Um, you do know that you always have the choice available to open a page in a new window, right?
So what are you bitching about? If you want to pull it directly from your task bar use a window, if you would rather nest it with one window with some other pages, use a tab. Once you start using tabs, you will find that they are very handy.
Congratulations, Microsoft! With this new feature, IE users will at last be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the cutting edge of three years ago.
I suspect that they anticipate selling other bluetooth devices to work along with the controllers, so it will actually be four players and three other gizmos of some kind... or maybe six players and one other strange gizmo.
While there's a lot to like about both consoles, I don't like the design of either of them.
This stand-it-up-on-the-side crap might look cool to some people, but it really doesn't fit in to the scheme of most media rooms very well.
And both of them have goofy contours with absolutely no function dictating the form, and not even much appeal from an aesthetic sense.
It's like Sony wanted their console to remind people of a Toyota Prius... And Microsoft has a consultant tell them that curved panels are "hip" right now.
The PS3 "boomerang" controller looks like an interesting industrial design choice, though. As a typical adult American, it will be fun to try playing Sony games with a controller that actually fits my hands, for a change. (Although I'm sure there will be howls of anguish from old-school Playstation bigots who think anything bigger than a suppository tablet is way too big for a game controller.)
If this really is a marketing thing, maybe it's high time for some counter-marketing.
I, for one, would very much prefer a man-made diamond.
A pretty rock which somebody found in a hole is nice, but a man-made diamond is a testament to the wonders of modern engineering.
I would love it if some company were to start selling high-dollar jewelry made exclusively with man-made gems. Call them "artisan crafted" stones or something.
If DeBeers can run a few ads around Valentine's Day to create the illusion that mined stones are worth more than they really are, it seems to me somebody could do the same thing to elevate the perceived value of the man-made ones.
Play the angles just right, and you will have women refusing to consider accepting flawed, irregular, "natrual" stones (which were probably dug up using child labor) as a gift, insisting on the "real" lab-made diamonds, which are perfect.
Some of the cheerleaders for the Minimate and similar products are overlooking the fact that not all $60 Firewire enclosures are massive and ugly.
I have two that are very small and fanless (thanks to an external power brick which steps down to DC power on the plug.) They are nothing special, just the cheap-assed in-house branded generic enclosures from my local electronics store.
I agree, having read both threads, that the contrast between cheerleaders for each platform is striking.
Personally, I'm hoping the PS3 is light-years ahead of the XBox360.
Not because I have anything against the XBox, but because I think the 360 looks like a really nice piece of hardware, and for something to be even better by a large margin, it must really be something special.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
While I enjoy the games on my current X-Box a lot, I still have not signed up for Live and have no intention of doing so. While the service seems nice, I just can't bring myself to pay for that which I'm accustomed to doing for free with almost every network PC game I've ever played (with the exception of MMORPG's, which you just know are going to have another fee on top of the Live costs if they ever come to the X-Box.)
What I really want is a console that lets me play cool, state-of-the-art games without having to sign up for some ongoing service just to take full advantage of them. From what I've seen so far, the XBox360 is not that console... and the PS3 is also not likely to be. The question then becomes, will either console offer a range of games good enough to make me want to put up with the elements I dislike about the platform?
The only reason for any of the posting was the original poster reversed history about who was following who, and then posted a load of crap about the profitability of the XBox system.
Actually, I was the original poster, and I didn't "reverse history", I merely confused the Dreamcast with the first edition of the X-Box.
Also, I wasn't the one claiming Microsoft's home media division made a profit. That was an AC who posted later.
Plus, that AC might be talking about the X-Box itself, which IIRC has started to sell at a profit in the last couple years. The division lost money an a whole lot of other projects (such as their ill-fated PVR and their current stabs at the MPC), so you can't really pin all those losses on the X-Box itself.
I haven't tried GT, so maybe you can enlighten me: It's just another racing game, isn't it?
Grand Theft Auto III created an environment which at least created the illusion of being totally open-ended. There were all kinds of fun things you could do in that game which had nothing to do with advancing the "narrative" of the story. It really did feel like something very different from any console game I've played or even seen before, and it had me insanely jealous of my Playstation owning friends until it was ported over to the X-Box.
