That's funny, I have two PS2s, one from release day, and they're both trucking along each with hundreds of hours of play time on them, and they work just fine. I can't keep a Gamecube alive to save my life though.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. I would be *very* surprised if more than 10% of the PS2s out there were sold as replacements.... at least because of damage. More people than that might have bought a replacement to get the new slim version. Same goes for the Xbox and the Gamecube.
Just because they tell you what they're doing doesn't excuse their behavior. I should be able to run homebrew games or backups on a game console that I paid for. If Sony wants to retain control of the machine, they should rent or lease it to me instead of selling it.
You assume I'm telling you that you shouldn't be able to do whatever you want with the machine. Go ahead, but as long as they label appropriately, they should be able to make that as difficult as they can or want to, and if you don't like it you'll know not to buy it. Also, the DMCA shouldn't exist.
There should be a backup provision though. You're completely right about that.
It wasn't necessary to install a mod chip; you could plug a cheat device (except the name-brand GameShark) into the expansion port and use it to swap discs
That didn't exist until late in the PSX lifecycle.
just prop the door open and swap the disc while it was spinning.
That was hard to do, and most people were afraid to try it anyway.
I find it hard to believe that piracy is making more of an impact on the PSP than it did on the PSX - anyone with a CD burner and a game enhancer could rent and copy all the PlayStation games they wanted.
Anybody with an internet connection can copy all the PSP games they want with no potential risk to their system. PSP piracy makes PSX piracy look hard.
I'm sure you're aware that the number of illegal copies != the number of sales lost to piracy.
I'm aware of that, and I think that a big part of the lack of sales is because the games cost too much. Piracy is higher for the PSP than I've seen for any newish game console ever though. Practically everybody I know with a PSP is pirating the games instead of buying them. (Sorry, anecdotal evidence is all I've got.)
I'm fairly anti-DRM, but I don't agree with you in this context. The PS3 is a single purpose machine, and unlike DRM on general purpose devices, on a single purpose machine the DRM only hurts people who are going to use the device for something other than what it was intended for. Unlike CDs, DVDs, or other forms of media, console video games are well labeled that they are intended for use only on their particular machine, and the machine is clearly labeled that it only plays it's associated games.
They don't need copy protection to be successful. As another poster mentioned, the original PlayStation was easily modded to play copied games, and yet it went on to be far more successful than its competitors.
A modchip is a fairly high barrier to entry. The PSP is software hackable, and you can see what that is doing to game sales. Even the few good games that are out for it are widely pirated. You don't need perfect copy protection to have a successful console, but it's pretty clear that you need some basic copy protection or you'll fail to turn a profit.
The Nintendo 64, for example, had much more effective copy protection - just try copying a rented cartridge game!
All that proves is that it takes more than copy protection to succeed.
What is so good about democracy? Do the people really have anything to say?
That aside, 99.9% of people have no clue about DNS, or even what it stands for, and thus their opinions on it would do no good, and probably do harm.
People that don't know or care about DNS probably wouldn't bother to express their opinion with a vote......assuming you had a democratic system that involved a formal polling process. I'd prefer that it was democratic in the sense that you ran a server that worked the way you liked. Then the people that don't know or don't care aren't even participants. That's the time honored tradition of how the internet works anyway.
How would you deregulate it, but yet keep it as fair as it even is now?
It's fair now? How about a DNS system built on consensus and trust similar to PGP keyservers? Everybody could run a DNS server which would connect to each other in a peer to peer fashion. Anybody could set their server as authoritative for any domain. As traffic crossed networks looking up IPs, that network would offer an authenticated token to the server that responded with the address. In the event that another server appeared claiming it was authoritative, your server would choose the response with the most tokens. The hurdle is that there would be no trademark enforcement in that case, but I call that a feature.:) There's also some technical detail that would need to be worked out for better protection against hijacking, etc, but you can't expect a perfect solution in a paragraph... You don't just jump off the cliff into something like this, you solicit comments, design, implement technologies, test, work out the kinks, and then hopefully you don't even have to "deregulate" as a verb, because the users will switch to your superior system anyway.
That's just one possibility. The market *would* work out something like that, because it is in everybody's best interests that their addresses resolve properly, but there's no reason that the "market" has to be defined as one set of players rather than some other set.
