The article was a bit scarce on details, but they made it sound like the Compact Flash and SD slots announced at E3 will not be used. I hate these stupid "leaked stories"....
Nope, inflation is generally considered a very good thing, a country's economy is best off when inflation is slow and steady. Now the opposite of inflation, "deflation" is generally considered a bad thing
Besides, I won't be surprised if Sony does drop Blue-Ray from the PS3 before ship, since they're already shedding features like they did with the PS2
The wifi router capability is the only feature I know of that has been "shed" from the PS3. What features were "shed" from the PS2 before launch?
I doubt Sony will drop Blue-Ray, especially if MS is dropping HD-DVD. Establishing Blue-Ray as the standard for HD Movie discs would give Sony a licensing cash bonanza. A Blue-Ray drive shouldn't cost much more than a standard DVD drive once Sony gets production ramped up(the only real difference is a more sophisticated read head). Putting Blue-Ray video players in millions of homes would fix the current chicken/egg problem that both HD-DVD and Blue-Ray currently have.
I would think it's much more likely MS announces that they are going to include a HD-DVD drive in the 360 at launch. There is a lot of money in establishing the HD movie disc standard and this announcement may just be Microsoft scheming for a bigger part of the pie.
You may want to look into modding your XBox so you no longer need to use the crappy crappy crappy XBox DVD drive. As long as you can get the drive to read the game disc once then you don't have to worry about dirty disc errors again. The drive in my XBox has almost completely crapped out now so I primarily load games onto it's HD via the network now.... On the down side XBLive will ban you if they catch you with a modded XBox, but you do get to use XBMC which was one of the reasons I originally bought an XBox for.
I must agree with you about the games available for the XBox, it's pretty pathetic. All the games I like are available on all consoles(Burnout3, Worms 3D, Beyond Good and Evil, Prince of Persia, Psychonauts). If it weren't for the fact that the XBox is easily moddable, then the it would have been hands-down the worst console ever.
My XBox SUCKS ass at reading any disc, so I don't use it to play DVDs. I have watched more DVDs on PS2s in the last year than stand-alone players, although I generally watch DVDs n computers.
I think the cross-licencing in your article was refering to the Windows Media WMV9 codec (a.k.a. VC-1, a.k.a. VC-9). Microsoft has been pushing both the Blue-Ray and HD-DVD standards bodies to accept mandatory Microsoft codecs for players. What this means is that Microsft will get paid part of that licencing fees for every HD-DVD and Blue-Ray player sold. The HD-DVD group has been much more freindly with Microsoft thus their link with HD-DVD. At this point Microsoft could even stab the HD-DVD group in the back and go with Blue Ray, Microsft has the HD-DVD group by the balls right now.
This whole announcment could easily be just a ploy to get all the licencing fees dropped indefinately for the XBox 360. Microsoft has shown their willingness to throw money at the XBox to make it an eventual success, another half billion loss by releasing the 360 in Nov with a HD-DVD drive fits in with their current business style.
This isn't a technical choice but an economic one. MS cant afford to pay for the license fees of the 2 million 360's that will get sold before the upgrade or version 2.
The HD-DVD consortium NEEDS to get some players into the market if they expect for their format to catch on(chicken and egg problem). Microsoft is one of the players in this group so I doubt MS would be paying ANY licencing fees to include this drive at launch.
The Jade Empire cutscenes aren't "pixelized" because they are compressed, it's because they use the game engine to render the cutscene!
Nope, I was talking about the video cutscenes, not the game engine rendered stuff. Their are plenty of video cutscenes in Jade Empire and pretty much all of them have nasty compression artifacts. I haven't gotten very far but the one that sticks out most in my mind is when the you use the flyer the first time. All the taking-off/landing/crashing is video and would have looked really nice if it weren't for the video having artifacts whenever there was any fast movement.
1080i games will finally start using the space on a DVD, but it would take almost 7 CDs worth of data to fill a single layer DVD... (ie 14 for dual layer!) There are quite a few PC games with a LOT of hi-res textures these days and they are nowhere near that. Plus, the whole point of the PS3/XBox360 is that they can render HD-quality 3D in real time (which uses a lot less space for textures and geometry than HD prerendered content would).
PC games aren't going to catch up to the texture sizes used on next-gen consoles for at least another year. The biggest limiting factor on texture size is video memory which these new consoles have butt loads of.... butt loads. Also, for 1080i(1920 X 1080) video in MPEG4 you are talking roughly 3.5gigs/hour for decent quality, that eats up space in a hurry.
Anyway, I agree theoretially Blu-Ray's capacity would give PS3 games more potential, but I'd put money MS or Sony can get by with 9GB for the next few years and no one will know the difference (the MASSIVE amount of resources required to create a great looking HD-res game will be the bottleneck...)
I think customers will be forced to notice. Sony is going to push this and I expect to see developers using this as THE reason that they didn't make Title-X for the XBox360 (some of the developers will even be telling the truth). Not many games will need more than 9gigs, but some will. 3 years from now I wouldn't doubt if ~25% of console games are multi-DVD size. Sony isn't going to let 360 fanboys forget about their puny size of their peni... disc.
Are you sure that you didn't recieve a bad batch of discs. Most people had/have the older model which explains why most of the returns were for the it.
