Type in =SIN(30 degrees) if you want degrees. I'm sorry, Excel doesn't pander to high school students. In the real world, when the sine of an angle is mentioned, it is SUPPOSED to be radians. Every programming language I know accepts arguments for trig functions as radians.
That's a ridiculous thing to say. We are talking about a specification that applications are meant to IMPLEMENT, not second guess. If a function takes radians it should just say it.
This is the worry. I don't see why anybody should pay Microsoft a penny for online play. PC games have traditionally allowed individuals and clans to set up their own servers. All that Epic or whoever needs to supply is a lookup service that lists running servers to the client so the user can pick which one to play on. This is not a massive expense for Epic since a single PC running Apache could probably manage the load.
Assuming that the online is free, I think Gears has the potential to kick the 360's ass. The 360 version was hobbled with ad hoc play only but dedicated servers run by clans could allow for 20 player carnage.
I wouldn't be so sure about the membership fees. On the one hand Gears of War is made by Epic who traditionally push lots of free stuff as part of the business model. On the other, Microsoft might force the game to use the Windows Live service for its online.
I can see MS giving Epic money to use their service, or perhaps it was written into the contract that Epic have to. Windows Live is dying a death since people reasonably wonder why they should pay for something that should be free and can still be found for free in other online services such as Steam.
"[We] fools" as you put it are simply pointing out that the BC is perfectly acceptable. How do we know this? BECAUSE "WE FOOLS" HAVE ACTUALLY USED IT. You haven't and yet you feel qualified to proclaim that the EU got shafted or similar. The EU may have gotten shafted for the price of the console, but the BC really is not an issue.
Sit various graphics designers, novices, casual users, expert users in front of GIMP and listen to what they say. I guarantee that you will come away with hundreds of comments.
GIMP has fundamental usability issues which have festered for years. I've had the odd rant about GIMP going back years and most of the issues are still there. They really should stop feature development and make the next major release all about cleaning up the existing functionality.
Despite the atrocious UI, the GIMP is an amazingly powerful tool. It's just frustrating to use, and IMHO the effort and time currently required to use it is probably DOUBLE what it could be if it were cleaned up.
One has to remember that COD2 & 3 looked impressive too but all the noise and hubris disguised a stupid AI, dumb automatons as allies, linear levels, infinite spawn points and lots and lots of scripting. Give me a shooter with a decent AI any day.
Noticeable issues to Sony does not mean they are unplayable or necessarily that distracting to the player. For example the only "noticeable" issue I saw in God of War was a flame effect in the title screen looked slightly blocky. Otherwise it plays just fine. GTA: SA plays perfectly as far as I can see. I can't say for the others since I don't have them but so far my experience is that for titles that are flagged, the issues are minor texture things and not a big deal. Furthermore Sony is fixing them with firmware updates.
People making a mountain out of a molehill. It trounces 360 BC, and it's just fine for the vast majority of existing PS2 owners.
Announce free signing for any GPL Linux Distributions (The PC killer)
You can already run Linux on the PS3, without the dist being signed so there is no issue. You do require a bootstrap to get things going the first time but after that it's fine. Go nuts and produce a MythTV based dist.
As for pricing the thing at $200, I suspect that losing $300 on each sale would be suicidal and severely piss off all of Sony's Blu Ray partners too. More likely they're just going to drop the price in increments (as they have begun to do), and put pressure on the 360 which is looking pretty vulnerable when the so-called "Elite" version does not have wi-fi or Blu Ray (or HD DVD) amongst other things.
Not according to Sony's own compatability list for the EU PS3. While many games work fine, there are also a significant number in the lowest-score "noticeable issues" category. Also note the caveats, like how you should skip optional FMV sequences and how you shouldn't use network modes due to graphical corruption.
It should be pointed out that it's software assisted emulation since some of the PS2 hardware remains (the GS chip). However, the emulation is pretty good. Not as good as pure hardware emulation but it supports thousands of games and emulates most of them perfectly. I assume that when the US / Japanese regions get the software BC that it will be even more robust since it must support each region's most popular titles.
