So, the message here is that the PS3 sucks and the Wii is good because the PS3 can handle more content?
If I want less content in my games, why wouldn't I just buy a used Game Cube? There's enough kiddie games already out for it to keep me busy until the entire next generation of consoles come out.
I'm sorry, but I simply don't get the hype over the Wii. They replaced a simple controller with one that is much more complex and will probably be more intimidating to "casual" gamers than the classic "D Pad", and say that they hope to outsell the competition by appealing to lots of "non-gamers."
Which makes about as much since as producing a TV show about robots with "the Hamish" as your target market.
They build a machine out of components that would not have been impressive two years ago, and sell it at a high margin, while their competition is building consoles out of really cool bleeding-edge hardware and selling them at a loss. If they can pull it off, it would be nice to be a shareholder, but I'm flummoxed as to why anybody thinks this a better deal for the consumer.
Everybody talks about how this funky new controller will turn the game world on it's head, but similar technologies have been attempted in video arcades for years, and "gimmick" controllers usually don't sustain all that much interest. People like the innovation to be in the game itself, and the controller to be familiar and transparent.
Disclaimer: I don't plan on buying any of the current generation of consoles anytime soon. The PS3 and 360 are too expensive, and the Wii is unimpressive. I'll keep playing WoW on my computer and wait for the Next Big Thing instead.
I would be bold to say that more than HALF of the PS3 campers are all eBay entrepreneurs.
Interesting theory, except I drove by that line, and the people I saw sitting by those tents were not exactly the type of people who would have the ambition to be any kind of black-market middle-man, if you know what I mean.
Even if they were speculative buyers, think about it for a minute. They are not going to be allowed to buy 400 units each. They are waiting in line 24 hours to buy a $600 console which the might be able to sell for $800, or might be stuck with owning or perhaps selling at a loss.
If the console is not a big enough hit, if Sony's supply chain catches up, or if eBay gets flooded with too many other such speculators, they end up with nothing.
So why would they wager a full day of sitting out in the cold, their numb little fingers clutching their PSPs and DS-Lites, as they wait for the chance to buy something they don't want, just so they can try to sell it.
If you want to be an eBay seller, just buy shit that is commonly available, and sell it to people who don't live near the retail outlet it comes from with the "Buy it now" button set at a 20% mark-up.
Or buy drugs downtown and sell them in the suburbs. Either way, you'll make a lot more money, a lot more easilly, than trying to eBay a game console or two.
Those guys in line are all typical gamer nerds, and are there because they want PSPs. In spite of all the Sony hate on slashdot, in spite of the absurd price, and in spite of all the obvious astroturfing for the Wii since the day they announced the upcoming announcement of it, lots of people seem to want to own one. Go figure.
In an ideal world we'd all be typing these messages on Slashdot on AmigaOS based PCs rather then Windows-based or 'i'd rather die then use Windows so I use Linux'-based PCs.:(
I had a Vic20, and later a C-64, and I am personally thrilled to be typing this on a Mac.
For example, how long is it going to take to get everyone on and off one of the A380s?
According to what I've read, the 380 can board both decks simultaneously via separate bridges, as long as you set up the terminal to take advantage of both entrances.
So yeah, you've got 555 passengers in three seating classes, but half of them will go in through another gate, so it should, in theory, board faster than a 747.
As for baggage handling... I find it hard to conceive of how anybody could handle baggage loading and unloading more poorly than the typical American airport. It would probably be faster to just make everybody walk their bags out on to the tarmac and hand them to a porter before climbing a portable staircase up in to the plane.
At some airlines, it's so bad that you can be the last one off the plane, walk for 10 minutes to the baggage claim area, and still be forced to wait a half-hour or so for the little chute to crap your bag out onto the carrousel. What were the baggage people doing when the plane was just sitting there at the terminal for the 15 minutes before they let you out???
To make matters worse, by allowing large-ish carry-on bags in overhead bins, you guarantee that every... last... person will stand in the middle of the aisle, blocking everybody else from boarding and de-boarding, while they monkey around with a small suitcase they can barely hold over their heads, let alone manipulate into a tight-fitting compartment. At a half-minute each for a few hundred people, that adds up to a lot of wasted time. But getting rid of that "feature" is not an option, because checked baggage is such a major pain in the ass that anybody on a trip for a long weekend or less is going to want avoid checking a bag entirely by hauling their entire lives with them on to the plane.
