First off, let's recognize that this still isn't confirmed - while it's a supposition with some good reasoning, it's not like the Big N has come out and told us the specs for the hardware. But, assuming that Hannibal is right, I have one complaint about the Wii: $250 is too much.
Yes, I know that I paid $400+ for my 360, and I know that the PS3 is going to be $580. I also understand that there was a ton of R&D on the Wiimote, that Nintendo's business plan includes profit on the consoles themselves, and that the price is determined by the market, not by the cost to produce.
But I also know I've paid $200 for each previous Nintendo console (except the NES...I didn't pay for that one, so I don't actually remember what it cost). I also know that technology gets cheaper over time - particularly microchips. A process shrink is neat, but shouldn't make the thing cost more, it should make it cost less. So the $250 is more than I've ever paid for a Nintendo console on the one hand, and an increase where there should have been a decrease on the other.
All that being said, I'll still probably pick one up at launch, or as soon after as I can manage. So in that sense, it's clearly not a problem from Ninty's point of view. But I'm vaguely irked by the price (again, assuming this supposition is accurate), and I don't think Nintendo's in a good position to withstand ill will.
Leaving 175W for the rest of the gaming system to use, if we're talking a 400W budget.
(Not that I don't think 225W is a metric assload of draw for a video card, but you seem to be implying that just the video card eats up 400W...but your numbers clearly don't bear that out)
Mutually exclusive is too strong a term. It's more an order of priorities. If your greater priority is the games, you're out of luck with Linux. If your greater priority is Linux, then you should do what you suggest.
There just isn't any getting past the fact that Linux compatibility is a distant secondary concern for most major game developers - when it's a concern at all. The simple fact of the matter is that major titles are released for Windows first, and often only. 3rd-party work on Linux compatibility, of necessity, lags behind the game's availability on Windows.
So, clearly, if gaming is your priority, you're stuck with Windows (unless, through pure coincidence, every game you're interested in playing happens to also be among the small set of games that are available for Linux on a comparable time scale. This happy accident, however, is more the exception than the rule).
...upon thinking about it, I don't know that it's all that far-fetched. Designing a system that can segregate commercials from television with a high degree of accuracy is probably comparable to information compression in the level of information/context comprehension required by the device. I begin to seriously wonder if there might be advances in AI that come out of work like this.
I say this because, ultimately, the difference between commercials and "content" is entirely made up of the information they present. As advertisers and broadcaster get better at removing the "flag" type of marker (blank frames, scene cuts, predictable timing) from commercials, there will be incentive to develop more intelligent ad-blocking mechanisms. Obviously, we're not at that point yet, as the methods described as employed by MythTV are fairly naive flag detection mechanisms - but with growing incentive, the odds of working towards a truly intelligent ad-removal scheme increase.
I think it would be hilarious if the biggest mind-mushing technology of all time (television) turned out, indirectly, to contribute to the rise of alternate, machine, intelligence.
Take the number of batteries in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
I couldn't agree more - we need robust economic models more than we need more robust climate models, at this point, to facilitate dealing with GW. Unfortunately, this goal is hampered by the crowd screaming "we have to DO SOMETHING about it RIGHT NOW." Just "doing something" is liable to produce worse effects than had we done nothing.
Which doesn't mean we should do nothing, it just means you're right - we should do something considered.
I do, however, have to disagree with your statement that "[t]he economy is a system of rules devised by man, the system should be designed to benifit everyone equally (or as close to that ideal as is practicable)." In the sense that it arises out of the interaction of human beings, yes, it does. However, this does not mean that it's a considered system that someone or some group can design to best effect. Rather, the economy is the emergent result of individual human behaviors aggregated into the 6 billion+ group of people as a whole.
Sort of like "capitalism" isn't really a system you can either live under or not. Capitalism is simply what arises because people like owning things. The role of societies is to encourage/discourage this behavior to whatever extent they feel is correct and possible. As such, the economy as a whole is something we have a degree of influence over (through implementing planned incentives), but not something we can just fiddle with until it's running perfectly.
Really, the economy is a lot like the environment. There's no denying we can, with intent, try to influence the way it works, but we're a long, long way from having anything like "control" over it.
thus producing more CO2 than you can possibly eliminate
Which says nothing about how much CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere, which is what we're concerned about. If you generate the CO2, but don't let it escape into the atmosphere, then it's a net CO2 decrease in the air, and therefore a net GW win.
