It looks like most retailers discount 1600 point cards to $20, but the list price is $25.
So...
64 points = US $1 + tax
200 points = US $3.13 + tax
and whats even more fun is that the point cards are region locked so you can't buy a japanese/european point card and use it on your US XBox and they can charge different regions different prices.
The bigger screen on the PSP will be nice, but being able to flick through your weapons, quickly set homing missles, and scroll the map at anytime is a big plus. Anyway, I'm sure my little brother will buy Worms for his PSP so I'll get to see which is better.
It would be trivial to design the system to underclock the CPU by 50% rather than 100%, and I'm sure that's what they are planning on doing(485Mhz * 150% = 729Mhz). Clock multipliers are easily adjusted these days.
The RSX supports rendering to both local and system memory. The way I'm understanding it you would probably want to leave your textures in the low latency video memory, but have your models sitting in system memory so that you could use the Cell's SPEs to do all kinds of nifty transforms. Hell, I still haven't heard anything definative on whether the RSX even has real vertex shaders.
Anyhoo, getting back on point... if you look at what PGR3 did with mapping giant textures to a cube and then bump-mapping them into nice buildings I could see using 1000MB of textures per level. Lets assume that 80% of the textures are unique to each level of a game. That means you could fit 10 levels on a DL-DVD or 5 levels on a SL-DVD.
The cost of single layer Blu-Ray discs should fall below DL-DVD prices pretty quickly, and with a single layer disc you don't have to worry about discs stuttering when you switch layers.
Wrong about what?
Almost all games could fit on a CD with minimal loss if the designers wanted to do it.
"Th reason for blu-ray is to encourage blu-ray update over hd-dvd.[sic]"
That is their primary motivation behind including Blu-Ray, however, Blu-Ray will help games. Most console games have cutscenes which will easily fill a 9gig DVD when converted to high-def, and in the future a lot of games will end up using single layer Blu-Ray because it will be cheaper than a dual layer DVD. Single layer discs also don't suffer from "stutter while laser is refocused" problems.
I think it is more likely that 360 games will be locked to a specific console. Nobody will be able to easily copy a Blu-Ray disc easily anytime soon, but pirating 360 games should be easy in a couple months.
Locking software to a piece of hardware is generally called "product activation" is patently Microsoftish.
Sony's version of XBox Live sounds quite nice to me. The subscription model that XBLive is based on is it's biggest flaw, and Sony is providing basically the same service sans fees. I expect to see Microsoft follow suite here soon and drop their subscription fees for playing online games.
The 360 really did fumbled it's hard-drive. Not only is the 20gig hard drive optionally mandatory, but you can't even upgrade it. At least Sony has said that the HD will be user upgradable. $100 for a 20gig hard-drive is a joke.
The PS3 will have a hard drive in some form, so you shouldn't need a memory stick.
I'm hoping that all PS3s ship without a hard drives, and that I can stick a standard 3.5" hard drive in it. The hard drive is really unneccesary unless you are going to take your PS3 online.
Re:Loved the show, not happy about this.
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 1
Are there really 50 some episodes written by the original writers?? Where did you get this figure? If this is true then I can't see how this could go wrong. I hope they can assemble enough of the original talent to give these new episodes the same feel.
Product Activation is totally unheard of in console gaming, and would be impossible to defeat until someone finds a way to either sign executables, or execute unsigned code on the 360.
I think people are used enough to product activation for this to work... the only problem I see is that it would tie a disc to a certain 360. Microsoft could provide a way to disassociate a disc with a given 360, but game rentals and used game sales would be problematic.
Microsoft could provide special time-limited activations for rental discs, so that if you copy the game you can still only play it for a couple days. Microsoft could charge a butt-load for these special discs and make extra cash.
Used game sales would just be difficult... every game sold back would have to checked that it was disassociated before a store could buy it. I doubt many retailers would buy used 360 games anymore. I think this would be seen as a positove thing to Microsoft and most game studios.
If you wanted to play the game at a friends you would either have to disassociate it before you left, or maybe just login with your gamertag on their 360. Similar to the way downloaded games work now.
