Except the only reason they're "copying" it isn't because of the iPhone, it's because to do a nearly bezel-less display, it's one of the best solutions. I still think how Samsung handled it with the S8 and Note 8 made more sense, but I suppose if you want all the display you can squeeze into a device, it works. But I really don't think customers wanting an iPhone X copycat makes that big of a impact.
I use BD-R as a method of backing up my photography work as I hit certain quotas of data (obviously pointless to burn a BD if I don't have ~25GB waiting to burn to it). I do still buy Blu-ray movies (and lately the 4K UltraHD variants) mostly because a) I want to "own" the movies (even if the studios think they're only licensing the content to me), and b) I like to use tools like makemkv to rip the disc and store it on a hard drive collection of movies. At approximately 25-35GB per movie, it can get kind of large, but the picture quality is worth it.
Wondering how long it'll be before we can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays though.:/
I use them mostly for gaming. I've found phone screens to be too small, both from a visual perspective, as well as an interface perspective. I couldn't imagine trying to use them for productivity though. Can you get BT keyboards (or use the on-screen keyboard)? Sure, but both typically sacrifice something (appearance, feel, layout) to remain portable. Even laptop keyboards don't feel right compared to a desktop keyboard.
Having said that, as others have suggested, they do have their limited uses. Watching videos, browsing the web and performing basic tasks (sending an e-mail, updating a spreadsheet, making minimal edits to a document) all fit within reasonable use for them. I also think as their prices come down they will be a basic addition for most people for just those very reasons: performs all of the tasks they can with their phone, but on a significantly larger and easier to see/interact with screen. I know the Galaxy Tab S2 is a natural complement to folks that use the S6 or S7: you can take calls/texts received by your phone on the tablet. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar functionality on iPads for folks with iPhones.
I think it loses the ability to call itself a "TV series" when it refuses to air over a conventional method for getting television into your home... Just sayin'.
How come? Consider the source of the word "television," tele meaning from a distance, and vision being to view something. The show is still being presented to a large audience over a great geographic distance, you're still viewing something remotely from where it's produced. Only the technology behind it has changed, moving from radio frequencies over the air to radio frequencies over a coaxial cable, and now to pulses of light over fiber.
Yes, but the model up until now has mostly been either free (OTA) or paying for an entire service (cable, minus the odd premium channels). This is streaming, which inherently limits the available quality to whatever CBS feels like providing and whatever your available bandwidth can handle; with ATSC OTA there's little reason to made content look worse on purpose, though cable/satellite is a mixed bag (cue up the stories of Comcast squeezing more and more channels into smaller space).
I love Trek, but I hope this flops so CBS will know their service is lame.
In what way is it "lame"? Shows cost money to produce, and that money has to come from somewhere. Consider that a lot of scripted prime time shows cost in the $3-4 million range to produce. You'd need 3-4 million people to chip in a buck to cover the cost of a show, but consider how many shows CBS is running and how many shows people watch. Scorpion, The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, NCIS and its two spin-offs, Blue Bloods, The Good Wife, Code Black, CSI and CSI: Cyber, Extant, Limitless, Hawaii Five-O, Madam Secretary, Elementary, The Mentalist, Mom, The Odd Couple, Person of Interest, Stalker, Supergirl, Life in Pieces, Criminal Minds, and the pending Angel from Hell, plus a few more. That's a lot of money, and considering that ads on the web don't snatch nearly the same kind of value as ads from OTA/MSO grab they have to make up the deficit somewhere.
So that's $6/mo to cover the production of more than twenty five different scripted television shows (not to mention the cost of licensing NCAA games, game shows, news programs, and reality shows). Assuming an average run of 25 episodes per season for each show, and a 12 month run, that's 12 per episode that CBS is getting to cover the cost of production of everything, advertising/promotion, and bandwidth for streaming. Even if you only watch three shows, you're paying 96 per episode which is cheaper than the going rate on iTunes, Amazon Prime or Google Play.
The money they make off of television advertising (OTA/cable) is pretty big, IIRC. Also, FWIW, CBS made a profit of $1.4 billion last year... hardly sounds like they're hurting.
I guess what I'm getting at is... they appear to be forcing people into a specific service using a name brand they know will get at least some people to bite. You have a loyal fanbase, why potentially ruin that by forcing them on to your platform? To make it so you have to pay for it AND can't skip ads?