Giving control to the UN to get it away from the US is a lesser-of-evils attitude. How can you take a lesser-of-evils position unless you consider all of the participants, well, evil?
As I read the comments in this thread, it really is starting to piss me off that people are letting their anti-American attitudes get in the way of talking about what's really going on.
Neither Verisign, ICANN,nor the UN are elected bodies, and none of them exist for the wellbeing of individuals or businesses. Verisign exists to make a profit, ICANN seems to exist to make sure they continue to exist, and the UN operates on the positions of governments (both the elected and/or corrupt types equally). Also, they each make the tasks they perform way more expensive than they have to be (this goes doubly so for the UN).
Are you sure it isn't that the primary reason you want the UN to take over is because you dislike the US government so much? If you ask me, the primary reason to oppose a UN takeover of DNS is that the UN answers to governments instead of people. Maybe you European types like that sort of thing. You did, after all, basically eliminate any individual level involvement in your new government when you set up the EU. I, however, would like a body that is actually accountable to ordinary people to be in charge... even if, for now, that means a subset of ordinary people.
Let's find some organization to run things that is actually democratic, and world representative, instead of handing it over to the UN just because people don't trust the US. Or better yet, let's trade a tiny bit of the reliablilty of the DNS system for distributed, de-regulated management.
(Yeah, I know, I'm going to get modded as Flamebait. Let me tell those moderators in advance that they're biased and wrong.)
Clearly they didn't make even the slightest attempt to validate the charge.
Why should they? They made money even on the fraudulent charge.
DirecTV submitted the charge, and your credit card company charged them a fee. You reported the charge as fraudulent, and they took the money back from DirecTV and charged DirecTV another fee for submitting an invalid charge. The only harm was done to DirecTV (financially) and you (lost time and effort). Plus, they use what happened as an example of how they "protect their customers".
Why do you think we still use security technology from the 1950's on credit cards? Well, sortof... We've actually weakened it a bit... Used to be a magstripe and a signature. Now you don't need a signature for charges under $50, since if those are fradulent you're liable instead of the merchant or credit company.
"Bad" means they might spell your name wrong on the card, not that they can't issue it.
Sure, the OCR software that came with your scanner sucks ass, but that doesn't mean all OCR sucks. Especially if the form is OCR friendly (blocks to write each letter in, check boxes to confirm existing data instead of complete entry, etc...) Plus, unlike generic text OCR, there are easy checks they can do since the data is contextual instead of random. Does the zipcode match the city? Is that street name similar to an actual street name in the town? etc...
They probably could have issued this guy a card just by having gotten the form back and scanning the barcode on the bottom, because all his data was already in their system anyway. So how much OCR did they really have to succeed at?
Not only can they do this stuff, but they can do it at *very* high speed. And the technology isn't that new.
Their target audience is "everybody who is still breathing". But they settle for everybody plus the recently deceased.
Their profits per customer are so high that it's worth sending offers to somebody who isn't interested on the off chance that they may change their mind.
...that profits are so high, these companies make more money having leniant application processes than they lose from the fraud. Sure, the credit card company is liable for the fraud, but not the time it takes for the victim to rectify the situation.
We need to make fraud more expensive for the credit card companies.
Isn't that essentially what the 360 did? Except for the allowing you to go buy your own part, of course...
Come the end of this console generation, when you tally up the statistics, what percentage of the 360 titles do you think will work at all without the hard drive? 5%, maybe? Once one developer requires it, they'll all start to require it, and the first developer to require it releases their game in five days.
If the hard drive for the PS3 is seperate, and you can use third party drives just like you use third party memory cards on the PS2 it will be a stroke of genius on the part of Sony.
Anybody else unfortunate enough to email the editors about an issue?
Maybe it's that they're more likely to answer a paying user than an AC, but all my interactions with the Slashdot staff have been focused, rapid, and informative. Perhaps it's the way you are asking, or the triviality of the issues you are asking about?
If it's a DRM issue, they may be able to build hardware as planned, even if the software isn't ready yet. Perhaps they're worried that something like what happened with the PSP will happen to the PS3. They'd rather (stupidly) delay the launch than put out something with insecure firmware that they won't be able to force people to upgrade...
