The comment I was responding to was about enabling encryption on units before they ship; any business using the default configuration is, well..... anyway, LEAP/PEAP is a much better solution for businesses.
Most home users would be perplexed by HEX keys with four places to put them.
What encryption should be enabled? WEP is pathetic all the way around and WPA-PSK complicates things and isn't supported everywhere(i.e. Nintendo DS).
Anyhoo, encrypting public access points is stupid. It's impossible to make sure someone isn't snarfing your traffic(rogue access points) so any confidential information needs to be encrypted at each end with something like SSL w/ 1024bit RSA.
HDMI is the future for video cables and you can pick one up for $20ish today and that price will drop, the 360 requires a $30 cable for anything but composite.
IBM's CELL blades are interesting, although they are just prototypes. The Cell will be in some stuff, it has a chance of catching on in media apps, but I'm guessing it will end up only being successful in the PS3.
The 360's hard drive is completely unupgradable, you can't upgrade it even if you rip the damn thing apart. The 360's hard-drive situation really couldn't be worse...
The off-die memory is cheaper, but the fact that the video card needs two dies connected with a 200 GByte/sec bus just isn't cheap or "commodity".
The 360 can use USB drives and controllers, but so can everything. The 360 has no real intigration with the iPod(it can't play iTunes DRMed AAC) or the PSP(nothing but a jump drive to the 360)
PC ports generally suck... but I guess it takes all kinds...
"The wireless it uses is a standard household wireless technology found in headphones and the like - while it is not Bluetooth or Wifi, it is not proprietary."
Where did you come up with this??? I'd love to see the specs to the 360's wireless interface, but the only thing that has been freely published is that it uses the 2.4Ghz frequency... what are you basing this on? Do you have headphones that use this????
HDMI ports - very commodity(you don't even need a stupid adapter). HDMI is going to have to be graphed onto the 360 if it wants to really support HD-DVD
Cell - Cell has a much better chance of becoming a commodity part than the 360's CPU. Neither the Cell nor the Xeon are good with unoptimised binaries
GPU - both use specialized GPUs, although the 360's incorporates an off-die 10MB EDRAM buffer
hard drive - the 360 will not accept standard hard drives(that's why they get away with charging $100 for a 20gig), it's unkown how the PS3's HD system will work.
memory sticks - still better than those stupid 360 mem cards
USB - why the Hell even bring this up?
software - The 360 uses an NT Kernel and has a lot of the win32 libraries(directx etc). This really only makes ports from PC games easier(not better)
The Blu-Ray drive is special and will increase the price, but it also lets you play HD movies. Oh, and I expect to see at least some of the ideas from the revolution's controller put into the PS3's controller.
The 360 seems to have just about as many custom parts as the PS3. The 360's CPU and GPU are custom designed just for the 360 and the 10MB EDRAM is hardly a commodity part. The 360 even uses some funky proprietary wireless signal instead of bluetooth(like the PS3).
If you discount the Blu-Ray drive then the PS3 will probably use less custom parts than the 360.
I hadn't really thought about the attachment aspect much. If Nintendo makes it cheap and easy to make attachments then there are going to be a lot of different little doo-dads hanging off those remotes. I'm not certain how I feel about this... making a quality controller that will stand up to a lot of gameplay isn't trivial: look at all the 3rd party controller market, 90% of it is utter crap.
Third person vs first person is a distinction that really only matters if you get motion sickness playing FPSs.
"I'd consider non-hardcore to be more about targetting casual gamers rather than getting the 6-year-old crowd."
I think a lot of casual gamers play with their families, which means the games need to be appropriate for 6-year-olds.
"The power difference between a PS3 and a 360 (with 3 3.2ghz processors and a better GPU) is negligable."
That's simply not true,
The architechture behind each console is VERY different and just flat out saying which is faster is impossible. The GPU on the 360 has unified shaders, so if you need to use a lot of just one kind of shader it should be faster on the 360, but the overhead of having unified shaders probably means that if you are doing some balance of vector and pixel shading then the PS3 will clean it's clock(it's still unclear whether vector manipulations will even really be done on the RSX).
The PS3 has memory bandwidth in spades over the 360 with over twice as much, but the 360 has one big chunk of memory with the same latency which makes it easier to use.
The Cell is different enough that I don't see how to even compare it to anything, although each of the 360's CPU cores are almost identical to the PPE core.
Honestly, if the PS3 can't make with the pretty better than the 360, then I don't see a reason to buy either.(I haven't seen Oblivion yet though)
Sony will almost definately copy parts of the Rev's controller, the PS3 will at least have tilt sensors in it's controllers. Microsoft would have to release it as another optional add-on for their console that seems to be aging already.