If I owned an airline, everything would be structured around making sure you got your bags back right away. Then I'd bolt the overhead compartments shut, and allow nothing in the passenger section bigger than a laptop bag unless you buy another seat for it. Flight attendants would consider it part of their job to forbid people from standing still in the aisles while people are trying to get in and out of the plane.
Get in, get out, grab your bags, and be driving out of the airport less 10 minutes after the plane touched down on the runway. That would be my idea of a perfect airline. Bus terminals do it every day (although on a much smaller scale). Why can't the airlines get this right?
Airbus is a rather diseased company from a business standpoint, but they do make nice planes. Some people like riding them even better than Boeing aircraft. My brother flies to the Far East a lot, and he usually prefers to go the "wrong" way around the globe with a stop in Europe, just so he can fly on Airbus for some (or all) of the trip.
This would all be so much simpler if we just switched to Japanese.
Japanese phonetic alphabets have 46 characters, each representing a full syllable, based on 9 consonants which can be followed by up to 5 vowel sounds, with the occasional marker to modify the consonant slightly. This means that, even before predictive logic is applied, the most common syllables in Japanese (a, i, u, o, and e) can by typed with one keystroke, more than half of the remaining only need two, and the rest can be typed in three.
It takes more keystrokes per character, but you never have to choose characters from a menu. Spaces are never needed, and the only punctuation marks you ever really need are period, comma, and ellipsis, and quotes.
It's one of the reasons why phone texting is so much more popular there than here. Their language is pretty much perfect for 10-key entry.
Plus, they were never conquered by France, so their language remains un-fucked-up compared to ours.
Re:The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 1
The primary focus of the commercials is that Macs are easier to use, more reliable, and better suited for creative work.
"Mac" is constantly showing off his photo-books, crowing about how nifty the iLife suite is, and flirting with Japanese cameras, while reminding "PC" that he also does a lot of good stuff.
They also happen to have two or three ads out of the bunch which point out that PC's are more crash-prone, harder to set up, and more vulnerable to virus attacks... but that's not the primary focus, unless you are so thin-skinned about your choice of computing platform that a little friendly ribbing really stands out to you.
Re:The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Alright, since theres nothing about those ads that are misleading, please explain to me: - Why they mention that PC's get viruses and Mac's don't (ever)
Because PC's do, and Macs don't.
I've been running an entire network of unsecured Macs 24/7 connected to my DSL connection for years with no anti-virus software. Not one infection.
On the other hand, in a one-year span, I had a RedHat Linux box and a Windows game machine that were pwned once each.
Why they claim Mac's are "just better" at doing graphics work
Ask somebody in the graphic printing business. I don't really know everything about it, but the professionals swear by Macs.
Why they claim that your average PC lock up every few seconds and needs rebooting
An amusing exaggeration. It wouldn't have gotten so many laughs if it wasn't rather close to the experience many people had with Windows.
If you honestly believe any of these things then you are behind your reality distortion field.
Call it what you like, but working virus-free on computers that don't get in the way of my creative work and run more reliably than Windows is a nice "field" to be standing in. You should try it sometime.
Do iPods still have to be sent off to replace the battery or not?
They never did in the first place. I've changed several iPod batteries, for myself and for friends. It's easier than putting extra RAM into some models of laptop.
Re:The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 1
Flaw or no flaw in that comparison, the fact was that they were both underhanded. Simplifying computing to two conversing humans is pretty much misinformation in its own way.
Are you saying that the intention of the Apple ads was to make people literally think their PC was a chubby dude in a suit and tie?
I think the American people have a better grasp of metaphor than you do. There was nothing misleading about those ads. They simply used humor to draw attention to some of the notorious problems with Windows PCs (which most people are already painfully aware of), and explained some of the Macintosh advantages in the hopes that you would consider one next time you are in the market for a new computer.
(just what was he saying to that hot new camera from Japan?)
Well, he started by saying "hajimemashite," which is a very standard greeting in Japan.
Then he said "douzo yoroshiku, onigaishimasu," which is a slightly over-polite way of saying "pleased to meet you." He did not pronounce it quite correctly, but he was close enough that the girl probably would have known what he was saying.
Why is the columnist so threatened by not knowing this?
Computer science deals with algorithms, complexity notation, predicate calculus, proofs, and grammars, most of which you will not pick up by just being a programmer.
But much of which you can pick up without going after a degree, if you have the ambition (and talent with mathematics) to do so.