If that's the case, they could ramp manufacturing as they would have for an early Japanese launch, and have enough units to ship in multiple places at once. Pure speculation though...
I can't wait for the PS3 to come out, just so we stop hearing about how [well|poorly] it's going to do against the 360.
If you ask me, all these stories should be about the battle between Microsoft and Nintendo... Or do people forget that Nintendo actually came out ahead against Microsoft both in terms of worldwide sales, and in US profits.
You shouldn't think for yourself. From now on, either repost what I post, or just look for my posts and reply with "MOD PARENT UP!".
Seriously though, this company isn't *totally* unknown. They designed the crap that goes in Logitech's force feedback stuff. I have a mouse with their stuff in it, and it actually seems fairly clever. It's like you can "feel" the stuff on your screen. It's a little noisy though.
Oh, right, Saturn. Doesn't fit the category of "competing products" if only 4 people had one.
What?
Saturn was the competetor until the N64 came out (two years later). There wasn't anything else in the market. I don't know how you can count the Dreamcast as competition to the PS2 if you don't count the Saturn as competition to the Playstation. At least the Saturn outsold the Playstation for a little while after the Playstation was released. The Dreamcast was practically DOA.
What is making this decision so horrible is the fact that these Blu-Ray drives will push the PS3 to around double the price of the 360 even when selling at a considerable loss.
I think that what you're going to find is that the reason BluRay players are so expensive is that many of them will have a Cell in them. Since the PS3 already has all that equipment in it, the BluRay won't add much to the cost, and the PS3 will be cheaper than everybody predicted.
Regardless of how much it costs to build, there's no way the PS3 ships at a higher price than the 360. Sony just isn't that stupid.
Unfortunate turns of events with the PS2. But they realized one thing : just as in music and film, it's not the actual content that sells, but the hype and marketing!
Um, were you paying attention for the last five years?
It's clearly the content that sells, *not* the hype.
And besides, a once off engineering challenge to gain long term advantages in cost and energy for every single launch? That by itself would justify evacuation.
Actually when I meant that I wasn't convinced there would be energy savings, I was thinking of the energy it would take to keep the air sucked out of the tube. Creating even a very small evacuated space uses quite a bit of energy. It may well be less than what it takes to push a vehicle through the atmosphere, but I'd like to see the numbers. When you don't have to propel your energy source, though, it almost doesn't matter how much energy you use, so why not go with the design that is easy to build?
Air pressure and density above the troposphere is considerably lower than sea level, but in any case I would envision the vessels themselves to be needle shaped, with three fins for the maglev rail.
It doesn't matter that the pressure is lower. The air pressure at lower levels is caused by the pressure of the air above it due to gravity. The volume of air at the bottom of the tube would need to increase the same amount regardless of the pressure at the top of the tube, so the amount of air rushing in would be the same if the tube were horizontal at sea level, or vertical (more or less... the higher parts of the tube would need less air in the vertical case). I can think of several clever potential ways around this, so I don't think it's insurmountable, but you have a huge non-trivial syncronization problem. It seems to me that it would be best to let the air in from the bottom, such that the pressure equalizes at the moment the projectile exits, but the pressures don't equalize instantly, so you would have to know exactly when to open, etc...
As far as I know this combination of technologies is entirely unique.
I meant the sans-tube version. People are working on mag-lev assisted launch technologies. I'm not convinced that the energy savings from using an evacuated tube are worth the trouble, or that there would even be a savings.
Because an evacuated tube is needed to negate the effects of friction at lower altitudes, otherwise you gain nothing by using maglev, as opposed to chemical...
There is still a *lot* to gain. You don't have to propel your energy source.
Either way, they haven't figured out how to switch the magnets fast enough to propel things to the speeds needed. I'm not sure what the current top speed is (it's always increasing, and I'm sure they'll get it eventually), but there's still some technology to develop.
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That's funny, I have two PS2s, one from release day, and they're both trucking along each with hundreds of hours of play time on them, and they work just fine. I can't keep a Gamecube alive to save my life though.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. I would be *very* surprised if more than 10% of the PS2s out there were sold as replacements.... at least because of damage. More people than that might have bought a replacement to get the new slim version. Same goes for the Xbox and the Gamecube.
but LCDs can run on just a few volts of power with little current
That's true about the LCD, but it's not true about the backlight.
