper pockets and despite Sony's reported extra costs in building a Live-quality online service as well - but that doesn't sound very realistic to me. I expect Sony to try and match the 360's price myself, but if they're as confident as Kutaragi (and you) sound, they may well price it higher.
Oh, and for the record? It's not just the games that matters. The 3DO's games were largely irrelevant because it launched at $700.
Evidence: see this. The harddisk is not locked in any way.
The original Xbox HDD was password-locked to the machine, and used a custom filesystem loosely based on FAT. On the 360, they deliberately didn't lock the drive, not even with a common password. They didn't even bother to change the filesystem. No encryption, no obfuscation, nothing.
MS obviously knew the HDD would be one of the first lines of attack, yet they made no particular effort to secure its contents - in fact, they actually reduced the protection. Why would they do that?
This time round, they have a far more secure model (motherboard communication is encrypted, kernel ram is checksummed, and the per-box keys & hypervisor are built into the CPU itself, where it can't be extracted with anything less than an electron microscope). If they left the HDD exposed, it's because they didn't care if it was modded; they clearly feel confident that it can't compromise the rest of the system.
Time will tell, of course, but as useful as Xplorer360 is, it's hardly a great step towards running homebrew code.
Do you have a 30" or smaller TV? Do you sit around 10 feet away from it? There's a good reason why DVDs look perfectly fine to your eyes; you've reached the resolution limits of your retina, and HD would simply be a waste.
<plagiarise victim="self">
The average eye with 20/20 vision is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.
So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV! At 10 feet, you need a 30" screen even to make out plain old standard-definition DVDs properly.
</plagiarise>
So unless you've got a particularly large TV or a particularly small loungeroom - or a projector - you may find investing in a high-definition TV to be entirely pointless. You simply can't see the extra detail. Of course, watching high-def movies on a computer monitor is different; we sit much closer to them, say around 18 inches away. At that distance, you'd want a 200 dpi screen (at 24", that's an impressive 4183 x 2353). Or you could get one of these - except it doesn't support HDCP...
If the movies doesn't work right, then most people will assume it's the computers fault
Not if the player software pops up a nice friendly dialog that says, "Your graphics card does not support HDCP, and cannot play movies in High Definition. Please contact Best Buy sales staff for a replacement." I imagine that would focus most consumer's attention on the real problem.
If you're faced with the choice of buying a new graphics card & monitor to go with your new BD-ROM drive & copy of Vista (not to mention $39.95 for the movie itself), or to just download the movie instead, what would you do? I fully expect HD movie piracy to be rampant, at least until people get around to upgrading their equipment for other reasons.
OTOH, there's probably still a decent-sized market of people who'll buy a standalone HD player, plug it into their 50" non-HDCP TV & say, "Wow! HiDef!" They'll probably connect it using a $20 "digital" S-Video cable too.
1080p pointless anyway, except on projectors
on
A PS3 Hands-On Report?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Of course, no-one was realistically expecting the PS3 to have the required 2.25x in pixel/shader/bandwidth horsepower to play Xbox360-level games at 1080p. And given a choice, developers would always rather do impressive-looking fancy graphics than plain, seen-it-before graphics at a higher resolution. But this may not matter anyway.
The human eye has limited resolution, and there's little benefit to be had by exceeding that, so unless you have a very large screen (or you like to sit unusually close), you simply can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at "normal" viewing distances on an average-sized HDTV. Some numbers:
The average eye is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.
So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV!
Of course, for computer monitors, where you sit much closer (say 18 inches), it's a different story - optimal resolution really ought to be 200 dpi (for a 24" widescreen monitor, that's an amazing 4183 x 2353, or one of these). But if you're on a couch, you probably don't need true 1080p unless you're watching a projector on an 80" screen, or unless you spent so much money on your TV that you can't afford a decent-sized loungeroom.
Slashdot Mirror
515 Gb is only 64 GB. So about 4.6 square inches of data surface on a 300 GB disc.
Regarding TDP, AMD usually quote maximum potential thermal dissipation, whereas Intel usually quote "typical" dissipation, around 75% of maximum, which would make the FX60's TDP only 82W by Intel's reckoning (Intel claim a TDP of 115W for their 3.6GHz P4, which is clearly a lot hotter than the FX60). Conroe is still coolest, but the difference is not that drastic.
