A full length HD format movie would be around 5 Gigabytes, according to this article.
That depends on what is meant by HD. I expect you could produce a downloadable movie in H264 (far better compression than MPEG2) at a higher quality than DVD that clocked in at 2-3Gb. Would it be BD / HD-DVD quality? Nope, but it would be perfectly acceptable and probably quite similar to what you get from digital satellite.
A more important question is how much it would cost to rent or buy movies from a download service and how convenient is it to order and download them. If Sony could make it a no-brainer to rent movies (e.g. for 5 days) at a reasonable price (e.g. $5) or buy them permenantly for $10 they might stand a chance of making some money out of the system.
I have colleagues who have screensavers running on there PCs/laptops for _days_ (as on weekends) and monitors never go to sleep. Sigh.
Which raises an interesting point. I expect if someone were to study how many computers were doing anything useful during out of office hours, the figure would be 10% tops. It seems like it would be an easy way to compel companies to use energy saving settings by hiking the electricity rates out of office hours so that leaving machines on that were doing nothing cost them real money.
What a phenomenally stupid idea. I have personally used a half-dozen machines where enabling "power-saving" is a recipe for operational disaster. Machines that power off completely. Machines that lock up. Machines that do something and never come back.
So in other words, this update should be optional?
S/MIME hasn't exactly killed PGP in all the years both have been around. Getting a PKI cert is an massive pain in the arse, costs money (and / or involves trusting someone with personal details like SSN or passport nr), requires annual renewal, results in larger attachments, slower encryption, and doesn't offer better crypto over PGP.
Sure, getting signed by a CA is useful for trust but only when the signature bestowes trust. Look at the small print on most sites and you'll see that the signature bestowes no trust at all. So what was the point in buying the cert and all of the associated hassle for something which is essentially no better than something you generated yourself?
I expect some business use S/MIME for internal mail and so forth, but it's not exactly common. PGP (and GPG) is perfectly adequate for email crypto and with the increasing quality and user friendliness of extensions such as Enigmail it is becoming very easy to do too.
But realistically neither technology will gain widespread use, but of the two PGP is by far and away the easiest to work with.
I loved the Amiga at the time and was a keen programmer for it. It was amazing that even back in 91 or so that I could knock something up which loosely approximated a Unix environment but booted from floppy. Armed with tools from Fred Fish disks, I cobbled together a pretty cool shell environment. I even bought an enormous sidecar hard drive sporting a whopping 20Mb of storage and used that with the A500 (+ 1.5Mb memory expansion), hacking away with Lattice/SAS C.
But once I switched to the PC I realised that I could do pretty much the same there. Sure, DOS and Windows were clunky but they weren't the only options. I loved the challenges of playing around with OS/2x. Sure OS/2 took up more disk space and memory, but then PC hardware was cheaper and far more expandable than buying an A4000. My PC cost something like £749 (including monitor) compared to the £1099 Commodore wanted from me for something with less specs. I had to toss in some extra RAM which was expensive, but then Borland C++ for OS/2 was a positive bargain compared to SAS C.
Now OS/2 is dead too but there is no use crying over spilt milk. The APIs were virtually identical to Windows so I simply jumped to NT. And on the side I've had always played around with Linux and have been running it on and off since the early days of Slackware.
The problem was that once Commodore went off the scene the Amiga brand meant nothing. I know there were true developments (as opposed to rejigged bundles) after the demise of Commodore but they were half-baked niche efforts with little money, no direction and a miniscule target audience. And that includes AmigaOne. It looked interesting as a project, but seriously, who was their target audience? Who is going to bother to buy a custom PPC board to run a custom OS just for Amiga-esque use experience? What is so compelling about that setup that you can't get with PC or Mac hardware? And if you want the nostaligia, then you've got UAE, AIAB, Amiga Forever or AROS to experience it with, or even a number of skins and windows managers for X. I find that AIAB over UAE satifies my nostalgia needs.
I have to say that Bangkok used to be a steaming hell hole of traffic jams and pollution before the monorail came along. It sure looks ugly but it makes an enormous difference to be travel across the city.