Just because they tell you what they're doing doesn't excuse their behavior. I should be able to run homebrew games or backups on a game console that I paid for. If Sony wants to retain control of the machine, they should rent or lease it to me instead of selling it.
You assume I'm telling you that you shouldn't be able to do whatever you want with the machine. Go ahead, but as long as they label appropriately, they should be able to make that as difficult as they can or want to, and if you don't like it you'll know not to buy it. Also, the DMCA shouldn't exist.
There should be a backup provision though. You're completely right about that.
It wasn't necessary to install a mod chip; you could plug a cheat device (except the name-brand GameShark) into the expansion port and use it to swap discs
That didn't exist until late in the PSX lifecycle.
just prop the door open and swap the disc while it was spinning.
That was hard to do, and most people were afraid to try it anyway.
I find it hard to believe that piracy is making more of an impact on the PSP than it did on the PSX - anyone with a CD burner and a game enhancer could rent and copy all the PlayStation games they wanted.
Anybody with an internet connection can copy all the PSP games they want with no potential risk to their system. PSP piracy makes PSX piracy look hard.
I'm sure you're aware that the number of illegal copies != the number of sales lost to piracy.
I'm aware of that, and I think that a big part of the lack of sales is because the games cost too much. Piracy is higher for the PSP than I've seen for any newish game console ever though. Practically everybody I know with a PSP is pirating the games instead of buying them. (Sorry, anecdotal evidence is all I've got.)
not on harming consumers with DRM schemes.
I'm fairly anti-DRM, but I don't agree with you in this context. The PS3 is a single purpose machine, and unlike DRM on general purpose devices, on a single purpose machine the DRM only hurts people who are going to use the device for something other than what it was intended for. Unlike CDs, DVDs, or other forms of media, console video games are well labeled that they are intended for use only on their particular machine, and the machine is clearly labeled that it only plays it's associated games.
They don't need copy protection to be successful. As another poster mentioned, the original PlayStation was easily modded to play copied games, and yet it went on to be far more successful than its competitors.
A modchip is a fairly high barrier to entry. The PSP is software hackable, and you can see what that is doing to game sales. Even the few good games that are out for it are widely pirated. You don't need perfect copy protection to have a successful console, but it's pretty clear that you need some basic copy protection or you'll fail to turn a profit.
The Nintendo 64, for example, had much more effective copy protection - just try copying a rented cartridge game!
All that proves is that it takes more than copy protection to succeed.
What is so good about democracy? Do the people really have anything to say?
...assuming you had a democratic system that involved a formal polling process. I'd prefer that it was democratic in the sense that you ran a server that worked the way you liked. Then the people that don't know or don't care aren't even participants. That's the time honored tradition of how the internet works anyway.
:) There's also some technical detail that would need to be worked out for better protection against hijacking, etc, but you can't expect a perfect solution in a paragraph... You don't just jump off the cliff into something like this, you solicit comments, design, implement technologies, test, work out the kinks, and then hopefully you don't even have to "deregulate" as a verb, because the users will switch to your superior system anyway.
That aside, 99.9% of people have no clue about DNS, or even what it stands for, and thus their opinions on it would do no good, and probably do harm.
People that don't know or care about DNS probably wouldn't bother to express their opinion with a vote...
How would you deregulate it, but yet keep it as fair as it even is now?
It's fair now? How about a DNS system built on consensus and trust similar to PGP keyservers? Everybody could run a DNS server which would connect to each other in a peer to peer fashion. Anybody could set their server as authoritative for any domain. As traffic crossed networks looking up IPs, that network would offer an authenticated token to the server that responded with the address. In the event that another server appeared claiming it was authoritative, your server would choose the response with the most tokens. The hurdle is that there would be no trademark enforcement in that case, but I call that a feature.
That's just one possibility. The market *would* work out something like that, because it is in everybody's best interests that their addresses resolve properly, but there's no reason that the "market" has to be defined as one set of players rather than some other set.
Giving control to the UN to get it away from the US is a lesser-of-evils attitude. How can you take a lesser-of-evils position unless you consider all of the participants, well, evil?
As I read the comments in this thread, it really is starting to piss me off that people are letting their anti-American attitudes get in the way of talking about what's really going on.