But my reaction upon seeing GT was, "huh... A racing game."
Wow. Microsoft has thrown away a lot of money on their quest for a "home entertainment" market.
In spite of what the grandparent AC says, I think they will throw away a lot more. They seem to really like losing money on consoles and set-top PVR systems.
What I wonder is: Why do you care? Are you a Microsoft shareholder? I can't imagine why anybody else would. Rich people and companies waste their money on all kinds of goofy things.
When the new XBox and Playstation generation comes out, I'll choose according to the games I want to play, not which little club I want to belong to, nor which one is the current "winner" of "the console wars."
Unless you can somehow jury rig a DVI or component port to an ipod you won't be able to see HD res anyway.
Which kind of gets back to my point. Five years ago, something like an iPod that served up 640x480 video would have rocked people's worlds.
People's expectations are a lot higher now, and if you were going to make a hand-held video player for the sake of selling movies and playing back on modern TV sets, you would be laughed at if it could not handle HDTV.
The thread was about using the iPod for playback on bigger screens. For that, you would want something considerably better than 320x240
Re:Enough with the Xbox hype already!
on
Out Of The XBox
·
· Score: 1
Manufacturing these days is all a big corporate soup.
All I know for sure is that every mouse I've seen which Microsoft was willing to screen-print their name on turned out to be a pretty good one, while I've encountered several crappy ones sold my Logitech.
Of course, Kensington pwnz as far as I'm concerned.
AFAIK, Sony's exclusive contract with Rockstar was up after the third and latest installment of the GTA3 series. I don't see that as a selling point any longer.
So, you don't think Rockstar is likely to re-up the deal?
If I were them, I wouldn't rule out another exclusive contract until I saw how much Sony was ready to offer. The GTA series pretty much single-handedly defined what was so cool about the PS/2 in the eyes of many gamers. I can't imagine Sony is in any hurry to give that up.
Re:Enough with the Xbox hype already!
on
Out Of The XBox
·
· Score: 1
To be fair, Microsoft pretty much invented astroturfing and has been caught at it often enough that pretty much any pro-MS statement on the Internet is going to be looked at with a little extra skepticism by anybody with a clue. They brought it on themselves.
But you know, once in a while Microsoft actually is capable of releasing a pretty good product. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
For example, I generally like Microsoft mice (which, IIRC, are really re-badged HP mice) a lot better than the ones from Logitech... but just because I said that, I'm sure there's some Logitech fanboy out who will assume I'm typing this from a cube in Redmond.
You know, as a Mac owner, never once have I given a damn that their market share is so tiny.
Sure, there were a few years there in the late 90s when their dwindling share had me worried that they might go out of business, but that's another matter.
As long as people are happy with a product, why should anyone give a damn how popular it is with other people. My X-Box plays several games which I really enjoy, and there's only one game out there (GTA-SA) which makes me the least bit jealous of other consoles. I don't give a fuck if nine console buyers out of ten are buying PS/2 systems. Good for them! What they do has nothing to do with me.
HALO 2 does not suddenly become less fun just because the X-Box isn't popular in Korea.
Likewise, if I decide to buy one of the next-generation consoles, I'll choose between the three based on the games I want to play, and I really don't care who "wins" to top marketshare position. It's not like I'm a shareholder or something.
Re:Sony is deluded.
on
Out Of The XBox
·
· Score: 1, Informative
As I explained to an earlier reply, I had the X-Box mixed up with the Dreamcast, which was the console which Sony was trashing to get people to wait for the PS/2.
So it happened, just with a different console than I remembered off the top of my head.
(P.S. Don't assume everybody you disagree with is a "fanboy." If you knew me, you wouldn't consider calling me a Microsoft fan of any stripe. If anything, I'm a Macintosh bigot.)
GTA is coming to the Xbox as well, where no doubt it will look better. Sony appears to have bought limited-time exclusivity, but Rockstar is hardly a Sony-owned shop.
I was pretty happy when GTA-III and GTA-VC finally made it to the X-Box, but the fact remains that Sony owners get to play them right away, while owners of other gaming systems have to wait, and for Sony that's a huge edge. (And it will remain so as long as the GTA series continues to be so much fun.)
I consider the X-Box to be the successor to the Dreamcast in many ways, as Sega has sadly departed from the market.