Whoops, my bad, no idea where I got $15 from.:( Still, other than being able to watch whenever I want, I can see this turning into an expensive thing to do if every individual network has just one show you want to watch.
Yeah, I haven't had cable in 12 years or so. It's been a combination of OTA television (local news, some prime time television now that they're mostly off the reality television bender they were on for ten years) and torrenting. If I'm going to pay $15 a month for something as limited as what CBS is offering, it better be advertising free.
I think it loses the ability to call itself a "TV series" when it refuses to air over a conventional method for getting television into your home...
Just sayin'. I love Trek, but I hope this flops so CBS will know their service is lame. (But if it flops, CBS will likely blame Trek and keep pushing ahead with the service anyways).
As languages further abstract away the underlying hardware, it's helpful to understand how it all works. Especially if you've never had to step into an assembly language debugger. The most likely (and probably relevant) architecture would be x86/x86-64, followed closely by some variation of ARM. IA64 isn't relevant, but if you read up on a little bit of it (there was a series of articles on Raymond Chen's blog a few weeks back), you'll learn about an interesting take on a processor architecture (which offloaded much of the optimization work to the compiler; it was also heavily slanted towards parallel processing unlike x86).
Hmm... I don't know. It's a value proposition for me. I've been cable free for over ten years. If there's some show I want to watch badly enough, there's the internet, for everything else, OTA HDTV works great. I couldn't stomach paying $40+ (and up to $90 if you actually wanted a choice of channels), that's $480 to $1080 a year, for the privilege of perhaps seeing something entertaining (but we don't guarantee that).
...but still lacking. I'm sad to see they're going with a proprietary memory card for games. I was hoping, at worst, they'd have two memory card slots, one proprietary one for games, and a standard SD or MS slot for expanding memory. Also sad to see video out is gone (PSP had video out at least, and I was hoping for a mini-HDMI connection or possibly wireless HDMI (since the standard is almost complete IIRC)).
Oh well... maybe next console generation.
Let's have a close look at these claims of yours...
What has been lost on the PS3:
- Emotion Engine (hardware)
First gen PS3 was very expensive, people bitched about the price and Sony responded by removing the PS2 compatibility. Sony still sells the PS2 console so there was no need to punish people who wanted a PS3 by forcing them to subsidize the PS2 owners. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Problem there chief, but it's very likely many PS2 games could be done in software. Neverminding the fact that the PS2 hardware needed is likely DIRT CHEAP for Sony (PS2 is $100 retail, and I suspect they're raking in profits off of those systems at this stage of the game).
- SACD playback (software)
Did anyone actually want this? While it's likely that a PS3 owner would have an HDTV, it's unlikely they would own a high end audio setup to take advantage of SACD. Anyone serious about this functionality would own a proper standalone SACD player. Less hardware = cheaper console.
It's software, not hardware. They flipped a bit and turned it off for the Slim units, there's nothing hardware related with SACD playback...
- USB 2.0 ports (hardware)
Not sure if reducing the number of ports counts as a "lost feature". Two ports is likely plenty for most people, and it's easy to add your own hub to increase the number of ports. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Oversimplified. USB ports (the hardware) cost PENNIES. Trust me, knocking off two USB ports didn't save Sony (or the consumer, for that matter) anything. About the only complaint I have about the 4 USB ports I have is that all four are on the front. I'd have preferred one or two on the back for external storage (so it looks nicer in my rack setup).
- Full PS2 backwards compatibility (software)
PS3 never had full PS2 compatibility in software, purely a myth perpetuated by the un-informed. First generation PS3 had full hardware PS2 support; second generation had a mix of hardware and software emulation. Made the PS3 expensive and added redundant capabilities as the PS2 was (and is) still being sold. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Okay, you're obviously "informed". Educate me how the PS3 isn't powerful enough to run PS2 software?
- Other OS Linux (software): retroactively disabled on older hardware as well now with the new update
Debatable whether this was a usable feature or not. Linux on the PS3 was horrible and Sony's removal of the option on the slim models was met with little but a yawn and "so what?" It wasn't until Geohot paraded around his so called PS3 hack and thousands of pirates perked up with the hope of finally getting their hands on some free PS3 games did anyone care about the OtherOS option. Sony acted to protect their platform and the pirates raised a ruckus. Anyone who used the old model PS3 for Cell programming couldn't care less, they didn't use the PS3 for games or playing blu-ray.