Anyway the only people who make money from commercial software in Thailand are the pirates. Its been a few years since I visited but Pantip Plaza was literally a 6 story high mall where every single shop sold pirate cds, dvds and software. Thailand should embrace open source as a way to get Microsoft and others off their back. If businesses do business on Linux, if governments run off Linux, there is less market for the pirates and the problem will simply recede through less demand.
I used to be an avid Amiga fan (although I also own an Atari ST as well). After going several A500s I thought I would upgrade to something a bit more substantial for development work. The A1200 & A4000 were out but I was put off by the lack of expansion in the A1200. So I saved up something like £999 for the A4000 and rang up a dealer to place an order. The dealer told me Commodore had hiked the price by £100 and reality kicked in - I bought a PC instead. I am so, so glad I did since Commodore went bust a few months later. Besides, I discovered that any advantage the Amiga had once had was practically non-existent. My PC happily ran OS/2, Linux and Windows with sound and graphics that exceeded the Amiga and I can't say I missed much about the Amiga that wasn't in those other operating systems. Sure, the Amiga multitasked which was great but so did OS/2 and Linux and with paging / VM too.
What amazed me was that the Amiga scene didn't die with Commodore. Every bullshit story was lapped up by some of the most vocal, vociferous and plain delusional zealots and fanboys that ever existed. I lost count of the number of times that the brand changed hands, or screenshots surfaced that claimed to be of the next Amiga, or the number of times that AmigaOS was going to be revived to move to the PPC etc. I find it pretty sad that anybody invests that much in a platform, console or OS but people still do. I wonder if in ten years there will be some desperate sadsack rabidly defending the Xbox360, PS3 or Wii in much the same way as you can still find the odd person on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy doing.
This whole battle really pisses me off because the whole reason we have 2 "standards" is because Sony and their opponents want to control the "standard" and thus control how we watch movies. I really wish some people would come in as a third independent party with a high definition digital video OPEN standard.
The chances of a DRM-less open standard are zero. Look at every music format going all the way back to the wax cylinder. They were all proprietary in their day and often there were competing standards. Given that climate all you can hope is that one format will swiftly prevail and everybody gets on with life.
Even if an open standard were to appear, such as with Ogg, the industry would simply ignore it. The best you can hope for is that there are enough gaps in the standard and enough rights in common law that you can rip a pretty good backup for your own purposes using whatever unencumbered mode are still supported.
Except HD-DVD doesn't just store videos so the word Video is meaningless. They could fudge it so the V meant Versatile, but really they should have called it HDD or something.
Blu-Ray is meaningless too and I hate typing it. I'd abbreviate it to BD if anyone knew what I was talking about. Perhaps in a few years they might.
Which format do you think most likely to win? Pragmatism suggests Blu-Ray will win simply because 500,000 players will enter the market within two weeks and millions more shortly after.
I'm not sure what reason people have for rooting for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. The standards are virtually identical in most respects (including their reliance on blue laser diodes meaning each are equally affected by shortages). Neither is an industry standard, and neither does either have a compelling reason you should use it over the other. They are practically twins in most respects aside from the physical storage medium. Sooner or later we'll see players that cope with both standards. At that point the dominant one will win simply based on its market share.
- reports of people saying the PS3 is barely better than an Xbox 360, the Xbox 360 already being extremely noisy (at least with Final Fantasy XI)
Franchise games are likely to look little different for either platform. Blame EA, Ubisoft etc. for that - they're going to do what they do now and take the lowest common denominator approach to their ports. Now take a look at something like Resistance: Fall of Man. Put aside whether the game is any good or not. Just look at how much is happening on screen at any time - enemies, graphics, explosions, bullets, fragments, physics. That is the cell right there. If games ignore the Cell, the PS3 is just a single core PPC with hyperthreading and it has a lot of work to do. If you use the Cell properly you can offload all the transformations, physics, sound, live texturing (for water etc.) onto SPEs and the thing screams.
- the Wii is 2-3 times more powerful than a Gamecube while at the same time requires half or a third of the power
The Wii CPU runs at something like 730Mhz. The thing has been described as an overclocked version of the Gekko chip found in the original Gamecube. It is not 2-3 times more powerful. I have no idea what the power consumption is like, but I doubt it is significantly different from the GC.
- the Nintendo DS can play for hours and hours on a single charge, not really so with the PSP
My PSP runs for about 4-5 hours on a single charge with screen brightness turned down. It's not stunning but its perfectly adequate for the experience.