Embedding the firmware makes it impossible to inject your own firmware and makes it MUCH MUCH harder to tell how the chip works. So, yes, Microsoft could stop people from reflashing their DVD drives.
Unlike the CPU, the chip that drives the DVD rom can be completely re-implemented with a relatively cheap FPGA. You can reverse engineer chips with electron microscopes, although it is really expensive. Mod chips could still be produced even if Microsoft decided to start making their DVD-ROMs with an embedded firmware.
I doubt embedding the firmware into the DVD controller is really an option for Microsoft since that would drive the cost of the DVD-ROM way up. Microsoft currently just reflashes standard Samsung and Hitachi Serial ATA parts with their proprietary firmware.
Unless Microsoft radically changes the way they make the 360, this attack should work.
This hack doesn't allow homebrew at all. It only allows you to copy signed 360 binaries off an official 360 CD and onto a burned disk. Defeating the signed executable requirment is what will allow Linux and homebrew to be possible.
Even if the DVD firmware is/was unflashable you can always remove/disable it and add your own. XBox 1.6s don't have flashable TSOPs but their are plenty of modchips to override their firmware.
Also, I doubt that the XBox compatability CDs are actually booted. I'd bet that the 360 checks for that type of disk the same way it checks for DVDs and launches the software from the HD, and even then I'm sure the data has to be signed.
If this video is real there isn't really any easy "patch" Microsoft can put out. If the part of the firmware that is in charge of downloading/uploading itself was also modified then I don't see how they could ever detect this hack without reulting to draconian means like putting a unique key on each copy of each disk sold and then forcing people to register their discs online.
"Hard drives are cheaper, portable, and easy to write to. They don't get scratched, smeared, melted, or destroyed."
CDs are always going to be cheaper to mail than HDs, and can be MUCH more resiliant depending on what you are doing with your backups(i.e. mailing them). First gen hardware only finds a few niches because it is always very expensive, but the price generally comes down pretty rapidly so that the main stream can start adopting it. That's the way it worked with CDs, CD-Rs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs.
I believe you are wrong here, although I'd like to here an expert say something on this. As I see it anything with the "or later" clause is dual licenced now and any developer wanting to extend that software can choose V2, V3, or "V2 or later" licences. I found the part of the GPL about the "or later" clause and it goes as such:
If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
If what you said was true then no current GPL software could be used in GPL v3 software unless all copyright holders gave consent. Remember that the developer is an end user as well.
Actually, in the article says "Sony will roll out the PS3 by year end, in time for the holidays", but I don't see any quote from Stringer saying anything about release dates in Japan or America.
Sony makes little to no money on the PSP hardware, but makes MAJOR moola on the software. If someone did make a good webbrowser for the PSP, Sony would gladly allow them to sell it.
The PS3 is in a far different situation; Sony can't stop simple software from being written for it. Even if Sony doesn't leave a way to run code natively, anyone can still use Blu-Ray's Java layer to write simple games, or even a media player. Blu-Ray's Java has built-in codecs to play MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 and has access to the network card.
2D games on the PS3 will not be making Sony any money. As long as Sony disables the 3D card(and the SPEs) they could allow Linux to run and not have it take a chunk out of their profits(3D games). By allowing Linux, Sony gets a free OS complete with a full compliment of modern apps.
XBMC is under the GPL, it's based on MPlayer, it's unlikely we will ever see any GPL software on a MS console without modding. IF Sony does allow Linux on the PS3, then you can expect to see some great media players for the PS3.
"It's all about cost of production. HD-DVD does the *same* thing with only a minor modification to the dvd fabrication plants."
One big problem with that argument is no company wants to convert a DVD plant to an HD-DVD plant. DVD production is going to increase into the forseable future and retrofitted plants are (probably) not going to be as effcient as a new HD-DVD/Blu-Ray plants. It's not like there are all these useless DVD plants that wouldn't be used for anything else, new DVD plants are still being "built from scratch".
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It looks like most retailers discount 1600 point cards to $20, but the list price is $25.
So...
64 points = US $1 + tax
200 points = US $3.13 + tax
and whats even more fun is that the point cards are region locked so you can't buy a japanese/european point card and use it on your US XBox and they can charge different regions different prices.
