To be fair, $100 more for a High-Def player is cheap. The $300 360 is a bad joke and the $500 PS3 is comparable feature wise to the $400 360. The 360 is WAY overpriced, although maybe they will drop the price for Christmas.
Yes, the PS3 is supposed to come with a standard HDMI port on the back. It's a digital signal so as long as you aren't getting an abnormally long cable the quality of the wire doesn't make much if any difference.
Ya, but Circuit City's $125 cable is the same thing as the discount $6 cable in this case. If sony just releases a reasonably priced cable($30) and sells it next to the PS3 then they will make a couple extra million on HDMI cables.
I've seen both and I thought Blu-Ray looked better; I've seen a bit of the Borne Supremacy from HD-DVD and Chicken Little on Blu-Ray. It shouldn't matter which codec was used as long as the video wasn't over-compressed. I think the difference I saw was just that one was much better suited to HD.
The biggest problem I see with the High-Def right now is that the players suck; $500+ for a player that takes several minutes to turn on. There really isn't any excuse for the boot-times on these players. My computer boots in about 30 seconds(MacBook) and a single-use device should definitely power on faster than that. Once a players drop into the $300 range I think we will see one of these formats take off.
I actually do enjoy that kind of stuff, I think it takes a just the right type of mental disfunction to enjoy it. I'd like to start doing some game programming on the side and see if I can release something fun. I'm not short on ideas for games, but I need to find one that doesn't end up sucking and get it finished. I'm graduating in December with my Bachelors in Accounting Information Systems and I'm planning to stick around and get my Masters in Comp Sci.
On a side note I just got my first computer with shaders!!(a macbook) and these things are fun to mess with. I'm still not wrapping my mind around how bump mapping works though...
A lot of those "GPS" phones don't use the GPS satellites at all, they just triangulate your position using cell towers. All mobile phones can do this but only a handful allow the user to get to the data.
Not letting people share there stuff easily is the point of the $99 fee and the strict conditions for sharing software. MS is already pissing off a lot of the real game studios by EOLing MDX and forcing them to convert to this new XNA framework. If MS decided that they were going to allow people to distribute games for a one time fee of $99 they would quickly drive away the big game makers and MS would have to leave the market eventually. MS relies on licensing fees to mitigate the losses they make elsewhere on the 360.
Think about it from MS's view as a company; this is likely an attempt to get students relying on MS products so that if they do become game creators they will already be using MS tools. Free games for the 360 would not be the objective since that would only make them lose money.
You got the HD-DVD size backwards: HD-DVD is 15gigs/layer w/ 3 layers max, Blu-Ray is 25gigs/layer with 8 layers max. Currently you can only get 2 layer discs of either format.
I'm guessing the external drive will be seen similarly to flash drives and other USB devices. I really doubt you will be able to put anything but movies in it. Game discs will almost certainly still have to be put in the regular drive
$200 might sell as long as it came with the HDMI kit for the 360, if they are making one. I can't fathom how they are going to add HDMI to the current 360s, the only option I can think of is to use a VGA->DVI type scan converter, which would add a lot to the cost and possibly degrade the quality.
An extra external drive will probably be seen negatively by most people. MS is really only selling this external drive to keep their current installed base from yelling too much when they put the drive in to the console.
I've never been to E3, but it looks like Kentia Hall was filled with lots of utter crap, with people hocking ancient hardware and "as seen on TV" crap. While it may have made the show more fun, it also distracted from the primary purpose of E3; to let people in the industry meet and talk. It will be more expensive to get a both at E3 now, but that does mean you will be taken more seriously.
The Xeon may never get into a laptop, but the Merom(mobile Core2) will be in laptops in a matter of months. I was basing my prediction that Apple will be selling 100% 64bit machines in a year on the fact that Intel's roadmap has the Core(Yohna) CPUs as the last 32bit only CPUs.
Intel still hasn't officially launched the mobile version of the Core2 chip called Merom. Intel has only launched the Desktop version of the chip, called Conroe, which eats up a lot more power than the original Core CPUs and isn't well suited for laptops. Expect to wait several more months before you see the the Core2 in a Macbook Pro.
The presentation made it clear that 32bit apps would run on 64bit machines, although I hope they make it easy to support both 32bit and 64 bit machines easily. I just ordered a MacBook and I'm a little worried about how quickly the current line will become legacy machines since it is pretty certain that Apple won't be shipping 32bit Intel machines in a year and has only been shipping 32bit Intel machines for a little while.
all well... no since in worrying too much about something that might not be an issue and that you have no control over.
You have a very valid point when you are using the connection repeatedly(like from your own apartment). The issue gets muddier when you are in a public place.