More expensive = more heat, more power required, less battery life (if applicable)?
You make it sound like better graphics and performance are necessarily bad things and fun comes from machines with less power. If we were to follow the logic backwards we'd all be playing Pong. I'm sure Nintendo can do great things within the severe limitations of their hardware, but the simple fact is that the Wii is mutton dressed as lamb.
What good is HD graphics if you have to keep the same quality per pixel as the last gen? I'd rather stay in normal definition and get a better picture. We're still very, VERY far away from real-life visuals. Pushing pixels only makes crappy graphics look less pixelated.
That simply isn't true. You cannot say that either the XBox 360 or PS3 looks remotely comparable to their last generation. Even if you play through 480i, the difference in textures, poly counts, animation, number of on screen assets is immediately noticeable.
I suggest if you want the experience of a last gen console that you should just buy one and save yourself a lot of money. The Wii is not going to significantly improve quality of games over the Gamecube. The Wii is all about the remote and the difference in experience that it offers. The games themselves will not significantly differ over the GC aside from their controller mechanics. You might see extra tweaks here or there (e.g. slightly boosted polys, greater field depth etc.), but the hardware is too similar to think there is going to be some sea change in visuals. No doubt some enterprising person will put up side by screen shots of Zelda for the Wii & GC that demonstrate this.
It doesn't support HDTV. I think this will be their fatal flaw for next gen console rave. With lifespan of 5 years, it will start showing its age in 2 or 3 years as HDTV become the norm. Really think this was bad decision on nintendo's part, what would it costs to upgrade the video chip and corresponding bandwidth to support 720p? Even the ps2 supported 1080i output as seen with the grand turismo.
You forget how Nintendo makes its money. Most of their handhelds have very obvious shortcomings which they consequently fix with constant revamps. Look how many incarnations the Gameboy, the Gameboy Advance and now the DS have gone through.
I expect Nintendo have learned from this model and will start applying it to their full-size consoles. In a few years hence expect to hear that a new Wii will fix the shortcomings of the current version (whatever they are). This might include sticking an HDMI port on the thing, improving the controller sensitivity or screen tracking and so on.
The Cell was designed to draw 30 watts which is considerably less than a conventional processor. It emits less heat too. By way of comparison, the 3 core PPC in the 360 is supposedly meant to draw anywhere between 80-120 watts which is normal for that kind of chip.
This whole story stinks and it is just being bounced around by people less interested in whether it is true or not than putting the PS3 down.
This story is utter bollocks that has been parroted from one blog to another without the slightest thought gone into checking if it might be true or not. Just follow the links and speculation from blogs all the way down.
How were these figures calculated? By taking the 127 from 100-127V range supported by the PSU and multiplying by 3A to get 381. 3 amps is what the FCC label says. But since the PS3 runs in Japan at 100V, the PS3 must demand at most 300 watts. At most. But that's just the PSU. It doesn't mean the device actually draws that power.
By way of illustration, the XBox 360 PSU run at 5 amps. 5 times 127V = 635 watts. So why no stories about the XBox demanding 635 watts? Why no stories that say the PS3 actually uses half the power of the 360? Because the XBox 360 consumes 160 watts in normal usage. It is entirely misleading to look at what the PSU can deliver to determine what the device actually uses.
The same will be true of the PS3. Unless some reputable site such as ARSTechnica, Toms Hardware etc. sticks a probe in the thing and states what power the thing draws this story should be treated as bollocks. Bollocks swallowed whole by Zonk as usual.
I'd buy a $300 olpc type device in a shot. It would be far, far, more useful to me than hauling around an expensive laptop and cables.
But I don't see what impact signing some silly poll / pledge site will do to change anybody's willingness to produce such a thing. Either the thing is commercially viable or it isn't. The likes of AMD have scads of money. Some of the OEMs have scads of money. Perhaps they should be quietly pitching the idea to OLPC of selling a commercial version and then doing their own market research to see what form it should take.
Hyped Apple / Nintendo / Sony / MS hardware, MS Windows Vista (???), store sales, movies (Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter) etc.