The X-Box had a very similar strategy to the Sega consoles: You can't compete with Sony and Nintendo when it comes to the huge quantity of available games, so compete on quality and make money off a smaller niche of the market.
I have a lot of PS/2 owning friends who consider the graphics to be "good enough", but when I see their games fired up I sometimes wonder if we are looking at the same screen.
Sony is deluded.
on
Out Of The XBox
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"X-Box 1.5"?
I'm not really all that fired up about the XBox 360... Until I see what games come out for it, I feel no real need to get one, but simply putting one of these things side-by-side with the current XBox or PS/2 makes it obvious that this is definately a huge leap forward, as far as the technology is concerned.
Let's set aside the massively faster CPU, and the collosally better graphics card. One would expect that.
This thing needs two wires: Power, and output. All the controllers connect wirelessly, and it uses 802.11 wireless for the network connection. I'm sorry, Sony, but I consider this a feature to be a very big deal, and one which you and Microsoft should have made the standard in the previous generation of consoles.
Full high-def support is also a biggie. DOAX on the old XBox in 480p looks far better than anything on the Playstation, but once you put it on the big-screen HDTV, the flaws become much more obvious.
I seem to recall Sony talking down the original X-Box back in the day... only to come out with a PS/2 console which in many ways is technically inferior. I've got a feeling history is repeating. Around November, Sony will ramp up yet another "just you wait" campaign, and eventually give us a PS/3 which is almost as good as the X-Box.... and people will buy the Sony anyway. Not because it will be better, but because of their exclusive contracts with the Rockstar for the Grand Theft Auto series. For many people, there simply is no reason to own a game console apart from playing GTA.
From the link you posted: H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate
So, to rip a DVD at the same resolution and frame rate, you go down from 7.5 GB to about 3 GB. Impressive, but still a huge file.
And if you want to retain the quality of a full-HD signal, you are easilly looking at four times that size.
Also, full-frame 1080i playback of H.264 files via Quicktime requires a dual-G5 tower. Do you really think the iPod will match that kind of processing power anytime soon?
Sure, there's other ways to copy a DVD, but nothing legal.
Oh really? So it's illegal to make a backup archive of your own DVD on a hard drive you own?
Both Apple and Microsoft are enabling copyright violations by having the ability to open VIDEO_TS folders with their included DVD players?
Everybody who rips DVD's they own to their laptop hard drive so they can get more battery life when watching their movies during a long flight is breaking the law?
Good luck trying to make that case.
Don't take this too personally, but I think there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod option.
who wants to look at photos on a tiny screen like that? Until you factor in the ability to hook it up to a TV or a projector, which suddenly allows it to be a hand-held slideshow presenter.
I imagine the same thing is in mind for the iPodVideo.
The problem is, a typical DVD these days is 7.5 GB of data, and only slightly better-looking than a standard-def TV signal.
More and more people are beginning to own huge 720p or 1080i TV sets, and believe me, once you do, the relatively low resolution of DVD's becomes pretty much the minimum you are willing to put up with when watching a movie you paid to see.
Anybody wanting to sell video in a format which is compressed even more than DVD is going to have a tough sell. Lossy video formats are barely even watchable on a 20-inch SDTV. Zoom them to fill a wide-screen HDTV, and they will look like ass compared to what people are used to.
Right now, DVD movies have become so cheap, they actually cost less than the CD sountrack of the same film. (Which the record industry should find damning.) Quality older titles flood the shelves of Best Buy and deepdiscountdvd.com for less than $10 each.
Music downloads can compete against CDs, because the record companies are gouging people. 99 cents a song seems reasonable when albums cost as high as $18 a pop sometimes.
How in the hell are you going to sell a video download service when NetFlix and Blockbuster already have such fantastically cheap and convenient rental services, and DVD sales cost mere pocket change?
Given the size of this beast it may well be that there is practically no air gap inside the box. This would enable Nintendo to use the whole surface area of the box as a heatsink.
So, you can play Mario Karts 2 while cooking your breakfast on it?
Slashdot Mirror
You can.
The new-ish group for it is alt.binaries.doctorwho (IIRC)
Um, you do know that you always have the choice available to open a page in a new window, right?