If you're one of those people still pissed off over having to choose between OtherOS or games/PSN, direct your anger to Geohot for pissing in your pool.
Why would I direct my rage at geohot when it's Sony who disabled it? Am I pro-piracy? No. But I am definitely all about consumer rights, and consumers bought a COMPUTER when they bought a PS3. Sony decided, on their own, unilaterally, to force people to choose between losing their computer or losing other portions of the device THEY PAID FOR. As I've said in dozens of other places, I'll be shocked if a class action lawsuit isn't started over this. If there was ever a "line in the sand" moment for people to stand up, this was it.
- SD and CF slots (hardware
Redundant hardware, PS3 already had USB ports and there was no need to provide multiple ports for the same function. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Again, dirt cheap hardware. Slightly more expensive than the two USB ports, but
One of the primary issues this bug causes is that it resets the clock to 12/31/1999. Most content (in fact, all content that I'm aware of) has a "licensed starting" date/time, and none of the titles I have will work at all. This tells me that they must have a secondary clock (a "real clock") that they use to tell when licensed content is valid/invalid (so people can't just change the date/time back two days to play a demo that has expired, or a rental that has expired, etc).
And since the clock is obviously integral to their protection mechanism, it is a flaw in said mechanism.
Note: No, I have no inside information, but this seems to be a reasonable deduction given the evidence at hand.
Yeah, I think it's called "Divx HD", and there's already hardware coming with that certification. I do agree that Sony seems to be missing the boat when it comes to functionality beyond games, and I was personally hoping from something more from a major firmware revision.
Hell, it'd be nice to see them add exFAT support so I can watch movies larger than 4 GB on attached storage (currently only FAT32 is supported on USB mass storage class devices; this means full length HD content usually needs to either a) be copied from a DLNA network share or b) split in to separate files for storage on the FAT32 formatted device).
Whenever they update their Divx support the MKV support should be included (since the new Divx uses MKV files).
As for the rest, agreed. The web browser should just use some custom build of Firefox, and the PS2 backwards compatibility would help bring in the people who want to keep playing their existing PS2 games.
Eh, recent weeks have shown an uptake in sales
on
Bad Signs For Blu-ray
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· Score: 2, Informative
I dunno who Ian is trying to fool, but recent weeks have been up, not down. Last week was because, quite honestly, there was nothing worth buying on Blu-ray Disc. However, the previous week set a record for Blu-ray vs. DVD (the week Transformers was finally put out on BD). Taking a down week and saying "oh look, it's failing" is just the ultimate in silliness.
Even so, the PS3 edition of the game could use higher quality textures without much additional effort from the developer. Obviously throwing in extra content would be the best way to utilize the added space, but if that's not cost effective, simply upping the quality of the content (less compression, etc) could make the PS3 edition of a title worth owning over the 360 edition.
FWIW, I don't own either system (and am actually planning on getting a Wii), but I don't think it's fair to call Blu-ray Disc on the PS3 as simply an attempt to force-feed the movie format onto the consumer public when it can actually benefit the games as well.
In case you didn't miss it, Blu-ray Disc's additional capacity is integral to the Playstation 3 succeeding over the XBox 360. The 360 is likely hitting the ceiling of what's possible with the standard DVD media they use, while the PS3 has room to grow for years to come. You're paying a $200 premium (if that number is even accurate) not for the drive, but for something that won't be outdated in 6 months.
You're being silly. Blu-ray Disc on the Playstation 3 is more than just an attempt to get the movie format into consumers homes. In case you didn't know, games on the PS3 are released on Blu-ray Disc media, meaning games have access to 25/50 GB of storage, allowing for loads more content/data, higher quality textures, etc. Keep in mind, the XBox 360 uses regular old DVDs (with a max capacity of 4.7/8.5 GB), and it's very unlikely any games will (or even can) be released on their HD DVD add-on.
Remove the bit about re-buying your DVD library on a next-gen format and you'll realize the percentage of people who can afford it shoots up dramatically. See, you don't need to purchase your entire DVD library on either of the next-gen formats; DVDs will continue to play fine in either a Blu-ray Disc player or an HD DVD player. That drops the price to just the player plus a few movies to try the format out.