On a related note on your totally unrelated note.........
Worms is also comming out for the DS very soon, and I couldn't be happier. It looks like they really nailed the user interface, the top screen is used as the default view of the scene and the bottom screen is used for weapons managment and scrolling the top screen.
The bigger screen on the PSP will be nice, but being able to flick through your weapons, quickly set homing missles, and scroll the map at anytime is a big plus. Anyway, I'm sure my little brother will buy Worms for his PSP so I'll get to see which is better.
It would be trivial to design the system to underclock the CPU by 50% rather than 100%, and I'm sure that's what they are planning on doing(485Mhz * 150% = 729Mhz). Clock multipliers are easily adjusted these days.
The RSX supports rendering to both local and system memory. The way I'm understanding it you would probably want to leave your textures in the low latency video memory, but have your models sitting in system memory so that you could use the Cell's SPEs to do all kinds of nifty transforms. Hell, I still haven't heard anything definative on whether the RSX even has real vertex shaders.
Anyhoo, getting back on point... if you look at what PGR3 did with mapping giant textures to a cube and then bump-mapping them into nice buildings I could see using 1000MB of textures per level. Lets assume that 80% of the textures are unique to each level of a game. That means you could fit 10 levels on a DL-DVD or 5 levels on a SL-DVD.
The cost of single layer Blu-Ray discs should fall below DL-DVD prices pretty quickly, and with a single layer disc you don't have to worry about discs stuttering when you switch layers.
If the space is there it will be used.
"You are so very wrong."
Wrong about what?
Almost all games could fit on a CD with minimal loss if the designers wanted to do it.
"Th reason for blu-ray is to encourage blu-ray update over hd-dvd.[sic]"
That is their primary motivation behind including Blu-Ray, however, Blu-Ray will help games. Most console games have cutscenes which will easily fill a 9gig DVD when converted to high-def, and in the future a lot of games will end up using single layer Blu-Ray because it will be cheaper than a dual layer DVD. Single layer discs also don't suffer from "stutter while laser is refocused" problems.
I think it is more likely that 360 games will be locked to a specific console. Nobody will be able to easily copy a Blu-Ray disc easily anytime soon, but pirating 360 games should be easy in a couple months.
Locking software to a piece of hardware is generally called "product activation" is patently Microsoftish.
A 1024x1024 texture compressed in a high-quality JPEG will eat up roughly 500kB,
so:
Sony's version of XBox Live sounds quite nice to me. The subscription model that XBLive is based on is it's biggest flaw, and Sony is providing basically the same service sans fees. I expect to see Microsoft follow suite here soon and drop their subscription fees for playing online games.
$10/month to play Puzzle Bobble online is stupid.
The 360 really did fumbled it's hard-drive. Not only is the 20gig hard drive optionally mandatory, but you can't even upgrade it. At least Sony has said that the HD will be user upgradable. $100 for a 20gig hard-drive is a joke.
The PS3 will have a hard drive in some form, so you shouldn't need a memory stick.
I'm hoping that all PS3s ship without a hard drives, and that I can stick a standard 3.5" hard drive in it. The hard drive is really unneccesary unless you are going to take your PS3 online.
Are there really 50 some episodes written by the original writers?? Where did you get this figure? If this is true then I can't see how this could go wrong. I hope they can assemble enough of the original talent to give these new episodes the same feel.
Product Activation is totally unheard of in console gaming, and would be impossible to defeat until someone finds a way to either sign executables, or execute unsigned code on the 360.
I think people are used enough to product activation for this to work... the only problem I see is that it would tie a disc to a certain 360. Microsoft could provide a way to disassociate a disc with a given 360, but game rentals and used game sales would be problematic.
Microsoft could provide special time-limited activations for rental discs, so that if you copy the game you can still only play it for a couple days. Microsoft could charge a butt-load for these special discs and make extra cash.
Used game sales would just be difficult... every game sold back would have to checked that it was disassociated before a store could buy it. I doubt many retailers would buy used 360 games anymore. I think this would be seen as a positove thing to Microsoft and most game studios.
If you wanted to play the game at a friends you would either have to disassociate it before you left, or maybe just login with your gamertag on their 360. Similar to the way downloaded games work now.