So what are you bitching about? If you want to pull it directly from your task bar use a window, if you would rather nest it with one window with some other pages, use a tab. Once you start using tabs, you will find that they are very handy.
Congratulations, Microsoft! With this new feature, IE users will at last be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the cutting edge of three years ago.
I suspect that they anticipate selling other bluetooth devices to work along with the controllers, so it will actually be four players and three other gizmos of some kind... or maybe six players and one other strange gizmo.
That's the best guess I can come up with.
While there's a lot to like about both consoles, I don't like the design of either of them.
This stand-it-up-on-the-side crap might look cool to some people, but it really doesn't fit in to the scheme of most media rooms very well.
And both of them have goofy contours with absolutely no function dictating the form, and not even much appeal from an aesthetic sense.
It's like Sony wanted their console to remind people of a Toyota Prius... And Microsoft has a consultant tell them that curved panels are "hip" right now.
The PS3 "boomerang" controller looks like an interesting industrial design choice, though. As a typical adult American, it will be fun to try playing Sony games with a controller that actually fits my hands, for a change. (Although I'm sure there will be howls of anguish from old-school Playstation bigots who think anything bigger than a suppository tablet is way too big for a game controller.)
If this really is a marketing thing, maybe it's high time for some counter-marketing.
I, for one, would very much prefer a man-made diamond.
A pretty rock which somebody found in a hole is nice, but a man-made diamond is a testament to the wonders of modern engineering.
I would love it if some company were to start selling high-dollar jewelry made exclusively with man-made gems. Call them "artisan crafted" stones or something.
If DeBeers can run a few ads around Valentine's Day to create the illusion that mined stones are worth more than they really are, it seems to me somebody could do the same thing to elevate the perceived value of the man-made ones.
Play the angles just right, and you will have women refusing to consider accepting flawed, irregular, "natrual" stones (which were probably dug up using child labor) as a gift, insisting on the "real" lab-made diamonds, which are perfect.
Some of the cheerleaders for the Minimate and similar products are overlooking the fact that not all $60 Firewire enclosures are massive and ugly.
I have two that are very small and fanless (thanks to an external power brick which steps down to DC power on the plug.) They are nothing special, just the cheap-assed in-house branded generic enclosures from my local electronics store.
I agree, having read both threads, that the contrast between cheerleaders for each platform is striking.
Personally, I'm hoping the PS3 is light-years ahead of the XBox360.
Not because I have anything against the XBox, but because I think the 360 looks like a really nice piece of hardware, and for something to be even better by a large margin, it must really be something special.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
While I enjoy the games on my current X-Box a lot, I still have not signed up for Live and have no intention of doing so. While the service seems nice, I just can't bring myself to pay for that which I'm accustomed to doing for free with almost every network PC game I've ever played (with the exception of MMORPG's, which you just know are going to have another fee on top of the Live costs if they ever come to the X-Box.)
What I really want is a console that lets me play cool, state-of-the-art games without having to sign up for some ongoing service just to take full advantage of them. From what I've seen so far, the XBox360 is not that console... and the PS3 is also not likely to be. The question then becomes, will either console offer a range of games good enough to make me want to put up with the elements I dislike about the platform?
The only reason for any of the posting was the original poster reversed history about who was following who, and then posted a load of crap about the profitability of the XBox system.
Actually, I was the original poster, and I didn't "reverse history", I merely confused the Dreamcast with the first edition of the X-Box.
Also, I wasn't the one claiming Microsoft's home media division made a profit. That was an AC who posted later.
Plus, that AC might be talking about the X-Box itself, which IIRC has started to sell at a profit in the last couple years. The division lost money an a whole lot of other projects (such as their ill-fated PVR and their current stabs at the MPC), so you can't really pin all those losses on the X-Box itself.
I haven't tried GT, so maybe you can enlighten me: It's just another racing game, isn't it?
Grand Theft Auto III created an environment which at least created the illusion of being totally open-ended. There were all kinds of fun things you could do in that game which had nothing to do with advancing the "narrative" of the story. It really did feel like something very different from any console game I've played or even seen before, and it had me insanely jealous of my Playstation owning friends until it was ported over to the X-Box.
But my reaction upon seeing GT was, "huh... A racing game."