This has nothing to do with the second law. We're talking about the location of pollutants, not energy conservation.
I don't disagree that we should push greener technologies.
However, your argument that such spending will necessarily result in a net economic boost, while common, doesn't work. You're taking a known cost* (projected economic cost of mandating greener technology), and offsetting it with an unknown benefit (the unforeseen boost to the economy).
You could just as well take a known cost* (projected damage from GW), and offset with an unknown benefit (unforeseen ecological benefits of GW).
The latter argument is ridiculous, of course. But so is the former, for exactly the same reason. Basically, your guess that this cost will result in a net economic positive is no more or less reasonable than a guess that GW will result in a net ecological positive. In both cases, not only do we not know the result to be probable, we can't know it to be without inventing prescience.
*I use the term 'known' to describe a short-term, and therefore high-certainty, projection, not absolute knowledge.
How is the second law of thermodyanmics relevant? The entropy of the universe can increase without increasing the specific concentrations of what we consider pollutants in our atmosphere. The facts that pollutants = bad and entropy = bad do not imply that pollutants = entropy.
All the second law means is that you'll spend more energy converting CO2 to C2 + O2 than you would subsequently get by turning C2 + O2 into CO2. Hence, the entropy of the universe increases. If you do this by burning coal, you could put a big sack on top of the exhaust and collect the pollutants in there. This would result in a net increase of entropy (as required by the second law), plus a net decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Or were you just itching to use that line because you've been seeing the ads for that video game?
'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government.'
I wholeheartedly support the things they're trying to achieve, but...I would be hard-pressed to find a statement that could be more fundamentally wrong than the above. It's that sort of thinking that's got us in the mess we're in.
The government, in no way whatsoever decides what rights people have. The function of legitimate government is no more or less than to recognize and to protect the rights people have*. The government doesn't grant rights, people have rights because they're people. The government, if anything, limits exercise of rights in the name of social order (don't read anything into this statement that isn't there - I'm not advocating anarchy, this is a legitimate function of government and necessary for society to function).
By ceding the power to government to decide what rights people have, we've opened the door for exactly the kind of abuse that now runs rampant. Government is controlled by money, and huge quantities of money are controlled by the pseudo-citizens we refer to as "corporations." Granting power to government is granting power to corporations.
It would be easy to say that the quote is just verbal shorthand, but I think there's a fundamental difference between the mindset "we have rights, and we delegate some authority to government" and the mindset "the government has authority, and delegates some rights to us" that is exhibited by such a statement.
*To demonstrate this to yourself, consider this: if government grants rights to people rather than people having rights and granting authority to government, then this means that there can be no such thing as a government abuse of rights. After all, if government can legitimately decide what your rights are, then you have no legitimate complaints about government trampling them. And I don't think you really need to look too far from home or too far in the past to find examples that, to me, pretty clearly indicate that the government can trample rights.
I finally broke down and bought an iPod thirty-eight - no, nine (thank you, DST) - hours ago, and now they're going to change it all up? The rat bastards.
Looks like all my years of supercilious PC-user loathing for all things Apple were justified, after all!! Well, I'll show them - just you wait to see what I do with those Apple stickers you so helpfully put in the box...JUST YOU WAIT.
(Yes, I have been up all night migrating DBs, bouncing servers, and racking crap in our cage. How could you tell?)
It's just a matter of scale. If it's the US armed forces against a small group of survivalists in AZ, then yeah, they're screwed.
If it's the US armed forces against every American who owns a gun (estimated at almost 100,000,000 people), it's a whole different ball game. If nothing else, we only have so many Warthogs, Apaches, M1A1s, F-22s, etc. They can't be everywhere at once. If it was really so easy to take care of widespread resistance, why are Iraq and Afghanistan still such pains in the ass?
The problem, of course, is that the armed civilians have to be willing to take the casualties necessary to win the inevitable war of attrition. And that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future unless there's a sudden and drastic something that makes it happen.
The problem with bread and circuses is that the policy works just fine.
If some of the zealots/fanbois/doomsdayists/next-big-thingers would go back and read those comments. Then think about how melodramatic, self-righteous, and - most importantly - certain so many of the posters were, and how wrong and silly they look now.
Then (and this is the hard part), they should THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A SECOND before they proclaim how their pet tech will take over the world, their hated enemy will crash and burn, everyone will be dead in ten years, etc.
Seriously.