Let's say you sit down in a coffee house that advertises free Wifi and you see 12 SSIDs, but nobody knows which one is the coffee house's. Even if you know the SSID you may have a problem if it's generic enough; the Shell gas stations in my area(Johnson City, TN) use "linksys" as the SSID. Is it O.K. to use wifi in these situations even if you don't know that you have the permision on the owner. The 12 SSID example isn't actually theoretical, the local Panera generally shows ~12 SSIDS although and 2 of them show up very strongly.
I think the situation is very similar to what you find with other utilities. If you temporarily plug into a random electrical outlet in public then I doubt anyone could successfully sue you; however if you run an extension cord from the same outlet into your apartment then you could be sued.
Well, I'm looking forward to HD movies and $100 seems like an insane deal to me. Production costs of the disc are irrelevant when you look at a single unit but companies can make a lot of extra using cheaper media. I'm doubting that the price was even increased by $100; the PS3 uses a much more innovative CPU design and has over twice the memory bandwidth of the 360.
Games put on multiple layer discs have similar issues to multiple disc games. The time for the laser to refocus between layers is ideally around 10ms, although the ideal isn't achievable due to misalligned heads, dirty/scratchd discs, and small defects in the hardware. The actual time it takes to switch layers varies dramatically and can easily be 250ms. If a developer plans ahead and puts files that will be accessed together on the same layer everything will work fine, but doing this does make the game more difficult to develop and increases costs.
There are only 2 companies(that I know of) currently making consumer Blu-Ray drives and those are both dual-layer Blu-Ray burners. They are still milking early adopters.
The data capacity problem was much worse for the PS1 then it is today, but the PS3 has about 15 times as much memory as the PS2 which will firmly push games into the dual-layer DVD area.
Dual layer discs are still roughly 25% more costly to replicate than single layer discs and skipping between the layers does cause a the data to pause which can be REALLY ANNOYING if the developer didn't account for it. I wouldn't doubt that single layer Blu-Ray discs will be cheaper than dual-layer DVDs in 2 years.
The PS3 is priced $100 more than the 360; the $600 version of the PS3 adds an integrated memory-card reader, HDMI output, wifi, and an extra 40gigs(none of which are included with the 360). Blu-Ray adds at most $100 to the PS3's initial price.
If you remember back when DVDs were first introduced, the same arguments were used. Some console games still ship on regular CDs, however a lot(most?) of the current console games are bumping against the single layer DVD limit. If/when single-layer Blu-Ray discs become cheaper than dual-layer DVDs I think we will see a lot of games start being released on Blu-Ray.
I don't know of anything that doesn't support 64bit WEP, but WEP can kill you battery faster and make your connection slower and less reliable. A lot of older 802.11b cards that implemented WEP completely in hardware are dog slow when you enable it.
MS has to realize the amount of crap that these OEMs are going to put on PCs, so it's probably not going to end up bad at all. The only defense against this crap is for MS to ship real Windows installation CDs with OEM copies so that people can do a clean install. I really hate the current trend of only shipping re-imaging software with a new PC, sometimes just on a hidden partition on the HD.
Anyhoo, I don't use Windows much anymore so this doesn't effect me much. I'm hopeful these changes will make fixing peoples Windows computers a lot easier, although I think it's just going to get worse after seeing the @#%*&#%! that WGA is.
Someone was telling me this the other day; the part of the constitution that authorizes copyrights and patents goes: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Clinton's DMCA is already pretty shot to hell, but this argument may be enough to get it off the books although I doubt the supreme court will be hearing a case based around this anytime soon though. One thing this case has going for it is that a crappy Democrat signed it into law and now there are several crappy Republican appointed Supreme Court Judges are in place to repeal it.
Microsoft intentionally broke Netware in certain versions of their software. XP Home is worthless on a Netware Network. The network interoperability you are talking about is all provided by MS's competitors.
The XML format's that MS promotes all require that you pay a fee to Microsoft to license the software patents needed to access the file(at least in the U.S.). Why do you think they are so opposed to using the Open Document format?
Have you ever attempted to use MS's "shared source" program? You have to sign an NDA from hell just to get a peek, and then you are legally barred from using anything tou saw in your own programs...
A signed executable just has a reallly realllllly complex checksum appended to the original unsigned executable. Any executable can be signed rather easily if you know the algorithm and key. Once the checksum checks out, the executable runs like normal. If all that was needed to run an XBox1 game was the signature then these downloads would only be a kilobyte or two at most.
The 360 doesn't seem to have enough power in the right areas to emulate a XBox1, I'm sure Microsoft tried to write a generic emulator... and failed.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, $100 more for a High-Def player is cheap. The $300 360 is a bad joke and the $500 PS3 is comparable feature wise to the $400 360. The 360 is WAY overpriced, although maybe they will drop the price for Christmas.