Calling the DS a PDA is a lot like calling the PS2 a business PC. A PS2 can run firefox and spreadsheet apps, but that doesn't change the fact that it was designed as a gaming console.
Gaming hardware gnereally allows for some tricky optimizations that you can't/wouldn't do on a normal PDA or PC application.
The DS isn't a PDA, and has 2 CPUs and a GPU. The TCM(tightly coupled memories) on the NDS's ARM9 allow you to squeeze more performance out of it than most other ARM9s.
Responsiveness of a CPU is never really a problem, humans generally precieve anything that happens in less than 1/10th of a second as happening instantaniously. The only real problem with using this chip in a PDA is it isn't very fast, the article says the chip is comparable to a 77Mhz ARM9 which is several times slower than anything you'd find in a PDA today. I would love to see a Palm-OS PDA based around this chip because of it's EXTREMELY low power consumption; we could be looking at the same kind of battery life as the original Palms.
I can't find anything about Lucent ever trying to sue over the original XBox, but Lucent has tried to sue Gateway/Dell before over the same patent, and Microsoft was forced to step in and defend them. It seems that Windows Media Player itself is infringing which means that the XBox1 possibly never infringed on this patent.
it sure looks like MS could just patch around this patent, but MS would likely be liable for damages on all 360s already sold and all unsold 360s would have to be pulled from the shelves.
"MPEG2 and all MPEG related standards are "owned" by MPEG LA, who licenses the technology. It would be one thing if Microsoft deployed a product with MPEG2 playback capabilities without paying the license, but then where is Lucent in all this? Is this some crappy dredge up of a vague compression scheme like Unisys pulled?"
The patent covers one implemntation of encoding/decoding MPEG2 video, not the actual formating of the data in the file like the UNISYS case. The lawsuit is definately real and it looks like Microsoft is going to be handing a wad-o-cash to Lucent for this.
Think what would have happened if Jack Bresenham had patented all of his work...
Some will buy full legit coppies, some will buy acadmic coppies and use them improperly, but almost all will pirate. Hell, I have several legit licences for Windows XP and the only version I have installed is pirated.
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If you haven't seen it you should check out this MGS4 demo clip; this is definately real-time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSDudPTOznE&search= metal%25%20gear%25%20solid%25%204
It looks like at least the MGS4 footage was real
The comment I was responding to was about enabling encryption on units before they ship; any business using the default configuration is, well..... anyway, LEAP/PEAP is a much better solution for businesses.
Most home users would be perplexed by HEX keys with four places to put them.
What encryption should be enabled? WEP is pathetic all the way around and WPA-PSK complicates things and isn't supported everywhere(i.e. Nintendo DS).
Anyhoo, encrypting public access points is stupid. It's impossible to make sure someone isn't snarfing your traffic(rogue access points) so any confidential information needs to be encrypted at each end with something like SSL w/ 1024bit RSA.
HDMI is the future for video cables and you can pick one up for $20ish today and that price will drop, the 360 requires a $30 cable for anything but composite.
IBM's CELL blades are interesting, although they are just prototypes. The Cell will be in some stuff, it has a chance of catching on in media apps, but I'm guessing it will end up only being successful in the PS3.
The 360's hard drive is completely unupgradable, you can't upgrade it even if you rip the damn thing apart. The 360's hard-drive situation really couldn't be worse...
The off-die memory is cheaper, but the fact that the video card needs two dies connected with a 200 GByte/sec bus just isn't cheap or "commodity".
The 360 can use USB drives and controllers, but so can everything. The 360 has no real intigration with the iPod(it can't play iTunes DRMed AAC) or the PSP(nothing but a jump drive to the 360)
PC ports generally suck... but I guess it takes all kinds...
Where did you come up with this??? I'd love to see the specs to the 360's wireless interface, but the only thing that has been freely published is that it uses the 2.4Ghz frequency... what are you basing this on? Do you have headphones that use this????
The Blu-Ray drive is special and will increase the price, but it also lets you play HD movies. Oh, and I expect to see at least some of the ideas from the revolution's controller put into the PS3's controller.
The 360 seems to have just about as many custom parts as the PS3. The 360's CPU and GPU are custom designed just for the 360 and the 10MB EDRAM is hardly a commodity part. The 360 even uses some funky proprietary wireless signal instead of bluetooth(like the PS3).
If you discount the Blu-Ray drive then the PS3 will probably use less custom parts than the 360.
The quote in the abstract is quote misleading. Mr. Lin from the Wistron company said it; Wistron makes some of the 360's for Microsoft.