My experience is that even titles tagged as having noticeable visual issues still work fairly well. For example in firmware 1.6, Resident Evil 4 had a few screwed up textures (on a washing line of clothes) but otherwise worked fine. Whatever the problem was, Sony fixed it and emulation is now perfect. Same for highly demanding games such as God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus etc. Also, I wouldn't take the current BC list as gospel since Sony take ages after a firmware update to make it current. Titles like God of War II are still not listed (as I write this) even though I know the emulation is flawless.
Unless someone is hoping to play some obscure collection of titles, they really don't have too much to worry about the move to software BC. I expect that Sony will put up a BC list for the US soon enough so people will be able to check for themselves.
The XMB user interface is generally excellent and simple to use. It gets a bit hairy in some of the system settings but I think the UI of the PS3 and the sheer breadth of features it offers are second to none. I think the 360 does have a better online story, but so it should if you're paying $50 a year for it. Even the free PS3 experience is no different from what you find in PC land so it varies but some some games such as Resistance have superb online support - clans, ranked / unranked games etc. In some ways the PS3 may surpass the 360 for online since vendors are more able to play around with their own business models such as allowing mods or map packs.
If I were one of the people who engineered this spec I would be cringing right now. No one involved with crypto would ever proclaim their tech was uncrackable, or safe for 10 years, or anything else that is probably not true. All they can do as engineers is anticipate possible attacks, and attempt to write a security model which has security in depth as well as the ability to "heal" if it does become compromised.
I hope the engineers email this guy to say "thanks a lot asshole". He might have done for BD+ what some idiot did for the Titanic by proclaiming it unsinkable.
Yes you can and this is Sony's own service. It's fairly obvious from the specs of the PS3 that this was always intended but it's been a hell of a long time coming.
I don't have figures of the crime stats themselves but there is much (empirical) evidence to suggest that the police are having significant success in bring serious criminals to court. In fact, 4 of the 6 terrorists charged with the failed 21/7 bomb attempt in London have been found guilty (the jury is still out on the remaining 2).
Securing a conviction is all very worthy but clearly CCTV didn't stop the terrorists from trying to blow themselves up in the first place. In other words it might stop them from having a second go if they botch the first, but that's about it.
I imagine that face recognition and licence plate readers could potentially flag known suspects and provide advance warning to thwart an attack but it has yet to be demonstrated in practice.
I don't quite follow what the Wii has to do with anything. The PS3, 360 and Wii platforms have downloadable games. Arguably you're getting better value from both the 360 & PS3 offerings though.
As for iTunes, it's fine for music, it isn't fine for video. The Apple TV device requires you to own PC / Mac, download movies to the PC / Mac and then sync them to the Apple TV box which is an extra $300 on top. It is too clunky and back-asswards to work properly. It's truly a bizarre design from a company that prides itself on simplicity. If they fixed it so the Apple TV worked without a Mac or a PC, it might work great but at the moment it sucks.
Just as bad is you can't rent movies, you have to buy them and the quality is not true HD at all. The 360 (and hopefully the PS3) solution does offer HD content, and you can rent content. And let's be honest, renting is where it's at and nobody particularly cares about DRM on rented content. People will only feel happy about buying movies to own when the DRM becomes infrastructure neutral, or vendors use some other mechanisms such as watermarking combined with revocation lists to control content playback.
That's also not the point I was making. There's a difference between "can buy" and "already own".
Again, completely irrelevant. People ask what justifies the cost of the PS3 and the answer is all the things in the list and more.
"Far more capable"...absurd.
It is far more capable. As a Linux box it can do pretty much anything the Mac Mini can do. As a PS3 it is a superior multimedia device and games console.