Yes, the PS3 is supposed to come with a standard HDMI port on the back. It's a digital signal so as long as you aren't getting an abnormally long cable the quality of the wire doesn't make much if any difference.
Ya, but Circuit City's $125 cable is the same thing as the discount $6 cable in this case. If sony just releases a reasonably priced cable($30) and sells it next to the PS3 then they will make a couple extra million on HDMI cables.
I've seen both and I thought Blu-Ray looked better; I've seen a bit of the Borne Supremacy from HD-DVD and Chicken Little on Blu-Ray. It shouldn't matter which codec was used as long as the video wasn't over-compressed. I think the difference I saw was just that one was much better suited to HD.
The biggest problem I see with the High-Def right now is that the players suck; $500+ for a player that takes several minutes to turn on. There really isn't any excuse for the boot-times on these players. My computer boots in about 30 seconds(MacBook) and a single-use device should definitely power on faster than that. Once a players drop into the $300 range I think we will see one of these formats take off.
I actually do enjoy that kind of stuff, I think it takes a just the right type of mental disfunction to enjoy it. I'd like to start doing some game programming on the side and see if I can release something fun. I'm not short on ideas for games, but I need to find one that doesn't end up sucking and get it finished. I'm graduating in December with my Bachelors in Accounting Information Systems and I'm planning to stick around and get my Masters in Comp Sci.
On a side note I just got my first computer with shaders!!(a macbook) and these things are fun to mess with. I'm still not wrapping my mind around how bump mapping works though...
This would be huge news if true... It seems more likely that you misread something else though. Has anyone else read this anywhere?
Anyone else notice that the Wii's Battalion Wars 2 screenshots were in 1080 Hi-Def?
A lot of those "GPS" phones don't use the GPS satellites at all, they just triangulate your position using cell towers. All mobile phones can do this but only a handful allow the user to get to the data.
Not letting people share there stuff easily is the point of the $99 fee and the strict conditions for sharing software. MS is already pissing off a lot of the real game studios by EOLing MDX and forcing them to convert to this new XNA framework. If MS decided that they were going to allow people to distribute games for a one time fee of $99 they would quickly drive away the big game makers and MS would have to leave the market eventually. MS relies on licensing fees to mitigate the losses they make elsewhere on the 360.
Think about it from MS's view as a company; this is likely an attempt to get students relying on MS products so that if they do become game creators they will already be using MS tools. Free games for the 360 would not be the objective since that would only make them lose money.
Blu-Ray R and RW discs are available in single and dual layer versions( here, and here.
I couldn't find any dual layer HD-DVD media for sale.
You got the HD-DVD size backwards: HD-DVD is 15gigs/layer w/ 3 layers max, Blu-Ray is 25gigs/layer with 8 layers max. Currently you can only get 2 layer discs of either format.
I'm guessing the external drive will be seen similarly to flash drives and other USB devices. I really doubt you will be able to put anything but movies in it. Game discs will almost certainly still have to be put in the regular drive
$200 might sell as long as it came with the HDMI kit for the 360, if they are making one. I can't fathom how they are going to add HDMI to the current 360s, the only option I can think of is to use a VGA->DVI type scan converter, which would add a lot to the cost and possibly degrade the quality.
An extra external drive will probably be seen negatively by most people. MS is really only selling this external drive to keep their current installed base from yelling too much when they put the drive in to the console.
I've never been to E3, but it looks like Kentia Hall was filled with lots of utter crap, with people hocking ancient hardware and "as seen on TV" crap. While it may have made the show more fun, it also distracted from the primary purpose of E3; to let people in the industry meet and talk. It will be more expensive to get a both at E3 now, but that does mean you will be taken more seriously.
The Xeon may never get into a laptop, but the Merom(mobile Core2) will be in laptops in a matter of months. I was basing my prediction that Apple will be selling 100% 64bit machines in a year on the fact that Intel's roadmap has the Core(Yohna) CPUs as the last 32bit only CPUs.
Intel still hasn't officially launched the mobile version of the Core2 chip called Merom. Intel has only launched the Desktop version of the chip, called Conroe, which eats up a lot more power than the original Core CPUs and isn't well suited for laptops. Expect to wait several more months before you see the the Core2 in a Macbook Pro.
The presentation made it clear that 32bit apps would run on 64bit machines, although I hope they make it easy to support both 32bit and 64 bit machines easily. I just ordered a MacBook and I'm a little worried about how quickly the current line will become legacy machines since it is pretty certain that Apple won't be shipping 32bit Intel machines in a year and has only been shipping 32bit Intel machines for a little while.
all well... no since in worrying too much about something that might not be an issue and that you have no control over.