I hadn't really thought about the attachment aspect much. If Nintendo makes it cheap and easy to make attachments then there are going to be a lot of different little doo-dads hanging off those remotes. I'm not certain how I feel about this... making a quality controller that will stand up to a lot of gameplay isn't trivial: look at all the 3rd party controller market, 90% of it is utter crap.
man I really should learn to proof-read my posts... the ass was completely unintentional...
How did XBox games have more "substance"? I'm really not trying to sound like a dick, I just would like some examples.
Third person vs first person is a distinction that really only matters if you get motion sickness playing FPSs.
"I'd consider non-hardcore to be more about targetting casual gamers rather than getting the 6-year-old crowd."
I think a lot of casual gamers play with their families, which means the games need to be appropriate for 6-year-olds.
The Xbox1 does make a great console for little kide if you mod it and put all their games on the HD. You could even disable/remove the DVD-ROM.
"I mean the PS* was built on sports games."
not even remotely ass much as the XBox is/was, first person shooters and sports games seem to make up over half of the library for the XBox.
"The power difference between a PS3 and a 360 (with 3 3.2ghz processors and a better GPU) is negligable."
That's simply not true,
The architechture behind each console is VERY different and just flat out saying which is faster is impossible. The GPU on the 360 has unified shaders, so if you need to use a lot of just one kind of shader it should be faster on the 360, but the overhead of having unified shaders probably means that if you are doing some balance of vector and pixel shading then the PS3 will clean it's clock(it's still unclear whether vector manipulations will even really be done on the RSX).
The PS3 has memory bandwidth in spades over the 360 with over twice as much, but the 360 has one big chunk of memory with the same latency which makes it easier to use.
The Cell is different enough that I don't see how to even compare it to anything, although each of the 360's CPU cores are almost identical to the PPE core.
Honestly, if the PS3 can't make with the pretty better than the 360, then I don't see a reason to buy either.(I haven't seen Oblivion yet though)
"Sony and Microsoft will copy it immediately"
Sony will almost definately copy parts of the Rev's controller, the PS3 will at least have tilt sensors in it's controllers. Microsoft would have to release it as another optional add-on for their console that seems to be aging already.
Calling the DS a PDA is a lot like calling the PS2 a business PC. A PS2 can run firefox and spreadsheet apps, but that doesn't change the fact that it was designed as a gaming console.
Gaming hardware gnereally allows for some tricky optimizations that you can't/wouldn't do on a normal PDA or PC application.
The DS isn't a PDA, and has 2 CPUs and a GPU. The TCM(tightly coupled memories) on the NDS's ARM9 allow you to squeeze more performance out of it than most other ARM9s.
Responsiveness of a CPU is never really a problem, humans generally precieve anything that happens in less than 1/10th of a second as happening instantaniously. The only real problem with using this chip in a PDA is it isn't very fast, the article says the chip is comparable to a 77Mhz ARM9 which is several times slower than anything you'd find in a PDA today. I would love to see a Palm-OS PDA based around this chip because of it's EXTREMELY low power consumption; we could be looking at the same kind of battery life as the original Palms.
I can't find anything about Lucent ever trying to sue over the original XBox, but Lucent has tried to sue Gateway/Dell before over the same patent, and Microsoft was forced to step in and defend them. It seems that Windows Media Player itself is infringing which means that the XBox1 possibly never infringed on this patent.
I doubt that this is the claim which MS is infringing on. MS only has to infringe every point of a single claim to lose.
it sure looks like MS could just patch around this patent, but MS would likely be liable for damages on all 360s already sold and all unsold 360s would have to be pulled from the shelves.
"MPEG2 and all MPEG related standards are "owned" by MPEG LA, who licenses the technology. It would be one thing if Microsoft deployed a product with MPEG2 playback capabilities without paying the license, but then where is Lucent in all this? Is this some crappy dredge up of a vague compression scheme like Unisys pulled?"
The patent covers one implemntation of encoding/decoding MPEG2 video, not the actual formating of the data in the file like the UNISYS case. The lawsuit is definately real and it looks like Microsoft is going to be handing a wad-o-cash to Lucent for this.
Think what would have happened if Jack Bresenham had patented all of his work...
I really don't think so...
Some will buy full legit coppies, some will buy acadmic coppies and use them improperly, but almost all will pirate. Hell, I have several legit licences for Windows XP and the only version I have installed is pirated.
The Walmart here(Johnson City,TN) has two decks of Bicycle cards for $3.00
I bought 6 decks because I don't expect that price to last long.
EB Games sells 1600 cards for $20, but the regular price is $25 elsewhere and the retail/list price is always $25.