AMD & IBM have been making good strides on their strained-silicon SiGe-based 65nm process, so it should provide performance & power improvements decent enough to keep AMD competitive when they get it into volume production early next year. We'll see how that turns out.
I read somewhere yesterday, can't find it now, that Conroe platforms could use FB-DIMMs - but that may be just Woodcrest-based servers. I did say consumer boards would use ordinary DDR2. In any case, since the memory controller is in the motherboard chipset and not the CPU, Intel can pair it with whatever is appropriate.
If you're referring to "Hyperthreading", Conroe has none that I'm aware of. One thread at a time, in hardware (whatever you like in software of course).
the power consumption and with that the heat output
Conroe is supposed to have a Thermal Design Power of only 65W. Compare this to the current 3.6GHz P4's TDP of 115W. AMD rate the Athlon FX60's TDP at 110W; however AMD quote the maximum possible thermal dissipation while Intel quotes "typical", usually 75% of maximum (which would make the FX60 about 82W by Intel's reckoning) .
of course the expense of both the processor and the ram it needs
The 2.4GHz and 2.6GHz Conroes are expected to sell for US$316 and US$530 respectively, in 1000-unit quantities (the FX60 was released at US$1031). RAM is harder; reportedly Conroe chipsets will use DDR2, but possibly packaged as new FB-DIMMs. I don't have pricing for those yet, but they'll probably cost more. Consumer motherboards may just use standard DDR2 DIMMs.
Man, there's gotta be some pretty heavy laws about posting on Slashdot while in control of a moving vehicle.
According to this, the 2.66 GHz Conroe will be released in Q3'06 at a price of US$530, in 1000-unit quantities.
With these prices, combined with the apparent performance and power differences (Conroe has a predicted TDP of 65W, compared to the FX60 at 110W), it looks to me like we'll finally see some heavy competition from Intel. Of course, a lot can happen between now and then - Intel have had manufacturing issues in the past, AMD have a new memory controller on the way and a 65nm die shrink due early next year, and can probably squeeze out two or even three speed bumps before Conroe really hits. Who knows, they might even drop their prices a bit.
Come Q3, I'll be sitting in the ringside seats with popcorn, ready to watch the fun :-)
You mean "Europe". Where's Australia? What about us Australians, you insensitive clod!
I try not to automatically dismiss statements outside my fields of expertise unless I know for a fact that they directly contradict physical law. Since we personally have no reliable facts in this case, just some fairly vague claims on a few easily-misinterpreted webpages, I must therefore reserve final judgement until I a) see & examine it for myself (at least the precise claims and theory), or b) hear the opinion of reliable experts whom I trust, the set of which includes very few Slashdot readers.
To go around calling people fools or con artists based on incomplete facts is not an exercise of "critical faculties" so much as an unscientific belief that you know it all already, and a malicious one at that. Skepticism may indeed be warranted, but I recommend avoiding complete dismissal until you know more about what is actually being claimed. Hence my original recommendation to simply read more than just a non-scientific journalist's article summary.
Anyway, I enjoy an argument as much as the next geek, but this one has taken enough of my time already and is just degenerating into name-calling.
Now, maybe that only applies to the simple example on this page, and actual PPMT motors don't draw energy from the permanent magnets at all. Maybe his FAQ is incorrect, and it does drain the magnets. Perhaps, as you say, he is deceiving himself and/or others (well enough to fool the aforemention Boeing engineers). Or perhaps TFA was a lie from start to finish, just to waste all our time.
I can draw no further conclusions from a couple of webpages, only opinions. But at least you read past TFA summary :-)
I meant, patch the otherwise-completed systems with the final firmware in the factory, before they go to retail.
I.e. the extra energy supply comes from the permanent magnets (which store a limited amount of energy - presumably these would run out in time).
Because a) it could easily be longer than 2 weeks, and b) they need to start production ASAP, if they want to launch in spring and still meet supply. Even if it costs a bit more to stockpile and revisit them in between.
fairly unsuccessfull overhyped launch of the 360
I dunno, PS3 fans probably think that, but given that MS sold everything they could make (outside Japan at least) and still have pre-orders for more, I don't imagine they're unhappy with it (perhaps with their supply efforts however).
yes, they may lose a few fence sitters to the 360. But on launch day, and the surge of advertising, everyone will completely forget about the lack of hype before-hand, go out and buy it.
Except the fence sitters who already bought the 360. That's my point.