You have a very valid point when you are using the connection repeatedly(like from your own apartment). The issue gets muddier when you are in a public place.
Let's say you sit down in a coffee house that advertises free Wifi and you see 12 SSIDs, but nobody knows which one is the coffee house's. Even if you know the SSID you may have a problem if it's generic enough; the Shell gas stations in my area(Johnson City, TN) use "linksys" as the SSID. Is it O.K. to use wifi in these situations even if you don't know that you have the permision on the owner. The 12 SSID example isn't actually theoretical, the local Panera generally shows ~12 SSIDS although and 2 of them show up very strongly.
I think the situation is very similar to what you find with other utilities. If you temporarily plug into a random electrical outlet in public then I doubt anyone could successfully sue you; however if you run an extension cord from the same outlet into your apartment then you could be sued.
Well, I'm looking forward to HD movies and $100 seems like an insane deal to me. Production costs of the disc are irrelevant when you look at a single unit but companies can make a lot of extra using cheaper media. I'm doubting that the price was even increased by $100; the PS3 uses a much more innovative CPU design and has over twice the memory bandwidth of the 360.
Games put on multiple layer discs have similar issues to multiple disc games. The time for the laser to refocus between layers is ideally around 10ms, although the ideal isn't achievable due to misalligned heads, dirty/scratchd discs, and small defects in the hardware. The actual time it takes to switch layers varies dramatically and can easily be 250ms. If a developer plans ahead and puts files that will be accessed together on the same layer everything will work fine, but doing this does make the game more difficult to develop and increases costs.
There are only 2 companies(that I know of) currently making consumer Blu-Ray drives and those are both dual-layer Blu-Ray burners. They are still milking early adopters.
The data capacity problem was much worse for the PS1 then it is today, but the PS3 has about 15 times as much memory as the PS2 which will firmly push games into the dual-layer DVD area.
Dual layer discs are still roughly 25% more costly to replicate than single layer discs and skipping between the layers does cause a the data to pause which can be REALLY ANNOYING if the developer didn't account for it. I wouldn't doubt that single layer Blu-Ray discs will be cheaper than dual-layer DVDs in 2 years.
The PS3 is priced $100 more than the 360; the $600 version of the PS3 adds an integrated memory-card reader, HDMI output, wifi, and an extra 40gigs(none of which are included with the 360). Blu-Ray adds at most $100 to the PS3's initial price.
If you remember back when DVDs were first introduced, the same arguments were used. Some console games still ship on regular CDs, however a lot(most?) of the current console games are bumping against the single layer DVD limit. If/when single-layer Blu-Ray discs become cheaper than dual-layer DVDs I think we will see a lot of games start being released on Blu-Ray.
I don't know of anything that doesn't support 64bit WEP, but WEP can kill you battery faster and make your connection slower and less reliable. A lot of older 802.11b cards that implemented WEP completely in hardware are dog slow when you enable it.
MS has to realize the amount of crap that these OEMs are going to put on PCs, so it's probably not going to end up bad at all. The only defense against this crap is for MS to ship real Windows installation CDs with OEM copies so that people can do a clean install. I really hate the current trend of only shipping re-imaging software with a new PC, sometimes just on a hidden partition on the HD.
Anyhoo, I don't use Windows much anymore so this doesn't effect me much. I'm hopeful these changes will make fixing peoples Windows computers a lot easier, although I think it's just going to get worse after seeing the @#%*&#%! that WGA is.
Best of luck to you guys...
Someone was telling me this the other day; the part of the constitution that authorizes copyrights and patents goes: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Clinton's DMCA is already pretty shot to hell, but this argument may be enough to get it off the books although I doubt the supreme court will be hearing a case based around this anytime soon though. One thing this case has going for it is that a crappy Democrat signed it into law and now there are several crappy Republican appointed Supreme Court Judges are in place to repeal it.
Microsoft intentionally broke Netware in certain versions of their software. XP Home is worthless on a Netware Network. The network interoperability you are talking about is all provided by MS's competitors.
The XML format's that MS promotes all require that you pay a fee to Microsoft to license the software patents needed to access the file(at least in the U.S.). Why do you think they are so opposed to using the Open Document format?
Have you ever attempted to use MS's "shared source" program? You have to sign an NDA from hell just to get a peek, and then you are legally barred from using anything tou saw in your own programs...
A signed executable just has a reallly realllllly complex checksum appended to the original unsigned executable. Any executable can be signed rather easily if you know the algorithm and key. Once the checksum checks out, the executable runs like normal. If all that was needed to run an XBox1 game was the signature then these downloads would only be a kilobyte or two at most.
The 360 doesn't seem to have enough power in the right areas to emulate a XBox1, I'm sure Microsoft tried to write a generic emulator... and failed.