Compare that discussion with pretty much any discussion these days on this site that runs more than 50 or so comments. Reads pretty much the same, doesn't it? Now, I suppose it's possible that this time, we're all much smarter, and our opinions really do dictate the way the world outside/. works......but odds are against it.
(Never mind me, I'm old, I'm drinking, and I've been building blades via a RIB interface through an RDP connection all day)
Yes, it only works for good games...but that's like saying "blue litmus paper only works for acid."
I want a test that only returns positive for good games. That's exactly the metric I'm looking for. If it occasionally returns negative for good games, I can live with it, as long as the number of true positives is high enough that it keeps my game playing habit fed.
Demos are fantastic, and after getting to know and love them on the 360, I'm quite certain the Wii and the PS3 will get fewer purchases from me if they don't make acquiring demos as easy and cheap (free) as Live! does.
Several posters have mentioned that demos are often buggy, and not representative of the final product. This may be true, but it really doesn't matter.
In the first place, since the article is proposing that good demos sell games, I don't see how bad demos really counter the assertion.
In the second place, from a personal standpoint, when I'm thinking about dropping $60 on a piece of entertainment, I would much rather employ a test that is biased towards false negatives than false positives. This may mean that I miss a game or two I would really have enjoyed, but it also means that the games I do buy, I enjoy. Of the fifteen or so video games I own for the 360, the only game that has proved to be a bad purchasing decision is one that I didn't play a demo for (PD:Z).
Relatedly, I just played the demo for Ninety-nine Nights...and went from being pretty interested in the game to dropping it from my "buy" list. Might it be a game that I would like if I gave it a chance? Sure, it's possible. But given the number of video games out there and the time/money I have to spend on playing them, it's guaranteed that I'm going to miss some good ones, anyway.
This just means it's the publisher's job to give me a demo that sells me on the game.
To some extent, demos are important to a key few individuals. But claiming that demos are vital to the entire market is complete rubbish
Then I suggest you go and fund a study to see if you can find evidence for your claim. When comparing a study of 12,100 video game purchasers to your personal buying-habits anecdote, you'll forgive me if I weight the sample size of 12,100 more heavily than I do the sample size of 1.
When you're talking about a $60 purchase, it's not a terribly surprising result to find that people who play a demo and like it are more likely to purchase the game than they are to purchase a game whose demo they don't like. In fact, claiming otherwise would require some significant proof. If I've got $60 to spend, I will always buy the game I've tried and liked, rather than buying the game I tried and didn't like on the off chance that the demo wasn't representative of the final product.
This is the concept that shareware has rested upon for almost 20 years, it's the concept that drove all the major DB/DBMS providers to give away "toy" versions of their products, it's the concept behind movie trailers, it's the concept behind TV pilots, and it's even the concept behind free food samples in the grocery store.
Your assertion that it's "complete rubbish," with no associated evidence beyond personal experiance of an unspecified sample size which featured demos having an unspecified degree of inferiority to their unspecified full game versions just isn't very compelling.
Besides which, are you seriously trying to claim that you have more faith in the games review industry (or, worse, the games marketing industry...or even, heaven forfend, box art?) to be more representative of which games you'll like than actually playing demos of the games? Or do you just pick games off the shelf at random, completely disregarding any pre-purchase evaluation of whether or not you'll enjoy the game?
Alternatively, do you only play games that your friends have purchased first? I hope you'll see how that may not be a universally applicable metric, particularly this early in the market penetration cycle of the next-gen consoles.
I can't help but think "Man, those guys look all blocky and stretched" when Hockey Night in Canada is on.
That's the magic of HD. SD sports on a big screen (like my 50") are blocky and stretched. Sports in HD on a 50" screen, though, make me wonder how I ever watched sports in SD. The aspect ratio alone, which allows you to see more of the field at once, is worth the price of admission.
For me, at least, the leap from SD to HD when watching sports is literally equivalent to the leap from VHS in EP to progressive scan DVD. It's just plain better.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, let's recognize that this still isn't confirmed - while it's a supposition with some good reasoning, it's not like the Big N has come out and told us the specs for the hardware. But, assuming that Hannibal is right, I have one complaint about the Wii: $250 is too much.
Yes, I know that I paid $400+ for my 360, and I know that the PS3 is going to be $580. I also understand that there was a ton of R&D on the Wiimote, that Nintendo's business plan includes profit on the consoles themselves, and that the price is determined by the market, not by the cost to produce.