Most people don't. 50GB still means burning 6 discs to back up my (not unusually large) 300GB drive. Are you going to want to blow 15 discs to back up one of those new Seagate 750GB drives? What about when we have 1TB drives? 2TB?
Yeah, 6 BDs to back up your 300 GB drive, and 9 HD DVDs to back it up with HD DVD. Believe it or not, people do make backups of all their content from time to time, and BD can do it with fewer discs.
What are you even smoking? LOTR:ROTK EE is 251 minutes (15060s). Assuming 5GB for audio, that leaves 25GB on a 30GB HD-DVD for the movie. That leaves an overall bitrate of 13.3Mbps, which is more than enough for high-quality HD video using H.264 or VC-1.
I broke down the math almost a year ago before either of these formats launched. You can read my response here:
To be clear, you need 15-19 Mbps to get really excellent quality out of VC1/H.264 (though you need something like 28-36 Mbps with MPEG2 I think for the same quality, so we're doing a lot better with VC1/H.264, no doubt). As you can see, getting LOTR:ROTK:EE to work on an HD DVD (even a dual layer HD DVD) will be troublesome at best. Nevermind any extras or high quality audio. It does, however, work fine on a Blu-ray Disc (with space for extras and more).
God forbid we get "stuck" with a format that is extremely similar in most regards!
They're similar in almost every way except the one that counts the most: capacity. In that regard, Blu-ray Disc is clearly the better bet for the long run..
Currently only the movies will be stored in HD. It's ridiculous to assume that extras will always be stored as standard definition (in fact, I'd say it'd be a joke if extras always remained SD; what's the point in an HD video format if we're still using SD extras?). Eventually extras will be in HD as well (I expect in a year or two).
Regarding TV episodes on HD DVD vs. BD, economies of scale wipe out any price advantage HD DVD has in manufacturing I imagine. And in any event, it's at least an extra disc for any TV show on HD DVD as opposed to the same show on BD. Ignoring the issue of cost per disc, that means you (and me, the consumers) must swap to that one extra disc to keep watching episodes. With BD, we wouldn't have that problem.
I would certainly hope so, and I've seen nothing suggesting discs burned with BD burners can't be played back on set top devices. I imagine you'd need some authoring software of some sort though, and I'm not aware of anything commercially available that'll let you author BD discs (though Nero Burning ROM 7.0+ has support for Blu-ray Disc burners, maybe it has some wizard to make it easy to burn a video only disc as long as the video is encoded properly?).
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Except the only reason they're "copying" it isn't because of the iPhone, it's because to do a nearly bezel-less display, it's one of the best solutions. I still think how Samsung handled it with the S8 and Note 8 made more sense, but I suppose if you want all the display you can squeeze into a device, it works. But I really don't think customers wanting an iPhone X copycat makes that big of a impact.
Sure it's useful. It refutes all the religions that claim mankind was made be some deity. That's money well spent in my mind.
I use BD-R as a method of backing up my photography work as I hit certain quotas of data (obviously pointless to burn a BD if I don't have ~25GB waiting to burn to it). I do still buy Blu-ray movies (and lately the 4K UltraHD variants) mostly because a) I want to "own" the movies (even if the studios think they're only licensing the content to me), and b) I like to use tools like makemkv to rip the disc and store it on a hard drive collection of movies. At approximately 25-35GB per movie, it can get kind of large, but the picture quality is worth it.
Wondering how long it'll be before we can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays though. :/
I use them mostly for gaming. I've found phone screens to be too small, both from a visual perspective, as well as an interface perspective. I couldn't imagine trying to use them for productivity though. Can you get BT keyboards (or use the on-screen keyboard)? Sure, but both typically sacrifice something (appearance, feel, layout) to remain portable. Even laptop keyboards don't feel right compared to a desktop keyboard.
Having said that, as others have suggested, they do have their limited uses. Watching videos, browsing the web and performing basic tasks (sending an e-mail, updating a spreadsheet, making minimal edits to a document) all fit within reasonable use for them. I also think as their prices come down they will be a basic addition for most people for just those very reasons: performs all of the tasks they can with their phone, but on a significantly larger and easier to see/interact with screen. I know the Galaxy Tab S2 is a natural complement to folks that use the S6 or S7: you can take calls/texts received by your phone on the tablet. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar functionality on iPads for folks with iPhones.