In answer to the parent's question, I didn't get the Verizon RAZR, I got the T-Mobile one. The interface is not half bad.
More significantly, I really only use my phone as a phone and UI is not very important to me as long as I can make calls and turn on the speaker-phone feature once in a while.
If people want a player locked into one store, they will get an ipod
That must be what they want, then. Because people are still mostly buying iPods. They are not just out-selling all the other players. They are outselling all the other players combined.
Why? I couldn't speak for others, but I know why I bought one.
1. The user interface is simply better. It's not even a vaguely subjective thing. It's better. I've yet to meet anybody face-to-face who honestly believes otherwise.
2. iTunes is a darn good media player on my computer, and the iPod works with it seamlessly.
3. They finally fixed that damned gapless playback issue.
4. Though I prefer buying CD's and ripping them as lossless files, iTMS is kind of spiffy for one-hit-wonder pop tracks.
5. It's easy to get peripherals for it. I have a car charger which doubles as a cradle and triples as a very good FM transmitter. My iPod + the Ford stock stereo makes the perfect "pull-out" audio system for my dashboard. I just take the whole iPod with me when I park, leaving my El-Cheapo radio and a strange-looking plastic stand in the car. It was the best of several just like it from different manufacturers. With no other portable music player do I have half as many options for gizmos like that.
6. My 80GB iPod plus my RAZR together take up less space than my first cell phone did by itself.
When are you nitwits going to get it through your head that there's no such word as "virii"?
Sure there is. It's a jargon word to refer to more than one computer virus (note: not more than one biological virus.)
And yes, it's incorrect Latin, but the word "television" was created by incorrectly mashing a Latin word together with a Greek word. Nobody cares that it's not a "real" word. Usage makes it real. That's English for you.
I don't know about you, but I've barely scratched the surface of the current game library from ONE of the three major consoles. You think the games for the other two can't keep me entertained for the next six years?
The only way anybody gets me to buy a new console with this current generation is by releasing a "killer app" game. A game good enough to be worth buying the whole console just for it. And I assure you that a game that lets you drive monster trucks with the Wiimote is not it.
Does it now? Gamecube = $100 GC Broadband adapter = $30 Wireless bridge = $60 2x 256MB Memory unit = $60 Cable to connect your DS/GBA = $20 SD Card reader = $30 Wii-Remote w/nunchuck = $60
Wait, I thought all you Wii fanboys were saying the Wii is going to take over the world by winning over the casual gamers. Wireless bridge circuits? SD Card readers? Sync with a portable console? WTF? Nobody cares about all that crap except those who are already really, really into gaming.
Rationalize it all you want, but the fact remains that the Wii is basically previous-generation hardware in a current-generation box, with a gimmicky new (and, at this point, completely unproven) controller to mask its obvious shortcomings.
I've yet hear anybody tell me how driving by waving a TV remote in the air is going to make Mario Kart any more fun than it already is.
Personally, I plan on skipping this entire generation of consoles. I'll have fun buying the consoles I don't already own from the previous generation at 50 bucks a pop, playing the vast back-catalog of those games, and wait for the Next Big Thing, which will hopefully be more compelling than locked-down DVD replacement formats or couple of sticks to wave around in the air while I'm gaming.
I've noticed high-definition TVs have blocky/ugly/stretched pictures when they show the local stations.
(Pssst: If you live in a US metro area, all the local stations have a free digital broadcast which is in either 720p or 1080i during primetime, news, most sports, and some late-night TV, and in a still-pretty-good-looking 480p during garbage time. All you need is a really good UHF antenna.)
Honestly, none of what you've mentioned matters at all. The PSP is light years better than the DS from a technological point of view, but the DS is mopping the floor with the PSP. Why?
That doesn't matter at all either, unless you have stock in one of the two companies. I don't give a shit if Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft make any money off their consoles or not. The only point that is relevant to the discussion is fact that the Wii brings very little to the table that we couldn't have already gotten from Nintendo by just adding a new controller to the Game Cube and writing games for it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the message here is that the PS3 sucks and the Wii is good because the PS3 can handle more content?
If I want less content in my games, why wouldn't I just buy a used Game Cube? There's enough kiddie games already out for it to keep me busy until the entire next generation of consoles come out.
I'm sorry, but I simply don't get the hype over the Wii. They replaced a simple controller with one that is much more complex and will probably be more intimidating to "casual" gamers than the classic "D Pad", and say that they hope to outsell the competition by appealing to lots of "non-gamers."