Some people lose all capacity for rational thought when things are hyped. More sensible people sit back and wait for the hype to dissipate and then try to make an objective evaluation once the good, the bad and the ugly are known. If a console really is THAT GOOD, then the chances are that you could walk into any store in several months from now or at any time in the next 5 years and pick one up with no effort at all. And if its THAT BAD well then... you've just saved yourself hundreds of dollars by waiting.
Let the nitwits unwrap their Wii / PS3 on day 1 and discover the thing is broken, or that the online service is borked, or the thing fuses to their carpet, or any number of other things that traditionally occur with new releases. Let them piss and moan that they were scalped on eBay and could have bought 2 or 3 of them if they could wait a few months.
Personally I'd rather wait. There are enough people who can't so let them be guinea pigs.
The PS3 also sells at 500 dollars. People sniff at 600, so why not go for the cheaper one? It's still comparable to the XBox 360 "premium" with the added benefit of a Blu-Ray player, better multimedia support, free online play, region free games, and more advanced processing capabilities.
It's also worth pointing out that XBox 360 was meant to have 10 million units out there already. It's at 6 million which is disappointingly low and way below expectations. Even the PS2 is outselling the 360 and the old XBox is dead as a dodo.
Even if the 360 gets to 8 by the end of the year, it's clear that the PS3 will be catching up fast. I expect that by next year the sales for both consoles will be virtually identical. The wildcard will be sales of the Wii. It could surprise both Sony & Microsoft.
I have had conversations from people who were more casual gamers who complained that Sony is producing a controller that has non-chargeable/non-replaceable batteries,
Just another follow-up. Someone actually dismantled a PS3 SIXAXIS controller. It looks to be trivially easy to replace the battery. All you have to do is undo a few screws and unplug / replace the old one which is attached to the board with a connector. Not as convenient as a little hatch, but not exactly rocket science either.
casual gamers who complained that Sony is producing a controller that has non-chargeable/non-replaceable batteries.
The batteries are chargeable, via a USB cable. There wouldn't be much point in a controller if they weren't. I don't agree that batteries should be sealed in, however they probably do last for years. Mobile phones have batteries which last 2 years even when they're in constant use. So its not unreasonable to assume a PS3 controller will last as long or longer as the controller isn't going to experience anywhere near the demand as a phone battery.
controller has lost rumble,
I do miss this, but despite the BS reasons coming from Sony it seems pretty clear that they took it out for the lawsuit. But Sony should have done something similar to the Wii remote and stuck a speaker in there or something to give some kind of feedback.
and that to take advantage of the features in the PS3 they'd need to spend thousands of dollars on a TV
That isn't true. Even at lower-res, the PS3 & 360 can handle far more assets than the Wii thanks to the increased memory and the (much, much, much faster) Cell processor. Assets equate to more happening on screen, better graphics, better textures, better AI, better physics, better sound effects, larger levels etc.
Nintendo fans love to negate these features to justify the inadequacies of the Wii by saying they want "fun" games, but it's hard to see how the argument that less CPU == more fun. CPU & memory just gives a system greater potential. It doesn't dictate what games do with it.
The difference between the 360 and PS3 will be less pronounced, but titles like Lair or Resistance show that the PS3 is an extremely capable system. I expect that ports from EA & Ubisoft will look mostly identical on both systems.
I'm as interested in the multimedia support as the game. This is another area where the PS3 will shine. You can rip DVDs (via a PC) and download and play them from the PS3. i.e. you have a multimedia jukebox. You could even fire up Yellow Dog Linux, run MythTV and do the same with DiVX / XVid support too.
people usually decide what they want and then justify the purchase; they may have decided they couldn't afford a PS3 and then looked into why they didn't like it.
I think this is true. Everyone has a price in mind and a feature set in mind. I'm just sick of having umpteen devices plugged into my TV so I want a games console that can play multimedia too. That doesn't mean it should sacrifice games performance but it does mean that if it is capable of something and its reasonable that it should support it (e.g. play DVDs) that it do it. I was really looking forward to the 360 and it's promise of being a "multimedia hub". In the end it turned out to be a crippled slave to Windows media center. The only one which comes close to my requirements is the PS3 and that is why I am rooting for it.
Even so, I'll let other people be guinea pigs and buy it first. I have no desire to buy a lemon. If its a great console it'll be a great console in 3-4 months when I can make an informed purchase within the hype and hysteria that precedes a launch.