But I also know I've paid $200 for each previous Nintendo console (except the NES...I didn't pay for that one, so I don't actually remember what it cost). I also know that technology gets cheaper over time - particularly microchips. A process shrink is neat, but shouldn't make the thing cost more, it should make it cost less. So the $250 is more than I've ever paid for a Nintendo console on the one hand, and an increase where there should have been a decrease on the other.
All that being said, I'll still probably pick one up at launch, or as soon after as I can manage. So in that sense, it's clearly not a problem from Ninty's point of view. But I'm vaguely irked by the price (again, assuming this supposition is accurate), and I don't think Nintendo's in a good position to withstand ill will.
Have some faith. I'm sure the number '40' is accurate to within at least an order of magnitude.
Do that math!
Ok.
75W + 2 * 75W = 225W
Leaving 175W for the rest of the gaming system to use, if we're talking a 400W budget.
(Not that I don't think 225W is a metric assload of draw for a video card, but you seem to be implying that just the video card eats up 400W...but your numbers clearly don't bear that out)
Included in your $600 is a miniature power plant that runs on burning batteries.
I saw March of the Penguins, does that count?
Mutually exclusive is too strong a term. It's more an order of priorities. If your greater priority is the games, you're out of luck with Linux. If your greater priority is Linux, then you should do what you suggest.
There just isn't any getting past the fact that Linux compatibility is a distant secondary concern for most major game developers - when it's a concern at all. The simple fact of the matter is that major titles are released for Windows first, and often only. 3rd-party work on Linux compatibility, of necessity, lags behind the game's availability on Windows.
So, clearly, if gaming is your priority, you're stuck with Windows (unless, through pure coincidence, every game you're interested in playing happens to also be among the small set of games that are available for Linux on a comparable time scale. This happy accident, however, is more the exception than the rule).
Which is a great suggestion if your goal is to improve gaming on Linux.
It's not so great a suggestion if your goal is to play games.
...upon thinking about it, I don't know that it's all that far-fetched. Designing a system that can segregate commercials from television with a high degree of accuracy is probably comparable to information compression in the level of information/context comprehension required by the device. I begin to seriously wonder if there might be advances in AI that come out of work like this.
I say this because, ultimately, the difference between commercials and "content" is entirely made up of the information they present. As advertisers and broadcaster get better at removing the "flag" type of marker (blank frames, scene cuts, predictable timing) from commercials, there will be incentive to develop more intelligent ad-blocking mechanisms. Obviously, we're not at that point yet, as the methods described as employed by MythTV are fairly naive flag detection mechanisms - but with growing incentive, the odds of working towards a truly intelligent ad-removal scheme increase.
I think it would be hilarious if the biggest mind-mushing technology of all time (television) turned out, indirectly, to contribute to the rise of alternate, machine, intelligence.
Take the number of batteries in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?
You would not believe.
Which battery company do you work for?
A major one.
I couldn't agree more - we need robust economic models more than we need more robust climate models, at this point, to facilitate dealing with GW. Unfortunately, this goal is hampered by the crowd screaming "we have to DO SOMETHING about it RIGHT NOW." Just "doing something" is liable to produce worse effects than had we done nothing.
Which doesn't mean we should do nothing, it just means you're right - we should do something considered.
I do, however, have to disagree with your statement that "[t]he economy is a system of rules devised by man, the system should be designed to benifit everyone equally (or as close to that ideal as is practicable)." In the sense that it arises out of the interaction of human beings, yes, it does. However, this does not mean that it's a considered system that someone or some group can design to best effect. Rather, the economy is the emergent result of individual human behaviors aggregated into the 6 billion+ group of people as a whole.
Sort of like "capitalism" isn't really a system you can either live under or not. Capitalism is simply what arises because people like owning things. The role of societies is to encourage/discourage this behavior to whatever extent they feel is correct and possible. As such, the economy as a whole is something we have a degree of influence over (through implementing planned incentives), but not something we can just fiddle with until it's running perfectly.
Really, the economy is a lot like the environment. There's no denying we can, with intent, try to influence the way it works, but we're a long, long way from having anything like "control" over it.
thus producing more CO2 than you can possibly eliminate
Which says nothing about how much CO2 ends up back in the atmosphere, which is what we're concerned about. If you generate the CO2, but don't let it escape into the atmosphere, then it's a net CO2 decrease in the air, and therefore a net GW win.
This has nothing to do with the second law. We're talking about the location of pollutants, not energy conservation.