I do not know the mind of Sony but I expect they're not quick to panic like some people imagine. If they were they would have slashed the price of Blu Ray players left and right to compete with Toshiba. Instead they kept their prices high (and helped their partners do the same) while Toshiba loses a ton of cash subsidizing their dying format. I think Sony is quite conservative - it has a long term plan and it sticks with it.
As posted on the PS3 blog - "In short, we're introducing a new PS3 model with a 80GB hard drive which will include a free copy of MotorStorm, all for the retail price of $599. This 80GB package will be available starting in August, just a few short weeks from today. The larger hard drive will give players more of an opportunity to take advantage of all the downloadable games and trailers on the PLAYSTATION Network, including the content from our forthcoming download service which will include videos, movies and other entertainment content."
In other words expect a full video / music download service and possibly IPTV to be announced at E3. It's been a long time coming seeing as it was such an obvious and natural feature for the PS3 to have.
I doubt it would happen. You're currently stuck with what you get which is about 210Mb of main memory. There is potential that the another 200Mb or so of framebuffer memory could be mapped in somehow, or exposed as a storage device for very fast swap.
Performance of Linux isn't bad. It obviously not going to win prizes but it is perfectly adequate for browsing, emulation, video etc.
Calling a $500 price "aggressive" may not be appropriate, really. Realistic, perhaps; it's still $200 pricier than an HD-DVD player or a basic XBox 360. I'd call it barely reasonable, but not aggressive.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that HDDVD players are being heavily subsidized by Toshiba and the strategy is failing badly. Blu Ray is still winning which may explain why Sony and other manufacturers (since there are many) are not falling over themselves to slash prices.
The comparison to the 360 Core is a bit mystifying. I'd say that the hard disk, wi-fi, wireless controllers, blu ray disk, mp3 / aac/h264 playback, HDMI 1.3, web browser, backwards compatibility (that the Core does not support) and a raft of other things are where your $200 is going.
The point is, I already have my computer. Most people already own computers, and it's been that way since the late 90's. The question, then, is what can this PS3 do that people's existing computers can't.
I thought the question is what justifies the cost of the PS3. And the answer is all of the things listed justify the cost of the PS3.
Yes you can buy a PC that does most of those things but that's rather irrelevant. People want to know why the PS3 costs so much (though no more than a Mac Mini), and there's your answer. The comparison to a Mac Mini is quite interesting really. People don't bat an eyelid at the cost of a Mac, yet pan the price of a PS3 even though it costs the same and is a far more capable device.
The annoying thing is that every phone brand uses different batteries and chargers. I wish the EU would force industries such as mobile phones to define and standardize on chargers and batteries so they were interchangeable.
Apple just takes it to a whole new level, presumably because they know that by sealing the battery in that their customers are far more likely to buy a whole new phone / iPod every few years. It's quite disgraceful really.
I believe that Dead Rising is coming to the PS3. Anyway the PS3 is coming out of its drought - there are going to be several hundred titles (retail & download) by the end of the year which includes most of the usual cross-platform stuff plus a lot of exclusives.
I think there is still merit to a 360 or PS3 even if you have an SD set. The graphics are still better than the Wii even in SD simply because the CPU and GPU in the other systems are capable of pushing out more textures, polys, effects. It's not just graphics either since the additional memory & CPU means larger levels, more enemies, better AI, better sound mixing etc.
With the exception of the Cell processor and a different selection of "fairly good online content", I already own something that does all of these things. And unless you're also using your PS3 to post on Slashdot, so do you.
Yes and I bet it cost only $500 (or $600), sits under your TV and has a kickass games console built-in. Right?
There is no question that you could build a PC gaming rig that would kick any console's ass. It sure as hell would not cost you more than $600 to make or buy it though.
It takes a bit of a hit but the software BC is still excellent. It's not a case of supporting a handful of select titles (i.e. the 360's idea of BC) - it supports thousands of titles including most of the things people would actually want to play. There are some exceptions, but not many.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a ridiculous thing to say. We are talking about a specification that applications are meant to IMPLEMENT, not second guess. If a function takes radians it should just say it.