Hmm, most of these are just garden variety bugs and some are just bullshit completely. For example the "memory leak" problem is long known to be the result of bad extensions and that Firefox itself doesn't leak much although it does maintain memory caches to do expand over time. The options bar isn't particularly confusing, and certainly easier to use that any other browser's settings. I'm not sure what to make of the Yahoo! comment. I've used the old-style and new-style (Web 2.0) Yahoo! Mail client and both work fine as far as I can tell.
Are there bugs? Of course, but most of the ones of this list seem like nonsense. One bug which is present for me is that Firefox treats a system shutdown like an unexpected crash and offers to "restore" the tabs when I restart it. This is annoying, but it will be fixed in time.
Can't speak for anybody else but the upgrade worked perfectly for me. Slightly troubling to see the download speed decrease from 200kb/s down to 55kb/s because the release was Slashdotted midway through my upgrade but I got through it. Perhaps the servers timed out for some and caused problems.
I have no idea about the other titles, but Oblivion is a shoe-in for 90%+ rating simply because its a great game. I guess Bethesda could seriously fuck up the port to lower that score.
Read my second link - it does. It shows Lik-Sang received a cease & desist in June 2005, concerning links to a manual (and probably other stuff). Sony took them to court in Hong Kong a month later. I expect that Lik-Sang yanked the links because it was the obvious copyright violation but kept on doing the rest, i.e. selling Japanese PSPs because they hoped the HK court wouldn't have jurisdiction about the other claims. They can hardly feign innocence and surprise a full 14 months later when Sony chose to sue them in the UK too.
Irrespective, they knew all this a long time ago. Sony was sending out cease and desists left & right in Summer 2005. Companies like Play.com chose to comply which is why they aren't the subject of lawsuits. Companies like Lik-Sang decided to carry on regardless and then play the "boo hoo" card when they got stopped.
I've bought from both Play.com & Lik-Sang.com in the past and both offer fine services. I found Lik-Sang particularly useful when I was after some cables and memory which were 2x as much in my local GAME store. I'm merely pointing out that people who screech "boycott Sony" clearly don't know the history behind Lik-Sang - they'll sell stuff until they are forced to stop. It was grey imports this time, but modchips, and piracy devices the times before.
Also, this shows Lik-Sang acknowledging compliance with some aspects a cease and desist concerning an online manual as well as a lawsuit last year. In short, it should have been absolutely no surprise to them that if they continued selling PSPs that Sony would keep coming at them.
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That depends on what is meant by HD. I expect you could produce a downloadable movie in H264 (far better compression than MPEG2) at a higher quality than DVD that clocked in at 2-3Gb. Would it be BD / HD-DVD quality? Nope, but it would be perfectly acceptable and probably quite similar to what you get from digital satellite.
A more important question is how much it would cost to rent or buy movies from a download service and how convenient is it to order and download them. If Sony could make it a no-brainer to rent movies (e.g. for 5 days) at a reasonable price (e.g. $5) or buy them permenantly for $10 they might stand a chance of making some money out of the system.
Which raises an interesting point. I expect if someone were to study how many computers were doing anything useful during out of office hours, the figure would be 10% tops. It seems like it would be an easy way to compel companies to use energy saving settings by hiking the electricity rates out of office hours so that leaving machines on that were doing nothing cost them real money.
So in other words, this update should be optional?
Sure, getting signed by a CA is useful for trust but only when the signature bestowes trust. Look at the small print on most sites and you'll see that the signature bestowes no trust at all. So what was the point in buying the cert and all of the associated hassle for something which is essentially no better than something you generated yourself?
I expect some business use S/MIME for internal mail and so forth, but it's not exactly common. PGP (and GPG) is perfectly adequate for email crypto and with the increasing quality and user friendliness of extensions such as Enigmail it is becoming very easy to do too.
But realistically neither technology will gain widespread use, but of the two PGP is by far and away the easiest to work with.
But once I switched to the PC I realised that I could do pretty much the same there. Sure, DOS and Windows were clunky but they weren't the only options. I loved the challenges of playing around with OS/2x. Sure OS/2 took up more disk space and memory, but then PC hardware was cheaper and far more expandable than buying an A4000. My PC cost something like £749 (including monitor) compared to the £1099 Commodore wanted from me for something with less specs. I had to toss in some extra RAM which was expensive, but then Borland C++ for OS/2 was a positive bargain compared to SAS C.