I fail to see why this is so hard to grasp.
I don't disagree that we should push greener technologies.
However, your argument that such spending will necessarily result in a net economic boost, while common, doesn't work. You're taking a known cost* (projected economic cost of mandating greener technology), and offsetting it with an unknown benefit (the unforeseen boost to the economy).
You could just as well take a known cost* (projected damage from GW), and offset with an unknown benefit (unforeseen ecological benefits of GW).
The latter argument is ridiculous, of course. But so is the former, for exactly the same reason. Basically, your guess that this cost will result in a net economic positive is no more or less reasonable than a guess that GW will result in a net ecological positive. In both cases, not only do we not know the result to be probable, we can't know it to be without inventing prescience.
*I use the term 'known' to describe a short-term, and therefore high-certainty, projection, not absolute knowledge.
Huh?
How is the second law of thermodyanmics relevant? The entropy of the universe can increase without increasing the specific concentrations of what we consider pollutants in our atmosphere. The facts that pollutants = bad and entropy = bad do not imply that pollutants = entropy.
All the second law means is that you'll spend more energy converting CO2 to C2 + O2 than you would subsequently get by turning C2 + O2 into CO2. Hence, the entropy of the universe increases. If you do this by burning coal, you could put a big sack on top of the exhaust and collect the pollutants in there. This would result in a net increase of entropy (as required by the second law), plus a net decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Or were you just itching to use that line because you've been seeing the ads for that video game?
You're posting AC? And here I was going to mod this funny...
This is only rated 2?
Come on, people - someone give this guy points. It was the perfect response!
'it is not the music industry's job to decide what rights consumers have. That is the job of government.'
I wholeheartedly support the things they're trying to achieve, but...I would be hard-pressed to find a statement that could be more fundamentally wrong than the above. It's that sort of thinking that's got us in the mess we're in.
The government, in no way whatsoever decides what rights people have. The function of legitimate government is no more or less than to recognize and to protect the rights people have*. The government doesn't grant rights, people have rights because they're people. The government, if anything, limits exercise of rights in the name of social order (don't read anything into this statement that isn't there - I'm not advocating anarchy, this is a legitimate function of government and necessary for society to function).
By ceding the power to government to decide what rights people have, we've opened the door for exactly the kind of abuse that now runs rampant. Government is controlled by money, and huge quantities of money are controlled by the pseudo-citizens we refer to as "corporations." Granting power to government is granting power to corporations.
It would be easy to say that the quote is just verbal shorthand, but I think there's a fundamental difference between the mindset "we have rights, and we delegate some authority to government" and the mindset "the government has authority, and delegates some rights to us" that is exhibited by such a statement.
*To demonstrate this to yourself, consider this: if government grants rights to people rather than people having rights and granting authority to government, then this means that there can be no such thing as a government abuse of rights. After all, if government can legitimately decide what your rights are, then you have no legitimate complaints about government trampling them. And I don't think you really need to look too far from home or too far in the past to find examples that, to me, pretty clearly indicate that the government can trample rights.
I finally broke down and bought an iPod thirty-eight - no, nine (thank you, DST) - hours ago, and now they're going to change it all up? The rat bastards.
Looks like all my years of supercilious PC-user loathing for all things Apple were justified, after all!! Well, I'll show them - just you wait to see what I do with those Apple stickers you so helpfully put in the box...JUST YOU WAIT.
(Yes, I have been up all night migrating DBs, bouncing servers, and racking crap in our cage. How could you tell?)
It's just a matter of scale. If it's the US armed forces against a small group of survivalists in AZ, then yeah, they're screwed.
If it's the US armed forces against every American who owns a gun (estimated at almost 100,000,000 people), it's a whole different ball game. If nothing else, we only have so many Warthogs, Apaches, M1A1s, F-22s, etc. They can't be everywhere at once. If it was really so easy to take care of widespread resistance, why are Iraq and Afghanistan still such pains in the ass?
The problem, of course, is that the armed civilians have to be willing to take the casualties necessary to win the inevitable war of attrition. And that's not going to happen in the foreseeable future unless there's a sudden and drastic something that makes it happen.
The problem with bread and circuses is that the policy works just fine.
No...no, I didn't.
To be honest, until I read the G4 bit, I had forgotten what was actually going on in that episode aside from Data's dreaming.
But it's having the line to hand when it counts that matters, and that part I pulled off just fine, if I do say so myself.