Neither Verisign, ICANN,nor the UN are elected bodies, and none of them exist for the wellbeing of individuals or businesses. Verisign exists to make a profit, ICANN seems to exist to make sure they continue to exist, and the UN operates on the positions of governments (both the elected and/or corrupt types equally). Also, they each make the tasks they perform way more expensive than they have to be (this goes doubly so for the UN).
Are you sure it isn't that the primary reason you want the UN to take over is because you dislike the US government so much? If you ask me, the primary reason to oppose a UN takeover of DNS is that the UN answers to governments instead of people. Maybe you European types like that sort of thing. You did, after all, basically eliminate any individual level involvement in your new government when you set up the EU. I, however, would like a body that is actually accountable to ordinary people to be in charge... even if, for now, that means a subset of ordinary people.
Let's find some organization to run things that is actually democratic, and world representative, instead of handing it over to the UN just because people don't trust the US. Or better yet, let's trade a tiny bit of the reliablilty of the DNS system for distributed, de-regulated management.
(Yeah, I know, I'm going to get modded as Flamebait. Let me tell those moderators in advance that they're biased and wrong.)
Clearly they didn't make even the slightest attempt to validate the charge.
Why should they? They made money even on the fraudulent charge.
DirecTV submitted the charge, and your credit card company charged them a fee. You reported the charge as fraudulent, and they took the money back from DirecTV and charged DirecTV another fee for submitting an invalid charge. The only harm was done to DirecTV (financially) and you (lost time and effort). Plus, they use what happened as an example of how they "protect their customers".
Why do you think we still use security technology from the 1950's on credit cards? Well, sortof... We've actually weakened it a bit... Used to be a magstripe and a signature. Now you don't need a signature for charges under $50, since if those are fradulent you're liable instead of the merchant or credit company.
"Bad" means they might spell your name wrong on the card, not that they can't issue it.
Sure, the OCR software that came with your scanner sucks ass, but that doesn't mean all OCR sucks. Especially if the form is OCR friendly (blocks to write each letter in, check boxes to confirm existing data instead of complete entry, etc...) Plus, unlike generic text OCR, there are easy checks they can do since the data is contextual instead of random. Does the zipcode match the city? Is that street name similar to an actual street name in the town? etc...
They probably could have issued this guy a card just by having gotten the form back and scanning the barcode on the bottom, because all his data was already in their system anyway. So how much OCR did they really have to succeed at?
Not only can they do this stuff, but they can do it at *very* high speed. And the technology isn't that new.
Their target audience is "everybody who is still breathing". But they settle for everybody plus the recently deceased.
Their profits per customer are so high that it's worth sending offers to somebody who isn't interested on the off chance that they may change their mind.
...that profits are so high, these companies make more money having leniant application processes than they lose from the fraud. Sure, the credit card company is liable for the fraud, but not the time it takes for the victim to rectify the situation.
We need to make fraud more expensive for the credit card companies.
It's just a ploy to get us all to finally upgrade to a firmware version that hasn't had the copy protection cracked.
Besides, I'll bet money you can't actually play your Playstation games, but that you'll have to buy new copies instead.
Also: How can you list compelling titles for the Playstation and leave out Castlevania: SOTN?
Isn't that essentially what the 360 did? Except for the allowing you to go buy your own part, of course...
Come the end of this console generation, when you tally up the statistics, what percentage of the 360 titles do you think will work at all without the hard drive? 5%, maybe? Once one developer requires it, they'll all start to require it, and the first developer to require it releases their game in five days.
If the hard drive for the PS3 is seperate, and you can use third party drives just like you use third party memory cards on the PS2 it will be a stroke of genius on the part of Sony.
Anybody else unfortunate enough to email the editors about an issue?
Maybe it's that they're more likely to answer a paying user than an AC, but all my interactions with the Slashdot staff have been focused, rapid, and informative. Perhaps it's the way you are asking, or the triviality of the issues you are asking about?
There's another side to that though. Once somebody breaks it, you can't update to a new version.
Nobody, except it seems unlikely.
If it's a DRM issue, they may be able to build hardware as planned, even if the software isn't ready yet. Perhaps they're worried that something like what happened with the PSP will happen to the PS3. They'd rather (stupidly) delay the launch than put out something with insecure firmware that they won't be able to force people to upgrade...