Now OS/2 is dead too but there is no use crying over spilt milk. The APIs were virtually identical to Windows so I simply jumped to NT. And on the side I've had always played around with Linux and have been running it on and off since the early days of Slackware.
The problem was that once Commodore went off the scene the Amiga brand meant nothing. I know there were true developments (as opposed to rejigged bundles) after the demise of Commodore but they were half-baked niche efforts with little money, no direction and a miniscule target audience. And that includes AmigaOne. It looked interesting as a project, but seriously, who was their target audience? Who is going to bother to buy a custom PPC board to run a custom OS just for Amiga-esque use experience? What is so compelling about that setup that you can't get with PC or Mac hardware? And if you want the nostaligia, then you've got UAE, AIAB, Amiga Forever or AROS to experience it with, or even a number of skins and windows managers for X. I find that AIAB over UAE satifies my nostalgia needs.
Anyway the only people who make money from commercial software in Thailand are the pirates. Its been a few years since I visited but Pantip Plaza was literally a 6 story high mall where every single shop sold pirate cds, dvds and software. Thailand should embrace open source as a way to get Microsoft and others off their back. If businesses do business on Linux, if governments run off Linux, there is less market for the pirates and the problem will simply recede through less demand.
What amazed me was that the Amiga scene didn't die with Commodore. Every bullshit story was lapped up by some of the most vocal, vociferous and plain delusional zealots and fanboys that ever existed. I lost count of the number of times that the brand changed hands, or screenshots surfaced that claimed to be of the next Amiga, or the number of times that AmigaOS was going to be revived to move to the PPC etc. I find it pretty sad that anybody invests that much in a platform, console or OS but people still do. I wonder if in ten years there will be some desperate sadsack rabidly defending the Xbox360, PS3 or Wii in much the same way as you can still find the odd person on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy doing.
The chances of a DRM-less open standard are zero. Look at every music format going all the way back to the wax cylinder. They were all proprietary in their day and often there were competing standards. Given that climate all you can hope is that one format will swiftly prevail and everybody gets on with life.
Even if an open standard were to appear, such as with Ogg, the industry would simply ignore it. The best you can hope for is that there are enough gaps in the standard and enough rights in common law that you can rip a pretty good backup for your own purposes using whatever unencumbered mode are still supported.
Blu-Ray is meaningless too and I hate typing it. I'd abbreviate it to BD if anyone knew what I was talking about. Perhaps in a few years they might.
I'm not sure what reason people have for rooting for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. The standards are virtually identical in most respects (including their reliance on blue laser diodes meaning each are equally affected by shortages). Neither is an industry standard, and neither does either have a compelling reason you should use it over the other. They are practically twins in most respects aside from the physical storage medium. Sooner or later we'll see players that cope with both standards. At that point the dominant one will win simply based on its market share.
Franchise games are likely to look little different for either platform. Blame EA, Ubisoft etc. for that - they're going to do what they do now and take the lowest common denominator approach to their ports. Now take a look at something like Resistance: Fall of Man. Put aside whether the game is any good or not. Just look at how much is happening on screen at any time - enemies, graphics, explosions, bullets, fragments, physics. That is the cell right there. If games ignore the Cell, the PS3 is just a single core PPC with hyperthreading and it has a lot of work to do. If you use the Cell properly you can offload all the transformations, physics, sound, live texturing (for water etc.) onto SPEs and the thing screams.
- the Wii is 2-3 times more powerful than a Gamecube while at the same time requires half or a third of the power
The Wii CPU runs at something like 730Mhz. The thing has been described as an overclocked version of the Gekko chip found in the original Gamecube. It is not 2-3 times more powerful. I have no idea what the power consumption is like, but I doubt it is significantly different from the GC.
- the Nintendo DS can play for hours and hours on a single charge, not really so with the PSP
My PSP runs for about 4-5 hours on a single charge with screen brightness turned down. It's not stunning but its perfectly adequate for the experience.
More expensive = more heat, more power required, less battery life (if applicable)?