Which makes about as much since as producing a TV show about robots with "the Hamish" as your target market.
They build a machine out of components that would not have been impressive two years ago, and sell it at a high margin, while their competition is building consoles out of really cool bleeding-edge hardware and selling them at a loss. If they can pull it off, it would be nice to be a shareholder, but I'm flummoxed as to why anybody thinks this a better deal for the consumer.
Everybody talks about how this funky new controller will turn the game world on it's head, but similar technologies have been attempted in video arcades for years, and "gimmick" controllers usually don't sustain all that much interest. People like the innovation to be in the game itself, and the controller to be familiar and transparent.
Disclaimer: I don't plan on buying any of the current generation of consoles anytime soon. The PS3 and 360 are too expensive, and the Wii is unimpressive. I'll keep playing WoW on my computer and wait for the Next Big Thing instead.
Those guys in line are all typical gamer nerds, and are there because they want PS3s.
Sorry about the typo.
I would be bold to say that more than HALF of the PS3 campers are all eBay entrepreneurs.
Interesting theory, except I drove by that line, and the people I saw sitting by those tents were not exactly the type of people who would have the ambition to be any kind of black-market middle-man, if you know what I mean.
Even if they were speculative buyers, think about it for a minute. They are not going to be allowed to buy 400 units each. They are waiting in line 24 hours to buy a $600 console which the might be able to sell for $800, or might be stuck with owning or perhaps selling at a loss.
If the console is not a big enough hit, if Sony's supply chain catches up, or if eBay gets flooded with too many other such speculators, they end up with nothing.
So why would they wager a full day of sitting out in the cold, their numb little fingers clutching their PSPs and DS-Lites, as they wait for the chance to buy something they don't want, just so they can try to sell it.
If you want to be an eBay seller, just buy shit that is commonly available, and sell it to people who don't live near the retail outlet it comes from with the "Buy it now" button set at a 20% mark-up.
Or buy drugs downtown and sell them in the suburbs. Either way, you'll make a lot more money, a lot more easilly, than trying to eBay a game console or two.
Those guys in line are all typical gamer nerds, and are there because they want PSPs. In spite of all the Sony hate on slashdot, in spite of the absurd price, and in spite of all the obvious astroturfing for the Wii since the day they announced the upcoming announcement of it, lots of people seem to want to own one. Go figure.
In an ideal world we'd all be typing these messages on Slashdot on AmigaOS based PCs rather then Windows-based or 'i'd rather die then use Windows so I use Linux'-based PCs. :(
I had a Vic20, and later a C-64, and I am personally thrilled to be typing this on a Mac.
For example, how long is it going to take to get everyone on and off one of the A380s?
According to what I've read, the 380 can board both decks simultaneously via separate bridges, as long as you set up the terminal to take advantage of both entrances.
So yeah, you've got 555 passengers in three seating classes, but half of them will go in through another gate, so it should, in theory, board faster than a 747.
As for baggage handling... I find it hard to conceive of how anybody could handle baggage loading and unloading more poorly than the typical American airport. It would probably be faster to just make everybody walk their bags out on to the tarmac and hand them to a porter before climbing a portable staircase up in to the plane.
At some airlines, it's so bad that you can be the last one off the plane, walk for 10 minutes to the baggage claim area, and still be forced to wait a half-hour or so for the little chute to crap your bag out onto the carrousel. What were the baggage people doing when the plane was just sitting there at the terminal for the 15 minutes before they let you out???
To make matters worse, by allowing large-ish carry-on bags in overhead bins, you guarantee that every... last... person will stand in the middle of the aisle, blocking everybody else from boarding and de-boarding, while they monkey around with a small suitcase they can barely hold over their heads, let alone manipulate into a tight-fitting compartment. At a half-minute each for a few hundred people, that adds up to a lot of wasted time. But getting rid of that "feature" is not an option, because checked baggage is such a major pain in the ass that anybody on a trip for a long weekend or less is going to want avoid checking a bag entirely by hauling their entire lives with them on to the plane.
If I owned an airline, everything would be structured around making sure you got your bags back right away. Then I'd bolt the overhead compartments shut, and allow nothing in the passenger section bigger than a laptop bag unless you buy another seat for it. Flight attendants would consider it part of their job to forbid people from standing still in the aisles while people are trying to get in and out of the plane.