Assuming that the online is free, I think Gears has the potential to kick the 360's ass. The 360 version was hobbled with ad hoc play only but dedicated servers run by clans could allow for 20 player carnage.
I can see MS giving Epic money to use their service, or perhaps it was written into the contract that Epic have to. Windows Live is dying a death since people reasonably wonder why they should pay for something that should be free and can still be found for free in other online services such as Steam.
"[We] fools" as you put it are simply pointing out that the BC is perfectly acceptable. How do we know this? BECAUSE "WE FOOLS" HAVE ACTUALLY USED IT. You haven't and yet you feel qualified to proclaim that the EU got shafted or similar. The EU may have gotten shafted for the price of the console, but the BC really is not an issue.
GIMP has fundamental usability issues which have festered for years. I've had the odd rant about GIMP going back years and most of the issues are still there. They really should stop feature development and make the next major release all about cleaning up the existing functionality. Despite the atrocious UI, the GIMP is an amazingly powerful tool. It's just frustrating to use, and IMHO the effort and time currently required to use it is probably DOUBLE what it could be if it were cleaned up.
One has to remember that COD2 & 3 looked impressive too but all the noise and hubris disguised a stupid AI, dumb automatons as allies, linear levels, infinite spawn points and lots and lots of scripting. Give me a shooter with a decent AI any day.
People making a mountain out of a molehill. It trounces 360 BC, and it's just fine for the vast majority of existing PS2 owners.
You can already run Linux on the PS3, without the dist being signed so there is no issue. You do require a bootstrap to get things going the first time but after that it's fine. Go nuts and produce a MythTV based dist.
As for pricing the thing at $200, I suspect that losing $300 on each sale would be suicidal and severely piss off all of Sony's Blu Ray partners too. More likely they're just going to drop the price in increments (as they have begun to do), and put pressure on the 360 which is looking pretty vulnerable when the so-called "Elite" version does not have wi-fi or Blu Ray (or HD DVD) amongst other things.
It should be pointed out that it's software assisted emulation since some of the PS2 hardware remains (the GS chip). However, the emulation is pretty good. Not as good as pure hardware emulation but it supports thousands of games and emulates most of them perfectly. I assume that when the US / Japanese regions get the software BC that it will be even more robust since it must support each region's most popular titles.
My experience is that even titles tagged as having noticeable visual issues still work fairly well. For example in firmware 1.6, Resident Evil 4 had a few screwed up textures (on a washing line of clothes) but otherwise worked fine. Whatever the problem was, Sony fixed it and emulation is now perfect. Same for highly demanding games such as God of War II, Shadow of the Colossus etc. Also, I wouldn't take the current BC list as gospel since Sony take ages after a firmware update to make it current. Titles like God of War II are still not listed (as I write this) even though I know the emulation is flawless.
Unless someone is hoping to play some obscure collection of titles, they really don't have too much to worry about the move to software BC. I expect that Sony will put up a BC list for the US soon enough so people will be able to check for themselves.
The XMB user interface is generally excellent and simple to use. It gets a bit hairy in some of the system settings but I think the UI of the PS3 and the sheer breadth of features it offers are second to none. I think the 360 does have a better online story, but so it should if you're paying $50 a year for it. Even the free PS3 experience is no different from what you find in PC land so it varies but some some games such as Resistance have superb online support - clans, ranked / unranked games etc. In some ways the PS3 may surpass the 360 for online since vendors are more able to play around with their own business models such as allowing mods or map packs.
I hope the engineers email this guy to say "thanks a lot asshole". He might have done for BD+ what some idiot did for the Titanic by proclaiming it unsinkable.
Yes you can and this is Sony's own service. It's fairly obvious from the specs of the PS3 that this was always intended but it's been a hell of a long time coming.