How come? Consider the source of the word "television," tele meaning from a distance, and vision being to view something. The show is still being presented to a large audience over a great geographic distance, you're still viewing something remotely from where it's produced. Only the technology behind it has changed, moving from radio frequencies over the air to radio frequencies over a coaxial cable, and now to pulses of light over fiber.
Yes, but the model up until now has mostly been either free (OTA) or paying for an entire service (cable, minus the odd premium channels). This is streaming, which inherently limits the available quality to whatever CBS feels like providing and whatever your available bandwidth can handle; with ATSC OTA there's little reason to made content look worse on purpose, though cable/satellite is a mixed bag (cue up the stories of Comcast squeezing more and more channels into smaller space).
In what way is it "lame"? Shows cost money to produce, and that money has to come from somewhere. Consider that a lot of scripted prime time shows cost in the $3-4 million range to produce. You'd need 3-4 million people to chip in a buck to cover the cost of a show, but consider how many shows CBS is running and how many shows people watch. Scorpion, The Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, NCIS and its two spin-offs, Blue Bloods, The Good Wife, Code Black, CSI and CSI: Cyber, Extant, Limitless, Hawaii Five-O, Madam Secretary, Elementary, The Mentalist, Mom, The Odd Couple, Person of Interest, Stalker, Supergirl, Life in Pieces, Criminal Minds, and the pending Angel from Hell, plus a few more. That's a lot of money, and considering that ads on the web don't snatch nearly the same kind of value as ads from OTA/MSO grab they have to make up the deficit somewhere.
So that's $6/mo to cover the production of more than twenty five different scripted television shows (not to mention the cost of licensing NCAA games, game shows, news programs, and reality shows). Assuming an average run of 25 episodes per season for each show, and a 12 month run, that's 12 per episode that CBS is getting to cover the cost of production of everything, advertising/promotion, and bandwidth for streaming. Even if you only watch three shows, you're paying 96 per episode which is cheaper than the going rate on iTunes, Amazon Prime or Google Play.
The money they make off of television advertising (OTA/cable) is pretty big, IIRC. Also, FWIW, CBS made a profit of $1.4 billion last year... hardly sounds like they're hurting. I guess what I'm getting at is... they appear to be forcing people into a specific service using a name brand they know will get at least some people to bite. You have a loyal fanbase, why potentially ruin that by forcing them on to your platform? To make it so you have to pay for it AND can't skip ads?
Whoops, my bad, no idea where I got $15 from. :( Still, other than being able to watch whenever I want, I can see this turning into an expensive thing to do if every individual network has just one show you want to watch.
Yeah, I haven't had cable in 12 years or so. It's been a combination of OTA television (local news, some prime time television now that they're mostly off the reality television bender they were on for ten years) and torrenting. If I'm going to pay $15 a month for something as limited as what CBS is offering, it better be advertising free.
I think it loses the ability to call itself a "TV series" when it refuses to air over a conventional method for getting television into your home... Just sayin'. I love Trek, but I hope this flops so CBS will know their service is lame. (But if it flops, CBS will likely blame Trek and keep pushing ahead with the service anyways).
As languages further abstract away the underlying hardware, it's helpful to understand how it all works. Especially if you've never had to step into an assembly language debugger. The most likely (and probably relevant) architecture would be x86/x86-64, followed closely by some variation of ARM. IA64 isn't relevant, but if you read up on a little bit of it (there was a series of articles on Raymond Chen's blog a few weeks back), you'll learn about an interesting take on a processor architecture (which offloaded much of the optimization work to the compiler; it was also heavily slanted towards parallel processing unlike x86).
Hmm... I don't know. It's a value proposition for me. I've been cable free for over ten years. If there's some show I want to watch badly enough, there's the internet, for everything else, OTA HDTV works great. I couldn't stomach paying $40+ (and up to $90 if you actually wanted a choice of channels), that's $480 to $1080 a year, for the privilege of perhaps seeing something entertaining (but we don't guarantee that).
...but still lacking. I'm sad to see they're going with a proprietary memory card for games. I was hoping, at worst, they'd have two memory card slots, one proprietary one for games, and a standard SD or MS slot for expanding memory. Also sad to see video out is gone (PSP had video out at least, and I was hoping for a mini-HDMI connection or possibly wireless HDMI (since the standard is almost complete IIRC)). Oh well... maybe next console generation.
Let's have a close look at these claims of yours...