Am I missing something really revolutionary?
Home and Entertainment
Operating loss 2002 1.135 billion
Operating loss 2003 1.191 billion
Operating loss 2004 1.215 billion
Wow. Microsoft has thrown away a lot of money on their quest for a "home entertainment" market.
In spite of what the grandparent AC says, I think they will throw away a lot more. They seem to really like losing money on consoles and set-top PVR systems.
What I wonder is: Why do you care? Are you a Microsoft shareholder? I can't imagine why anybody else would. Rich people and companies waste their money on all kinds of goofy things.
When the new XBox and Playstation generation comes out, I'll choose according to the games I want to play, not which little club I want to belong to, nor which one is the current "winner" of "the console wars."
Unless you can somehow jury rig a DVI or component port to an ipod you won't be able to see HD res anyway.
Which kind of gets back to my point. Five years ago, something like an iPod that served up 640x480 video would have rocked people's worlds.
People's expectations are a lot higher now, and if you were going to make a hand-held video player for the sake of selling movies and playing back on modern TV sets, you would be laughed at if it could not handle HDTV.
The thread was about using the iPod for playback on bigger screens. For that, you would want something considerably better than 320x240
Manufacturing these days is all a big corporate soup.
All I know for sure is that every mouse I've seen which Microsoft was willing to screen-print their name on turned out to be a pretty good one, while I've encountered several crappy ones sold my Logitech.
Of course, Kensington pwnz as far as I'm concerned.
AFAIK, Sony's exclusive contract with Rockstar was up after the third and latest installment of the GTA3 series. I don't see that as a selling point any longer.
So, you don't think Rockstar is likely to re-up the deal?
If I were them, I wouldn't rule out another exclusive contract until I saw how much Sony was ready to offer. The GTA series pretty much single-handedly defined what was so cool about the PS/2 in the eyes of many gamers. I can't imagine Sony is in any hurry to give that up.
To be fair, Microsoft pretty much invented astroturfing and has been caught at it often enough that pretty much any pro-MS statement on the Internet is going to be looked at with a little extra skepticism by anybody with a clue. They brought it on themselves.
But you know, once in a while Microsoft actually is capable of releasing a pretty good product. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
For example, I generally like Microsoft mice (which, IIRC, are really re-badged HP mice) a lot better than the ones from Logitech... but just because I said that, I'm sure there's some Logitech fanboy out who will assume I'm typing this from a cube in Redmond.
And who can blame him?
You know, as a Mac owner, never once have I given a damn that their market share is so tiny.
Sure, there were a few years there in the late 90s when their dwindling share had me worried that they might go out of business, but that's another matter.
As long as people are happy with a product, why should anyone give a damn how popular it is with other people. My X-Box plays several games which I really enjoy, and there's only one game out there (GTA-SA) which makes me the least bit jealous of other consoles. I don't give a fuck if nine console buyers out of ten are buying PS/2 systems. Good for them! What they do has nothing to do with me.
HALO 2 does not suddenly become less fun just because the X-Box isn't popular in Korea.
Likewise, if I decide to buy one of the next-generation consoles, I'll choose between the three based on the games I want to play, and I really don't care who "wins" to top marketshare position. It's not like I'm a shareholder or something.
As I explained to an earlier reply, I had the X-Box mixed up with the Dreamcast, which was the console which Sony was trashing to get people to wait for the PS/2.
So it happened, just with a different console than I remembered off the top of my head.
(P.S. Don't assume everybody you disagree with is a "fanboy." If you knew me, you wouldn't consider calling me a Microsoft fan of any stripe. If anything, I'm a Macintosh bigot.)
GTA is coming to the Xbox as well, where no doubt it will look better. Sony appears to have bought limited-time exclusivity, but Rockstar is hardly a Sony-owned shop.
I was pretty happy when GTA-III and GTA-VC finally made it to the X-Box, but the fact remains that Sony owners get to play them right away, while owners of other gaming systems have to wait, and for Sony that's a huge edge. (And it will remain so as long as the GTA series continues to be so much fun.)
Right you are.
I consider the X-Box to be the successor to the Dreamcast in many ways, as Sega has sadly departed from the market.