The fans of each will buy each, those rich enough will buy both, but it's the fence sitters that MS and Sony are competing for. And if Sony cannot convince those people that PS3 is worth waiting for, some will not bother waiting and buy a 360 now. As MS get their supply problems under control and newer & better 360 games get released, the 360 looks more & more attractive to those people. If Sony doesn't counter that by showing off PS3 now, they lose those sales now - and the longer they wait the more sales they lose.
If 360 wasn't already out there tempting consumers, if Sony had a reason to hide their secrets from their competitor, what you say would make perfect sense. But as it stands, Sony are losing sales for no reason, and I'm sure they know that. The question remains, why didn't they show the current state of the hardware at the Tapei Games Show? Why aren't they at least trickling out a few more details of the hardware, showing a few new tech demos, a completed & playable level, rather than just the same pre-rendered trailers and empty cases as they did 9 months ago?
What's more, TFA says Boeing Phantom Works has seen it, and backs it. Who do you think is more likely to be correct, Boeing engineers who have seen it for themselves, or Slashdot Armchair Experts? Read the patent. At least read the inventor's website, it's more likely to represent the actual invention.
Hell, even some Slashdot readers have seen it, and report that it exists, it really works, and it delivers 98% efficiency.
That's like, what, 12 metres? Holy crap. What do you consider to be "large sized"?
That leaves Sony at most two months, May and June, to get the PS3 into production & still release it in "spring". Assuming there are no (further) unforseen delays. How many do they hope to have on shelves? Where are they going to release it, Mauritius?
I dunno, maybe Sony are trying to fool people into thinking they're going to be late so they can suprise us all, but how will that do anything except drive more people to Xbox 360 in the meantime? It's as silly as claiming MS deliberately restricted supply of the 360 - it'll only cost them sales.
I would have thought AACS support was something they could patch the final hardware to do, and thus not prevent them actually going into production. Finished machines could be stockpiled and patched before being boxed.
But even assuming this isn't the case, missing AACS still wouldn't stop them giving otherwise-complete hardware to developers (who require it ASAP for finishing their launch titles), or showing it at tradeshows etc. If your statement is true, everything else is complete, so why not show how awesomely great it all is?
Instead, we've heard no releases from Sony about completing any milestones whatsoever. Perhaps they're just keeping mum. We've heard nothing, no comments or leaks or anything, from any PS3 developer. Perhaps they're just showing unusual respect for their NDAs.
But most tellingly, we're seeing nothing new whatsoever in the tradeshows. At the Tapei Game Show that was just on, there were no new "live" demos, no playable games, just the same old pre-rendered trailers and empty cases under glass. They even had the same old boomerang controller concept - are they actually going to launch with that, after the reception it got? Wouldn't they want to show a newer concept at least, to gauge the reaction to it? Why aren't they saying anything, except "We will launch in spring. Somewhere" ??
What happened to the infamous Sony hype machine? Don't they realise that the greater the market's uncertainty about PS3, the more sales will go to the Xbox 360? Oh that's right, they don't care, "it's not a competitor".
OK, so they're asserting that the rumours are baseless and they'll get lots of PS3s out this year. No suprises there, of course they'd say that. But this bit:
Sony does not regard Xbox as a competitor. Rather, the company may even consider working with Microsoft to develop games together, Yasuda noted.
Are they really that confident that they don't even consider Xbox to be a competitor? Well, good luck with that.
If they're roughly correct with the numbers they do show, US$900 total cost would be conservative.
I swore I'd never get married, who needs the complications if you break up? Then I realised it made no difference. I eventually got married a few years later, for the extra commitment factor & to provide a slightly more "normal" family for my upcoming children. 12 years on, no regrets.
Well of course, when you show the whole power of the machine focussed on a single head & shoulders, it looks pretty nice. The individual faces in the Killzone demo may not have looked that good, but there was so much more going on (multiple fullbody characters, detailed outdoor environment, explosions etc), it's not really comparable. Regardless, neither of them were finished games running on final hardware, so it's still way too early to make claims about quality.
If the games look like what Sony claimed (see Project Offset...), what else matters?