What has been lost on the PS3: - Emotion Engine (hardware) First gen PS3 was very expensive, people bitched about the price and Sony responded by removing the PS2 compatibility. Sony still sells the PS2 console so there was no need to punish people who wanted a PS3 by forcing them to subsidize the PS2 owners. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Problem there chief, but it's very likely many PS2 games could be done in software. Neverminding the fact that the PS2 hardware needed is likely DIRT CHEAP for Sony (PS2 is $100 retail, and I suspect they're raking in profits off of those systems at this stage of the game).
- SACD playback (software) Did anyone actually want this? While it's likely that a PS3 owner would have an HDTV, it's unlikely they would own a high end audio setup to take advantage of SACD. Anyone serious about this functionality would own a proper standalone SACD player. Less hardware = cheaper console.
It's software, not hardware. They flipped a bit and turned it off for the Slim units, there's nothing hardware related with SACD playback...
- USB 2.0 ports (hardware) Not sure if reducing the number of ports counts as a "lost feature". Two ports is likely plenty for most people, and it's easy to add your own hub to increase the number of ports. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Oversimplified. USB ports (the hardware) cost PENNIES. Trust me, knocking off two USB ports didn't save Sony (or the consumer, for that matter) anything. About the only complaint I have about the 4 USB ports I have is that all four are on the front. I'd have preferred one or two on the back for external storage (so it looks nicer in my rack setup).
- Full PS2 backwards compatibility (software) PS3 never had full PS2 compatibility in software, purely a myth perpetuated by the un-informed. First generation PS3 had full hardware PS2 support; second generation had a mix of hardware and software emulation. Made the PS3 expensive and added redundant capabilities as the PS2 was (and is) still being sold. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Okay, you're obviously "informed". Educate me how the PS3 isn't powerful enough to run PS2 software?
- Other OS Linux (software): retroactively disabled on older hardware as well now with the new update Debatable whether this was a usable feature or not. Linux on the PS3 was horrible and Sony's removal of the option on the slim models was met with little but a yawn and "so what?" It wasn't until Geohot paraded around his so called PS3 hack and thousands of pirates perked up with the hope of finally getting their hands on some free PS3 games did anyone care about the OtherOS option. Sony acted to protect their platform and the pirates raised a ruckus. Anyone who used the old model PS3 for Cell programming couldn't care less, they didn't use the PS3 for games or playing blu-ray.
If you're one of those people still pissed off over having to choose between OtherOS or games/PSN, direct your anger to Geohot for pissing in your pool.
Why would I direct my rage at geohot when it's Sony who disabled it? Am I pro-piracy? No. But I am definitely all about consumer rights, and consumers bought a COMPUTER when they bought a PS3. Sony decided, on their own, unilaterally, to force people to choose between losing their computer or losing other portions of the device THEY PAID FOR. As I've said in dozens of other places, I'll be shocked if a class action lawsuit isn't started over this. If there was ever a "line in the sand" moment for people to stand up, this was it.
- SD and CF slots (hardware Redundant hardware, PS3 already had USB ports and there was no need to provide multiple ports for the same function. Less hardware = cheaper console.
Again, dirt cheap hardware. Slightly more expensive than the two USB ports, but
One of the primary issues this bug causes is that it resets the clock to 12/31/1999. Most content (in fact, all content that I'm aware of) has a "licensed starting" date/time, and none of the titles I have will work at all. This tells me that they must have a secondary clock (a "real clock") that they use to tell when licensed content is valid/invalid (so people can't just change the date/time back two days to play a demo that has expired, or a rental that has expired, etc).
And since the clock is obviously integral to their protection mechanism, it is a flaw in said mechanism.
Note: No, I have no inside information, but this seems to be a reasonable deduction given the evidence at hand.
What does it have to do with DRM? Calendar bugs have been a very common part of the computing landscape for many years.
Because even offline games are unplayable, so it's clear some flaw exists relating to their protection mechanism.
Yeah, I think it's called "Divx HD", and there's already hardware coming with that certification. I do agree that Sony seems to be missing the boat when it comes to functionality beyond games, and I was personally hoping from something more from a major firmware revision.
Hell, it'd be nice to see them add exFAT support so I can watch movies larger than 4 GB on attached storage (currently only FAT32 is supported on USB mass storage class devices; this means full length HD content usually needs to either a) be copied from a DLNA network share or b) split in to separate files for storage on the FAT32 formatted device).