If some of the zealots/fanbois/doomsdayists/next-big-thingers would go back and read those comments. Then think about how melodramatic, self-righteous, and - most importantly - certain so many of the posters were, and how wrong and silly they look now.
/. works... ...but odds are against it.
Then (and this is the hard part), they should THINK ABOUT THAT FOR A SECOND before they proclaim how their pet tech will take over the world, their hated enemy will crash and burn, everyone will be dead in ten years, etc.
Seriously.
Compare that discussion with pretty much any discussion these days on this site that runs more than 50 or so comments. Reads pretty much the same, doesn't it? Now, I suppose it's possible that this time, we're all much smarter, and our opinions really do dictate the way the world outside
(Never mind me, I'm old, I'm drinking, and I've been building blades via a RIB interface through an RDP connection all day)
Yes, it only works for good games...but that's like saying "blue litmus paper only works for acid."
I want a test that only returns positive for good games. That's exactly the metric I'm looking for. If it occasionally returns negative for good games, I can live with it, as long as the number of true positives is high enough that it keeps my game playing habit fed.
Demos are fantastic, and after getting to know and love them on the 360, I'm quite certain the Wii and the PS3 will get fewer purchases from me if they don't make acquiring demos as easy and cheap (free) as Live! does.
Several posters have mentioned that demos are often buggy, and not representative of the final product. This may be true, but it really doesn't matter.
In the first place, since the article is proposing that good demos sell games, I don't see how bad demos really counter the assertion.
In the second place, from a personal standpoint, when I'm thinking about dropping $60 on a piece of entertainment, I would much rather employ a test that is biased towards false negatives than false positives. This may mean that I miss a game or two I would really have enjoyed, but it also means that the games I do buy, I enjoy. Of the fifteen or so video games I own for the 360, the only game that has proved to be a bad purchasing decision is one that I didn't play a demo for (PD:Z).
Relatedly, I just played the demo for Ninety-nine Nights...and went from being pretty interested in the game to dropping it from my "buy" list. Might it be a game that I would like if I gave it a chance? Sure, it's possible. But given the number of video games out there and the time/money I have to spend on playing them, it's guaranteed that I'm going to miss some good ones, anyway.
This just means it's the publisher's job to give me a demo that sells me on the game.
To some extent, demos are important to a key few individuals. But claiming that demos are vital to the entire market is complete rubbish
Then I suggest you go and fund a study to see if you can find evidence for your claim. When comparing a study of 12,100 video game purchasers to your personal buying-habits anecdote, you'll forgive me if I weight the sample size of 12,100 more heavily than I do the sample size of 1.
When you're talking about a $60 purchase, it's not a terribly surprising result to find that people who play a demo and like it are more likely to purchase the game than they are to purchase a game whose demo they don't like. In fact, claiming otherwise would require some significant proof. If I've got $60 to spend, I will always buy the game I've tried and liked, rather than buying the game I tried and didn't like on the off chance that the demo wasn't representative of the final product.
This is the concept that shareware has rested upon for almost 20 years, it's the concept that drove all the major DB/DBMS providers to give away "toy" versions of their products, it's the concept behind movie trailers, it's the concept behind TV pilots, and it's even the concept behind free food samples in the grocery store.
Your assertion that it's "complete rubbish," with no associated evidence beyond personal experiance of an unspecified sample size which featured demos having an unspecified degree of inferiority to their unspecified full game versions just isn't very compelling.
Besides which, are you seriously trying to claim that you have more faith in the games review industry (or, worse, the games marketing industry...or even, heaven forfend, box art?) to be more representative of which games you'll like than actually playing demos of the games? Or do you just pick games off the shelf at random, completely disregarding any pre-purchase evaluation of whether or not you'll enjoy the game?
Alternatively, do you only play games that your friends have purchased first? I hope you'll see how that may not be a universally applicable metric, particularly this early in the market penetration cycle of the next-gen consoles.
I can't help but think "Man, those guys look all blocky and stretched" when Hockey Night in Canada is on.
That's the magic of HD. SD sports on a big screen (like my 50") are blocky and stretched. Sports in HD on a 50" screen, though, make me wonder how I ever watched sports in SD. The aspect ratio alone, which allows you to see more of the field at once, is worth the price of admission.
For me, at least, the leap from SD to HD when watching sports is literally equivalent to the leap from VHS in EP to progressive scan DVD. It's just plain better.
Since these are all being bundled with the matching player, I don't really see this plan working out so well.