Um, Project Offset is an in-development PC game that may at some time be ported to consoles. Neither Sony nor anyone else (other than you) are claiming it's relevant. What else matters? Price matters.
it's already been confirmed long ago that the PS3 will launch at the same price-point the PS2 and PS1 did
That link is hardly "confirmation" of a US$299 launch price - "hint" is the word used, of a claim that a different site had heard (somewhere) that "SCE had been telling its partners to expect" a certain price level. 12-18 months before launch. Kutaragi himself is on record as saying PS3 could be more expensive than the average console.
All we know is that, from the included hardware, the PS3 will be more expensive to build than any other console (probably ever). We can speculate that Sony might be concerned enough about Xbox 360 to try and undercut it on price, despite Microsoft's deeper pockets and despite Sony's reported extra costs in building a Live-quality online service as well - but that doesn't sound very realistic to me. I expect Sony to try and match the 360's price myself, but if they're as confident as Kutaragi (and you) sound, they may well price it higher.
Oh, and for the record? It's not just the games that matters. The 3DO's games were largely irrelevant because it launched at $700.
The original Xbox HDD was password-locked to the machine, and used a custom filesystem loosely based on FAT. On the 360, they deliberately didn't lock the drive, not even with a common password. They didn't even bother to change the filesystem. No encryption, no obfuscation, nothing.
MS obviously knew the HDD would be one of the first lines of attack, yet they made no particular effort to secure its contents - in fact, they actually reduced the protection. Why would they do that?
This time round, they have a far more secure model (motherboard communication is encrypted, kernel ram is checksummed, and the per-box keys & hypervisor are built into the CPU itself, where it can't be extracted with anything less than an electron microscope). If they left the HDD exposed, it's because they didn't care if it was modded; they clearly feel confident that it can't compromise the rest of the system. Time will tell, of course, but as useful as Xplorer360 is, it's hardly a great step towards running homebrew code.
<plagiarise victim="self">
The average eye with 20/20 vision is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.
So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV! At 10 feet, you need a 30" screen even to make out plain old standard-definition DVDs properly.
</plagiarise>
So unless you've got a particularly large TV or a particularly small loungeroom - or a projector - you may find investing in a high-definition TV to be entirely pointless. You simply can't see the extra detail. Of course, watching high-def movies on a computer monitor is different; we sit much closer to them, say around 18 inches away. At that distance, you'd want a 200 dpi screen (at 24", that's an impressive 4183 x 2353). Or you could get one of these - except it doesn't support HDCP...
Not if the player software pops up a nice friendly dialog that says, "Your graphics card does not support HDCP, and cannot play movies in High Definition. Please contact Best Buy sales staff for a replacement." I imagine that would focus most consumer's attention on the real problem.
If you're faced with the choice of buying a new graphics card & monitor to go with your new BD-ROM drive & copy of Vista (not to mention $39.95 for the movie itself), or to just download the movie instead, what would you do? I fully expect HD movie piracy to be rampant, at least until people get around to upgrading their equipment for other reasons.
OTOH, there's probably still a decent-sized market of people who'll buy a standalone HD player, plug it into their 50" non-HDCP TV & say, "Wow! HiDef!" They'll probably connect it using a $20 "digital" S-Video cable too.
The human eye has limited resolution, and there's little benefit to be had by exceeding that, so unless you have a very large screen (or you like to sit unusually close), you simply can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at "normal" viewing distances on an average-sized HDTV. Some numbers:
The average eye is capable of resolving one minute of arc, a sixtieth of a degree. This equates to roughly 300 dpi, when viewed at a distance of one foot. Let's say the average distance from a couch to a TV is 7 to 10 feet. At 7 feet, you can resolve 300/7 = 43 dpi, at 10 feet it's 30 dpi.
So in order to fully resolve a 720p picture (1469 pixels diagonally) at 7 feet, the TV would have to be at least 34 inches diagonally to make out all the detail. At 10 feet you'd need a rather large 50 incher. For true 1080p, even at 7 feet, anything under 50 inches and you're missing out - and at 10 feet you'd have to get a whopping 74 inch TV!
Of course, for computer monitors, where you sit much closer (say 18 inches), it's a different story - optimal resolution really ought to be 200 dpi (for a 24" widescreen monitor, that's an amazing 4183 x 2353, or one of these). But if you're on a couch, you probably don't need true 1080p unless you're watching a projector on an 80" screen, or unless you spent so much money on your TV that you can't afford a decent-sized loungeroom.
Even Steam allows you to play Half-Life 2 in a completely offline mode - whether Valve are still extant or not.