The X-Box had a very similar strategy to the Sega consoles: You can't compete with Sony and Nintendo when it comes to the huge quantity of available games, so compete on quality and make money off a smaller niche of the market.
I have a lot of PS/2 owning friends who consider the graphics to be "good enough", but when I see their games fired up I sometimes wonder if we are looking at the same screen.
"X-Box 1.5"?
... and people will buy the Sony anyway. Not because it will be better, but because of their exclusive contracts with the Rockstar for the Grand Theft Auto series. For many people, there simply is no reason to own a game console apart from playing GTA.
I'm not really all that fired up about the XBox 360... Until I see what games come out for it, I feel no real need to get one, but simply putting one of these things side-by-side with the current XBox or PS/2 makes it obvious that this is definately a huge leap forward, as far as the technology is concerned.
Let's set aside the massively faster CPU, and the collosally better graphics card. One would expect that.
This thing needs two wires: Power, and output. All the controllers connect wirelessly, and it uses 802.11 wireless for the network connection. I'm sorry, Sony, but I consider this a feature to be a very big deal, and one which you and Microsoft should have made the standard in the previous generation of consoles.
Full high-def support is also a biggie. DOAX on the old XBox in 480p looks far better than anything on the Playstation, but once you put it on the big-screen HDTV, the flaws become much more obvious.
I seem to recall Sony talking down the original X-Box back in the day... only to come out with a PS/2 console which in many ways is technically inferior. I've got a feeling history is repeating. Around November, Sony will ramp up yet another "just you wait" campaign, and eventually give us a PS/3 which is almost as good as the X-Box.
From the link you posted: H.264 delivers the same quality as MPEG-2 at a third to half the data rate
So, to rip a DVD at the same resolution and frame rate, you go down from 7.5 GB to about 3 GB. Impressive, but still a huge file.
And if you want to retain the quality of a full-HD signal, you are easilly looking at four times that size.
Also, full-frame 1080i playback of H.264 files via Quicktime requires a dual-G5 tower. Do you really think the iPod will match that kind of processing power anytime soon?
Sure, there's other ways to copy a DVD, but nothing legal.
Oh really? So it's illegal to make a backup archive of your own DVD on a hard drive you own?
Both Apple and Microsoft are enabling copyright violations by having the ability to open VIDEO_TS folders with their included DVD players?
Everybody who rips DVD's they own to their laptop hard drive so they can get more battery life when watching their movies during a long flight is breaking the law?
Good luck trying to make that case.
Don't take this too personally, but I think there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod option.
who wants to look at photos on a tiny screen like that? Until you factor in the ability to hook it up to a TV or a projector, which suddenly allows it to be a hand-held slideshow presenter.
I imagine the same thing is in mind for the iPodVideo.
The problem is, a typical DVD these days is 7.5 GB of data, and only slightly better-looking than a standard-def TV signal.
More and more people are beginning to own huge 720p or 1080i TV sets, and believe me, once you do, the relatively low resolution of DVD's becomes pretty much the minimum you are willing to put up with when watching a movie you paid to see.
Anybody wanting to sell video in a format which is compressed even more than DVD is going to have a tough sell. Lossy video formats are barely even watchable on a 20-inch SDTV. Zoom them to fill a wide-screen HDTV, and they will look like ass compared to what people are used to.
Right now, DVD movies have become so cheap, they actually cost less than the CD sountrack of the same film. (Which the record industry should find damning.) Quality older titles flood the shelves of Best Buy and deepdiscountdvd.com for less than $10 each.
Music downloads can compete against CDs, because the record companies are gouging people. 99 cents a song seems reasonable when albums cost as high as $18 a pop sometimes.
How in the hell are you going to sell a video download service when NetFlix and Blockbuster already have such fantastically cheap and convenient rental services, and DVD sales cost mere pocket change?
Given the size of this beast it may well be that there is practically no air gap inside the box. This would enable Nintendo to use the whole surface area of the box as a heatsink.
So, you can play Mario Karts 2 while cooking your breakfast on it?
mini iMac - can decode 780p, but no surround sound output
Two corrections:
1. It's 720p, not 780... and actually 1080i works fine for me running EyeTV on the 1.42 GHz mini. Seriously.
2. Surround sound can be done with the mini via USB with third-party devices.