Embedding the firmware makes it impossible to inject your own firmware and makes it MUCH MUCH harder to tell how the chip works. So, yes, Microsoft could stop people from reflashing their DVD drives.
Unlike the CPU, the chip that drives the DVD rom can be completely re-implemented with a relatively cheap FPGA. You can reverse engineer chips with electron microscopes, although it is really expensive. Mod chips could still be produced even if Microsoft decided to start making their DVD-ROMs with an embedded firmware.
I doubt embedding the firmware into the DVD controller is really an option for Microsoft since that would drive the cost of the DVD-ROM way up. Microsoft currently just reflashes standard Samsung and Hitachi Serial ATA parts with their proprietary firmware.
Unless Microsoft radically changes the way they make the 360, this attack should work.
This hack doesn't allow homebrew at all. It only allows you to copy signed 360 binaries off an official 360 CD and onto a burned disk. Defeating the signed executable requirment is what will allow Linux and homebrew to be possible.
Even if the DVD firmware is/was unflashable you can always remove/disable it and add your own. XBox 1.6s don't have flashable TSOPs but their are plenty of modchips to override their firmware.
Also, I doubt that the XBox compatability CDs are actually booted. I'd bet that the 360 checks for that type of disk the same way it checks for DVDs and launches the software from the HD, and even then I'm sure the data has to be signed.
If this video is real there isn't really any easy "patch" Microsoft can put out. If the part of the firmware that is in charge of downloading/uploading itself was also modified then I don't see how they could ever detect this hack without reulting to draconian means like putting a unique key on each copy of each disk sold and then forcing people to register their discs online.
no
"Hard drives are cheaper, portable, and easy to write to. They don't get scratched, smeared, melted, or destroyed."
CDs are always going to be cheaper to mail than HDs, and can be MUCH more resiliant depending on what you are doing with your backups(i.e. mailing them). First gen hardware only finds a few niches because it is always very expensive, but the price generally comes down pretty rapidly so that the main stream can start adopting it. That's the way it worked with CDs, CD-Rs, DVDs, and DVD-Rs.
Darn, it took me forever to realize this wasn't real and I couldn't order it...
"a customer service rep I spoke with on the phone was allowed to tell me that the release is expected to be in the March-May time frame."
Tech-monkey often don't follow company policy; that monkey would at least get chewed out if his manager found out.
Actually, in the article says "Sony will roll out the PS3 by year end, in time for the holidays", but I don't see any quote from Stringer saying anything about release dates in Japan or America.
Bit fanatic?
Sony makes little to no money on the PSP hardware, but makes MAJOR moola on the software. If someone did make a good webbrowser for the PSP, Sony would gladly allow them to sell it.
The PS3 is in a far different situation; Sony can't stop simple software from being written for it. Even if Sony doesn't leave a way to run code natively, anyone can still use Blu-Ray's Java layer to write simple games, or even a media player. Blu-Ray's Java has built-in codecs to play MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 and has access to the network card.
2D games on the PS3 will not be making Sony any money. As long as Sony disables the 3D card(and the SPEs) they could allow Linux to run and not have it take a chunk out of their profits(3D games). By allowing Linux, Sony gets a free OS complete with a full compliment of modern apps.
XBMC is under the GPL, it's based on MPlayer, it's unlikely we will ever see any GPL software on a MS console without modding. IF Sony does allow Linux on the PS3, then you can expect to see some great media players for the PS3.
XBMC is freaking awesome.
"spend thousands of dollars all over again for the SAME movies just to get a few more pixels out of the newer format."
So, are you going to buy new movies in an HD or SD format?? Almost all Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players will play DVDs, so you will still only need one player.
"It's all about cost of production. HD-DVD does the *same* thing with only a minor modification to the dvd fabrication plants."
One big problem with that argument is no company wants to convert a DVD plant to an HD-DVD plant. DVD production is going to increase into the forseable future and retrofitted plants are (probably) not going to be as effcient as a new HD-DVD/Blu-Ray plants. It's not like there are all these useless DVD plants that wouldn't be used for anything else, new DVD plants are still being "built from scratch".