Whenever they update their Divx support the MKV support should be included (since the new Divx uses MKV files).
As for the rest, agreed. The web browser should just use some custom build of Firefox, and the PS2 backwards compatibility would help bring in the people who want to keep playing their existing PS2 games.
I dunno who Ian is trying to fool, but recent weeks have been up, not down. Last week was because, quite honestly, there was nothing worth buying on Blu-ray Disc. However, the previous week set a record for Blu-ray vs. DVD (the week Transformers was finally put out on BD). Taking a down week and saying "oh look, it's failing" is just the ultimate in silliness.
Uhm, RTFA, it's 100,000 in the United States. A giveaway in Europe has no effect at all on this.
Even so, the PS3 edition of the game could use higher quality textures without much additional effort from the developer. Obviously throwing in extra content would be the best way to utilize the added space, but if that's not cost effective, simply upping the quality of the content (less compression, etc) could make the PS3 edition of a title worth owning over the 360 edition.
FWIW, I don't own either system (and am actually planning on getting a Wii), but I don't think it's fair to call Blu-ray Disc on the PS3 as simply an attempt to force-feed the movie format onto the consumer public when it can actually benefit the games as well.
In case you didn't miss it, Blu-ray Disc's additional capacity is integral to the Playstation 3 succeeding over the XBox 360. The 360 is likely hitting the ceiling of what's possible with the standard DVD media they use, while the PS3 has room to grow for years to come. You're paying a $200 premium (if that number is even accurate) not for the drive, but for something that won't be outdated in 6 months.
You're being silly. Blu-ray Disc on the Playstation 3 is more than just an attempt to get the movie format into consumers homes. In case you didn't know, games on the PS3 are released on Blu-ray Disc media, meaning games have access to 25/50 GB of storage, allowing for loads more content/data, higher quality textures, etc. Keep in mind, the XBox 360 uses regular old DVDs (with a max capacity of 4.7/8.5 GB), and it's very unlikely any games will (or even can) be released on their HD DVD add-on.
Remove the bit about re-buying your DVD library on a next-gen format and you'll realize the percentage of people who can afford it shoots up dramatically. See, you don't need to purchase your entire DVD library on either of the next-gen formats; DVDs will continue to play fine in either a Blu-ray Disc player or an HD DVD player. That drops the price to just the player plus a few movies to try the format out.
Yeah, 6 BDs to back up your 300 GB drive, and 9 HD DVDs to back it up with HD DVD. Believe it or not, people do make backups of all their content from time to time, and BD can do it with fewer discs.
I broke down the math almost a year ago before either of these formats launched. You can read my response here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155929&cid=130 76530
To be clear, you need 15-19 Mbps to get really excellent quality out of VC1/H.264 (though you need something like 28-36 Mbps with MPEG2 I think for the same quality, so we're doing a lot better with VC1/H.264, no doubt). As you can see, getting LOTR:ROTK:EE to work on an HD DVD (even a dual layer HD DVD) will be troublesome at best. Nevermind any extras or high quality audio. It does, however, work fine on a Blu-ray Disc (with space for extras and more).
They're similar in almost every way except the one that counts the most: capacity. In that regard, Blu-ray Disc is clearly the better bet for the long run..
Currently only the movies will be stored in HD. It's ridiculous to assume that extras will always be stored as standard definition (in fact, I'd say it'd be a joke if extras always remained SD; what's the point in an HD video format if we're still using SD extras?). Eventually extras will be in HD as well (I expect in a year or two).
Regarding TV episodes on HD DVD vs. BD, economies of scale wipe out any price advantage HD DVD has in manufacturing I imagine. And in any event, it's at least an extra disc for any TV show on HD DVD as opposed to the same show on BD. Ignoring the issue of cost per disc, that means you (and me, the consumers) must swap to that one extra disc to keep watching episodes. With BD, we wouldn't have that problem.
I would certainly hope so, and I've seen nothing suggesting discs burned with BD burners can't be played back on set top devices. I imagine you'd need some authoring software of some sort though, and I'm not aware of anything commercially available that'll let you author BD discs (though Nero Burning ROM 7.0+ has support for Blu-ray Disc burners, maybe it has some wizard to make it easy to burn a video only disc as long as the video is encoded properly?).
I'd love to see some feedback on this though.