Get in, get out, grab your bags, and be driving out of the airport less 10 minutes after the plane touched down on the runway. That would be my idea of a perfect airline. Bus terminals do it every day (although on a much smaller scale). Why can't the airlines get this right?
I believe that's what I just said.
If you are anywhere near as tall as it sounds like you are, you should probably request an exit row.
Not only do you get lots of leg-room, but your display monitor is on this little flip-up arm, which you can tilt to just the angle you want.
Also, if there's an emergency, you get to decide who lives and who dies!
Unless you seriously restrict the types of media that can be played, this system will be vulnerable for all kinds of malicious software.
Well, we wouldn't want display monitors infected with malicious software, so I guess you're...
Hey, waitaminute!
Airbus is a rather diseased company from a business standpoint, but they do make nice planes. Some people like riding them even better than Boeing aircraft. My brother flies to the Far East a lot, and he usually prefers to go the "wrong" way around the globe with a stop in Europe, just so he can fly on Airbus for some (or all) of the trip.
This would all be so much simpler if we just switched to Japanese.
Japanese phonetic alphabets have 46 characters, each representing a full syllable, based on 9 consonants which can be followed by up to 5 vowel sounds, with the occasional marker to modify the consonant slightly. This means that, even before predictive logic is applied, the most common syllables in Japanese (a, i, u, o, and e) can by typed with one keystroke, more than half of the remaining only need two, and the rest can be typed in three.
It takes more keystrokes per character, but you never have to choose characters from a menu. Spaces are never needed, and the only punctuation marks you ever really need are period, comma, and ellipsis, and quotes.
It's one of the reasons why phone texting is so much more popular there than here. Their language is pretty much perfect for 10-key entry.
Plus, they were never conquered by France, so their language remains un-fucked-up compared to ours.
The primary focus of the commercials is that Macs are easier to use, more reliable, and better suited for creative work.
"Mac" is constantly showing off his photo-books, crowing about how nifty the iLife suite is, and flirting with Japanese cameras, while reminding "PC" that he also does a lot of good stuff.
They also happen to have two or three ads out of the bunch which point out that PC's are more crash-prone, harder to set up, and more vulnerable to virus attacks... but that's not the primary focus, unless you are so thin-skinned about your choice of computing platform that a little friendly ribbing really stands out to you.
Alright, since theres nothing about those ads that are misleading, please explain to me: - Why they mention that PC's get viruses and Mac's don't (ever)
Because PC's do, and Macs don't.
I've been running an entire network of unsecured Macs 24/7 connected to my DSL connection for years with no anti-virus software. Not one infection.
On the other hand, in a one-year span, I had a RedHat Linux box and a Windows game machine that were pwned once each.
Why they claim Mac's are "just better" at doing graphics work
Ask somebody in the graphic printing business. I don't really know everything about it, but the professionals swear by Macs.
Why they claim that your average PC lock up every few seconds and needs rebooting
An amusing exaggeration. It wouldn't have gotten so many laughs if it wasn't rather close to the experience many people had with Windows.
If you honestly believe any of these things then you are behind your reality distortion field.
Call it what you like, but working virus-free on computers that don't get in the way of my creative work and run more reliably than Windows is a nice "field" to be standing in. You should try it sometime.
Do iPods still have to be sent off to replace the battery or not?
They never did in the first place. I've changed several iPod batteries, for myself and for friends. It's easier than putting extra RAM into some models of laptop.
Flaw or no flaw in that comparison, the fact was that they were both underhanded. Simplifying computing to two conversing humans is pretty much misinformation in its own way.
Are you saying that the intention of the Apple ads was to make people literally think their PC was a chubby dude in a suit and tie?
I think the American people have a better grasp of metaphor than you do. There was nothing misleading about those ads. They simply used humor to draw attention to some of the notorious problems with Windows PCs (which most people are already painfully aware of), and explained some of the Macintosh advantages in the hopes that you would consider one next time you are in the market for a new computer.
(just what was he saying to that hot new camera from Japan?)
Well, he started by saying "hajimemashite," which is a very standard greeting in Japan.
Then he said "douzo yoroshiku, onigaishimasu," which is a slightly over-polite way of saying "pleased to meet you." He did not pronounce it quite correctly, but he was close enough that the girl probably would have known what he was saying.
Why is the columnist so threatened by not knowing this?
Is studying philosophy worth it?
Yes, if you love it.
And no, if you don't.