You make it sound like better graphics and performance are necessarily bad things and fun comes from machines with less power. If we were to follow the logic backwards we'd all be playing Pong. I'm sure Nintendo can do great things within the severe limitations of their hardware, but the simple fact is that the Wii is mutton dressed as lamb.
What good is HD graphics if you have to keep the same quality per pixel as the last gen? I'd rather stay in normal definition and get a better picture. We're still very, VERY far away from real-life visuals. Pushing pixels only makes crappy graphics look less pixelated.
That simply isn't true. You cannot say that either the XBox 360 or PS3 looks remotely comparable to their last generation. Even if you play through 480i, the difference in textures, poly counts, animation, number of on screen assets is immediately noticeable.
I suggest if you want the experience of a last gen console that you should just buy one and save yourself a lot of money. The Wii is not going to significantly improve quality of games over the Gamecube. The Wii is all about the remote and the difference in experience that it offers. The games themselves will not significantly differ over the GC aside from their controller mechanics. You might see extra tweaks here or there (e.g. slightly boosted polys, greater field depth etc.), but the hardware is too similar to think there is going to be some sea change in visuals. No doubt some enterprising person will put up side by screen shots of Zelda for the Wii & GC that demonstrate this.
You forget how Nintendo makes its money. Most of their handhelds have very obvious shortcomings which they consequently fix with constant revamps. Look how many incarnations the Gameboy, the Gameboy Advance and now the DS have gone through.
I expect Nintendo have learned from this model and will start applying it to their full-size consoles. In a few years hence expect to hear that a new Wii will fix the shortcomings of the current version (whatever they are). This might include sticking an HDMI port on the thing, improving the controller sensitivity or screen tracking and so on.
This whole story stinks and it is just being bounced around by people less interested in whether it is true or not than putting the PS3 down.
How were these figures calculated? By taking the 127 from 100-127V range supported by the PSU and multiplying by 3A to get 381. 3 amps is what the FCC label says. But since the PS3 runs in Japan at 100V, the PS3 must demand at most 300 watts. At most. But that's just the PSU. It doesn't mean the device actually draws that power.
By way of illustration, the XBox 360 PSU run at 5 amps. 5 times 127V = 635 watts. So why no stories about the XBox demanding 635 watts? Why no stories that say the PS3 actually uses half the power of the 360? Because the XBox 360 consumes 160 watts in normal usage. It is entirely misleading to look at what the PSU can deliver to determine what the device actually uses.
The same will be true of the PS3. Unless some reputable site such as ARSTechnica, Toms Hardware etc. sticks a probe in the thing and states what power the thing draws this story should be treated as bollocks. Bollocks swallowed whole by Zonk as usual.
But I don't see what impact signing some silly poll / pledge site will do to change anybody's willingness to produce such a thing. Either the thing is commercially viable or it isn't. The likes of AMD have scads of money. Some of the OEMs have scads of money. Perhaps they should be quietly pitching the idea to OLPC of selling a commercial version and then doing their own market research to see what form it should take.
Some people lose all capacity for rational thought when things are hyped. More sensible people sit back and wait for the hype to dissipate and then try to make an objective evaluation once the good, the bad and the ugly are known. If a console really is THAT GOOD, then the chances are that you could walk into any store in several months from now or at any time in the next 5 years and pick one up with no effort at all. And if its THAT BAD well then... you've just saved yourself hundreds of dollars by waiting.
Let the nitwits unwrap their Wii / PS3 on day 1 and discover the thing is broken, or that the online service is borked, or the thing fuses to their carpet, or any number of other things that traditionally occur with new releases. Let them piss and moan that they were scalped on eBay and could have bought 2 or 3 of them if they could wait a few months.
Personally I'd rather wait. There are enough people who can't so let them be guinea pigs.
It's also worth pointing out that XBox 360 was meant to have 10 million units out there already. It's at 6 million which is disappointingly low and way below expectations. Even the PS2 is outselling the 360 and the old XBox is dead as a dodo.
Even if the 360 gets to 8 by the end of the year, it's clear that the PS3 will be catching up fast. I expect that by next year the sales for both consoles will be virtually identical. The wildcard will be sales of the Wii. It could surprise both Sony & Microsoft.
Just another follow-up. Someone actually dismantled a PS3 SIXAXIS controller. It looks to be trivially easy to replace the battery. All you have to do is undo a few screws and unplug / replace the old one which is attached to the board with a connector. Not as convenient as a little hatch, but not exactly rocket science either.