Securing a conviction is all very worthy but clearly CCTV didn't stop the terrorists from trying to blow themselves up in the first place. In other words it might stop them from having a second go if they botch the first, but that's about it.
I imagine that face recognition and licence plate readers could potentially flag known suspects and provide advance warning to thwart an attack but it has yet to be demonstrated in practice.
As for iTunes, it's fine for music, it isn't fine for video. The Apple TV device requires you to own PC / Mac, download movies to the PC / Mac and then sync them to the Apple TV box which is an extra $300 on top. It is too clunky and back-asswards to work properly. It's truly a bizarre design from a company that prides itself on simplicity. If they fixed it so the Apple TV worked without a Mac or a PC, it might work great but at the moment it sucks.
Just as bad is you can't rent movies, you have to buy them and the quality is not true HD at all. The 360 (and hopefully the PS3) solution does offer HD content, and you can rent content. And let's be honest, renting is where it's at and nobody particularly cares about DRM on rented content. People will only feel happy about buying movies to own when the DRM becomes infrastructure neutral, or vendors use some other mechanisms such as watermarking combined with revocation lists to control content playback.
Again, completely irrelevant. People ask what justifies the cost of the PS3 and the answer is all the things in the list and more.
"Far more capable"...absurd.
It is far more capable. As a Linux box it can do pretty much anything the Mac Mini can do. As a PS3 it is a superior multimedia device and games console.
I do not know the mind of Sony but I expect they're not quick to panic like some people imagine. If they were they would have slashed the price of Blu Ray players left and right to compete with Toshiba. Instead they kept their prices high (and helped their partners do the same) while Toshiba loses a ton of cash subsidizing their dying format. I think Sony is quite conservative - it has a long term plan and it sticks with it.
In other words expect a full video / music download service and possibly IPTV to be announced at E3. It's been a long time coming seeing as it was such an obvious and natural feature for the PS3 to have.
I suggest you won't be buying an consumer gear from ANY company if that's your attitude.
Performance of Linux isn't bad. It obviously not going to win prizes but it is perfectly adequate for browsing, emulation, video etc.
I think it's worth bearing in mind that HDDVD players are being heavily subsidized by Toshiba and the strategy is failing badly. Blu Ray is still winning which may explain why Sony and other manufacturers (since there are many) are not falling over themselves to slash prices.
The comparison to the 360 Core is a bit mystifying. I'd say that the hard disk, wi-fi, wireless controllers, blu ray disk, mp3 / aac /h264 playback, HDMI 1.3, web browser, backwards compatibility (that the Core does not support) and a raft of other things are where your $200 is going.
I thought the question is what justifies the cost of the PS3. And the answer is all of the things listed justify the cost of the PS3.
Yes you can buy a PC that does most of those things but that's rather irrelevant. People want to know why the PS3 costs so much (though no more than a Mac Mini), and there's your answer. The comparison to a Mac Mini is quite interesting really. People don't bat an eyelid at the cost of a Mac, yet pan the price of a PS3 even though it costs the same and is a far more capable device.
Apple just takes it to a whole new level, presumably because they know that by sealing the battery in that their customers are far more likely to buy a whole new phone / iPod every few years. It's quite disgraceful really.
I think there is still merit to a 360 or PS3 even if you have an SD set. The graphics are still better than the Wii even in SD simply because the CPU and GPU in the other systems are capable of pushing out more textures, polys, effects. It's not just graphics either since the additional memory & CPU means larger levels, more enemies, better AI, better sound mixing etc.
Yes and I bet it cost only $500 (or $600), sits under your TV and has a kickass games console built-in. Right?
There is no question that you could build a PC gaming rig that would kick any console's ass. It sure as hell would not cost you more than $600 to make or buy it though.
It takes a bit of a hit but the software BC is still excellent. It's not a case of supporting a handful of select titles (i.e. the 360's idea of BC) - it supports thousands of titles including most of the things people would actually want to play. There are some exceptions, but not many.