If somebody is even asking the question whether it is "still worth it", one assumes that they are not in it for love.
Computer science deals with algorithms, complexity notation, predicate calculus, proofs, and grammars, most of which you will not pick up by just being a programmer.
But much of which you can pick up without going after a degree, if you have the ambition (and talent with mathematics) to do so.
My degree is in Music Education, so naturally I work as a programmer these days.
I guess that means you could put me down as a "no."
Although for some people it's the best choice.
In answer to the parent's question, I didn't get the Verizon RAZR, I got the T-Mobile one. The interface is not half bad.
More significantly, I really only use my phone as a phone and UI is not very important to me as long as I can make calls and turn on the speaker-phone feature once in a while.
If people want a player locked into one store, they will get an ipod
That must be what they want, then. Because people are still mostly buying iPods. They are not just out-selling all the other players. They are outselling all the other players combined.
Why? I couldn't speak for others, but I know why I bought one.
1. The user interface is simply better. It's not even a vaguely subjective thing. It's better. I've yet to meet anybody face-to-face who honestly believes otherwise.
2. iTunes is a darn good media player on my computer, and the iPod works with it seamlessly.
3. They finally fixed that damned gapless playback issue.
4. Though I prefer buying CD's and ripping them as lossless files, iTMS is kind of spiffy for one-hit-wonder pop tracks.
5. It's easy to get peripherals for it. I have a car charger which doubles as a cradle and triples as a very good FM transmitter. My iPod + the Ford stock stereo makes the perfect "pull-out" audio system for my dashboard. I just take the whole iPod with me when I park, leaving my El-Cheapo radio and a strange-looking plastic stand in the car. It was the best of several just like it from different manufacturers. With no other portable music player do I have half as many options for gizmos like that.
6. My 80GB iPod plus my RAZR together take up less space than my first cell phone did by itself.
When are you nitwits going to get it through your head that there's no such word as "virii"?
Sure there is. It's a jargon word to refer to more than one computer virus (note: not more than one biological virus.)
And yes, it's incorrect Latin, but the word "television" was created by incorrectly mashing a Latin word together with a Greek word. Nobody cares that it's not a "real" word. Usage makes it real. That's English for you.
I don't know about you, but I've barely scratched the surface of the current game library from ONE of the three major consoles. You think the games for the other two can't keep me entertained for the next six years?
The only way anybody gets me to buy a new console with this current generation is by releasing a "killer app" game. A game good enough to be worth buying the whole console just for it. And I assure you that a game that lets you drive monster trucks with the Wiimote is not it.
Does it now? Gamecube = $100 GC Broadband adapter = $30 Wireless bridge = $60 2x 256MB Memory unit = $60 Cable to connect your DS/GBA = $20 SD Card reader = $30 Wii-Remote w/nunchuck = $60
Wait, I thought all you Wii fanboys were saying the Wii is going to take over the world by winning over the casual gamers. Wireless bridge circuits? SD Card readers? Sync with a portable console? WTF? Nobody cares about all that crap except those who are already really, really into gaming.
Rationalize it all you want, but the fact remains that the Wii is basically previous-generation hardware in a current-generation box, with a gimmicky new (and, at this point, completely unproven) controller to mask its obvious shortcomings.
I've yet hear anybody tell me how driving by waving a TV remote in the air is going to make Mario Kart any more fun than it already is.
Personally, I plan on skipping this entire generation of consoles. I'll have fun buying the consoles I don't already own from the previous generation at 50 bucks a pop, playing the vast back-catalog of those games, and wait for the Next Big Thing, which will hopefully be more compelling than locked-down DVD replacement formats or couple of sticks to wave around in the air while I'm gaming.
I've noticed high-definition TVs have blocky/ugly/stretched pictures when they show the local stations.
(Pssst: If you live in a US metro area, all the local stations have a free digital broadcast which is in either 720p or 1080i during primetime, news, most sports, and some late-night TV, and in a still-pretty-good-looking 480p during garbage time. All you need is a really good UHF antenna.)
Honestly, none of what you've mentioned matters at all. The PSP is light years better than the DS from a technological point of view, but the DS is mopping the floor with the PSP. Why?
That doesn't matter at all either, unless you have stock in one of the two companies. I don't give a shit if Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft make any money off their consoles or not. The only point that is relevant to the discussion is fact that the Wii brings very little to the table that we couldn't have already gotten from Nintendo by just adding a new controller to the Game Cube and writing games for it.