My system was slightly modified too - I have an NVidia driver for X. I actually forgot all about this but it worked at the end so I'm happy.
The batteries are chargeable, via a USB cable. There wouldn't be much point in a controller if they weren't. I don't agree that batteries should be sealed in, however they probably do last for years. Mobile phones have batteries which last 2 years even when they're in constant use. So its not unreasonable to assume a PS3 controller will last as long or longer as the controller isn't going to experience anywhere near the demand as a phone battery.
controller has lost rumble,
I do miss this, but despite the BS reasons coming from Sony it seems pretty clear that they took it out for the lawsuit. But Sony should have done something similar to the Wii remote and stuck a speaker in there or something to give some kind of feedback.
and that to take advantage of the features in the PS3 they'd need to spend thousands of dollars on a TV
That isn't true. Even at lower-res, the PS3 & 360 can handle far more assets than the Wii thanks to the increased memory and the (much, much, much faster) Cell processor. Assets equate to more happening on screen, better graphics, better textures, better AI, better physics, better sound effects, larger levels etc.
Nintendo fans love to negate these features to justify the inadequacies of the Wii by saying they want "fun" games, but it's hard to see how the argument that less CPU == more fun. CPU & memory just gives a system greater potential. It doesn't dictate what games do with it.
The difference between the 360 and PS3 will be less pronounced, but titles like Lair or Resistance show that the PS3 is an extremely capable system. I expect that ports from EA & Ubisoft will look mostly identical on both systems.
I'm as interested in the multimedia support as the game. This is another area where the PS3 will shine. You can rip DVDs (via a PC) and download and play them from the PS3. i.e. you have a multimedia jukebox. You could even fire up Yellow Dog Linux, run MythTV and do the same with DiVX / XVid support too.
people usually decide what they want and then justify the purchase; they may have decided they couldn't afford a PS3 and then looked into why they didn't like it.
I think this is true. Everyone has a price in mind and a feature set in mind. I'm just sick of having umpteen devices plugged into my TV so I want a games console that can play multimedia too. That doesn't mean it should sacrifice games performance but it does mean that if it is capable of something and its reasonable that it should support it (e.g. play DVDs) that it do it. I was really looking forward to the 360 and it's promise of being a "multimedia hub". In the end it turned out to be a crippled slave to Windows media center. The only one which comes close to my requirements is the PS3 and that is why I am rooting for it.
Even so, I'll let other people be guinea pigs and buy it first. I have no desire to buy a lemon. If its a great console it'll be a great console in 3-4 months when I can make an informed purchase within the hype and hysteria that precedes a launch.
Are there bugs? Of course, but most of the ones of this list seem like nonsense. One bug which is present for me is that Firefox treats a system shutdown like an unexpected crash and offers to "restore" the tabs when I restart it. This is annoying, but it will be fixed in time.
Can't speak for anybody else but the upgrade worked perfectly for me. Slightly troubling to see the download speed decrease from 200kb/s down to 55kb/s because the release was Slashdotted midway through my upgrade but I got through it. Perhaps the servers timed out for some and caused problems.
I have no idea about the other titles, but Oblivion is a shoe-in for 90%+ rating simply because its a great game. I guess Bethesda could seriously fuck up the port to lower that score.
Irrespective, they knew all this a long time ago. Sony was sending out cease and desists left & right in Summer 2005. Companies like Play.com chose to comply which is why they aren't the subject of lawsuits. Companies like Lik-Sang decided to carry on regardless and then play the "boo hoo" card when they got stopped.
I've bought from both Play.com & Lik-Sang.com in the past and both offer fine services. I found Lik-Sang particularly useful when I was after some cables and memory which were 2x as much in my local GAME store. I'm merely pointing out that people who screech "boycott Sony" clearly don't know the history behind Lik-Sang - they'll sell stuff until they are forced to stop. It was grey imports this time, but modchips, and piracy devices the times before.
Also, this shows Lik-Sang acknowledging compliance with some aspects a cease and desist concerning an online manual as well as a lawsuit last year. In short, it should have been absolutely no surprise to them that if they continued selling PSPs that Sony would keep coming at them.