If that's the case, they could ramp manufacturing as they would have for an early Japanese launch, and have enough units to ship in multiple places at once. Pure speculation though...
I can't wait for the PS3 to come out, just so we stop hearing about how [well|poorly] it's going to do against the 360.
If you ask me, all these stories should be about the battle between Microsoft and Nintendo... Or do people forget that Nintendo actually came out ahead against Microsoft both in terms of worldwide sales, and in US profits.
Right, because the Nintendo and Microsoft devices don't use any copy protection...
Who to side for?? Help me!! :-(
You shouldn't think for yourself. From now on, either repost what I post, or just look for my posts and reply with "MOD PARENT UP!".
Seriously though, this company isn't *totally* unknown. They designed the crap that goes in Logitech's force feedback stuff. I have a mouse with their stuff in it, and it actually seems fairly clever. It's like you can "feel" the stuff on your screen. It's a little noisy though.
Oh, right, Saturn. Doesn't fit the category of "competing products" if only 4 people had one.
What?
Saturn was the competetor until the N64 came out (two years later). There wasn't anything else in the market. I don't know how you can count the Dreamcast as competition to the PS2 if you don't count the Saturn as competition to the Playstation. At least the Saturn outsold the Playstation for a little while after the Playstation was released. The Dreamcast was practically DOA.
That's odd....because the launch prices of their first two consoles were dramatically higher than any of the competing products available at the time.
I wonder how old you are...
Sony undercut Saturn by $100, and there were all sorts of accusations of dumping, etc.. when the playstation came out.
Check your history. You're wrong.
What is making this decision so horrible is the fact that these Blu-Ray drives will push the PS3 to around double the price of the 360 even when selling at a considerable loss.
I think that what you're going to find is that the reason BluRay players are so expensive is that many of them will have a Cell in them. Since the PS3 already has all that equipment in it, the BluRay won't add much to the cost, and the PS3 will be cheaper than everybody predicted.
Regardless of how much it costs to build, there's no way the PS3 ships at a higher price than the 360. Sony just isn't that stupid.
Unfortunate turns of events with the PS2. But they realized one thing : just as in music and film, it's not the actual content that sells, but the hype and marketing!
Um, were you paying attention for the last five years?
It's clearly the content that sells, *not* the hype.
And besides, a once off engineering challenge to gain long term advantages in cost and energy for every single launch? That by itself would justify evacuation.
Actually when I meant that I wasn't convinced there would be energy savings, I was thinking of the energy it would take to keep the air sucked out of the tube. Creating even a very small evacuated space uses quite a bit of energy. It may well be less than what it takes to push a vehicle through the atmosphere, but I'd like to see the numbers. When you don't have to propel your energy source, though, it almost doesn't matter how much energy you use, so why not go with the design that is easy to build?
Air pressure and density above the troposphere is considerably lower than sea level, but in any case I would envision the vessels themselves to be needle shaped, with three fins for the maglev rail.
It doesn't matter that the pressure is lower. The air pressure at lower levels is caused by the pressure of the air above it due to gravity. The volume of air at the bottom of the tube would need to increase the same amount regardless of the pressure at the top of the tube, so the amount of air rushing in would be the same if the tube were horizontal at sea level, or vertical (more or less... the higher parts of the tube would need less air in the vertical case). I can think of several clever potential ways around this, so I don't think it's insurmountable, but you have a huge non-trivial syncronization problem. It seems to me that it would be best to let the air in from the bottom, such that the pressure equalizes at the moment the projectile exits, but the pressures don't equalize instantly, so you would have to know exactly when to open, etc...
As far as I know this combination of technologies is entirely unique.
I meant the sans-tube version. People are working on mag-lev assisted launch technologies. I'm not convinced that the energy savings from using an evacuated tube are worth the trouble, or that there would even be a savings.
Because an evacuated tube is needed to negate the effects of friction at lower altitudes, otherwise you gain nothing by using maglev, as opposed to chemical...
There is still a *lot* to gain. You don't have to propel your energy source.
Either way, they haven't figured out how to switch the magnets fast enough to propel things to the speeds needed. I'm not sure what the current top speed is (it's always increasing, and I'm sure they'll get it eventually), but there's still some technology to develop.