Hardly. It'll make a difference sure, but think about what the bulk of space on game discs is. It's sound files and video clips. That's not going to make a huge impact on these games. It's telling that DVD drives have been common on PC's for a while now and there's really not much in games that's taking advatange of it. It's just a nice way to consolidate 3 or 4 cd's.
The cut scenes on PC games are also generally VERY brief, where games for consoles are much much longer.
Some console cutscenes look like crap because they were severely compressed to make sure they fit on standard DVDs. I've been playing Jade Empire and the pixelization of the cutscenes really hurts the feel of the game*. If all your cutscenes are now going to be 1080i HD then your space to hold the video goes up several times. Not to mention textures, with textures going from 256x256 pixel to 2048x2048 pixel textures are going to start eating up space. Filling up a DVD with a next-gen title should be very easy.
* It's not a dirty disk problem because I'm playing it off of the HD.
Sorry, I was rambling.... What I was trying to say was that this announcement will hurt the 360 and possibly kill HD-DVD unless MS is actually planning to include a HD-DVD drive at launch.
There is no technical reason the 360 couldn't have a HD-DVD drive at launch and MS doesn't mind losing lots of money on the XBox. If MS doesn't kill Sony this console war then the billions they lost on the XBox1 were spent in vain. Right now I think the 360 has at least a 50% chance of launching with a HD-DVD drive.
What's the alternative? Delay the launch 6 months or a year and come out the same time or after the PS3? Look like a bunch of idiots after promising a November release? And have no sales at all while waiting to add a HD-DVD drive which has no HD-DVDs to play on it anyway?
I think the real news is that they confirmed it, I was pretty sure this is what they were going to do before reading this. Since MS isn't trying to sweep this under the rug I'm wondering if they aren't planning on having a "surprise" at realease and include an HD-DVD drive. Microsft definately doesn't mind throwing money at their XBox problems. Not having a HD-DVD drive on launch will probably hurt 360 sales a bit, but it could kill the HD-DVD format. It looks like the 360 will be the vehicle that might bring HD-DVDs to comsumers. If you can only say some 360s will play HD-DVDs then HD-DVD will lose a lot of mindshare.
If MS is confirming this, then I think they are planning on incluing a HD-DVD drive.
I have Linux installed on my XBox as well, but MS most certainly doesn't want people installing Linux on the current XBox, much less the 360. At best you are looking at hackers getting Linux running O.K. about 1 year after launch, but I'm betting it's never going to as simple and functional as it is on the XBox1. Until Linux runs on the 360 you are looking at very few apps on the 360. MS hasn't even said that Internet Explorer will come with the 360. It's very likely MS doesn't want to include IE on the 360 because it's a support nightmere! The only thing MS could do would be to include a reformat disk with every 360, so when people call with problems MS can tell them to just reformat their console.....
The main problem I have with Google Earth is that it only runs on Windows and Google Earth doesn't seem to really work with Wine.. Welll... seeing as I've never gotten it to work, that is the also the only problem I have with it.
Microsoft's maps of around ETSU are nearly worthless. It's sorta fun to see what things may have looked like a decade ago, but I like my maps to be updated. MSN has roads going through buildings that are 30 years old and a lot of missing roads, the few on-campus roads that are named on the map are wrong. I know for a fact that their aerial photos are at least 3 years old for ETSU.
And what's with MS's maps inability to render curved roads?
Now I might forgive them for messing up my campus, but the WHOLE the map for Johnson City, TN at MSN has SERIOUS problems. (try comparing the area surrounding ETSU(Google's is correct).
From what I've read so far it sounds more likely that the PS3 would be a better "spare" computer than the 360, that is if Sony actaully does put Linux on the PS3's HDD...
Why?
Firefox
Open Office, MythTV, etc...
Blue-Ray HD-Movies
No built-in Bluetooth/WiFi on the 360, both are in the PS3.
The 360 will require either a USB keyboard or a "special" wireless keyboard.(bluetooth is much nicer)
WiFi makes running a home network much easier.(I know you can add optional WiFi to the 360)
Anyhooo, I'm looking forward to seeing all the new consoles released. If i
Entourage is really just an IMAP email client with LDAP and WebDAV support that happens to work with Exchange. Outlook uses Microsoft's MAPI proprietary protocol. You run into a lot of stupid limitations when trying to use Entourage with Exchange.
Novell's GroupWise is the most complete groupware package I've ever seen from the little I've messed with it. I have used Novell's NetMail extensively and it is the best email system I've ever used.
that sounds like bull. iDVD is one of the few apps that REQUIRE a G4 while Rosetta only emulates a G3. I'd be very VERY surprised if all the iLife apps weren't included with the shipping Intel Macs.
Uhm, I hope you realize that apple includes many [kernel extensions] as well that aren't exactly usable on these Dev kits.
... Then for third party kexts there are Logitech Drivers, Norton Utilities kexts, Virtual PC kexts, the Ambrosia kext, DiskWarrior kexts, and many other third party drivers and kexts that shouldn't be loading at startup and shouldn't even be kexts but are.... You don't need to load a kext for hardware that doesn't exist.
Yep, you are basically right, but I do believe DiskWarrior doesn't install any kexts.
What makes you think these dev kits have either iDVD or Firefox installed on them? Did you see iDVD in use during Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote?
Well, the article is about Firefox's speed on Intel Macs, and I could have sworn I did see Jobs use iDVD but I may be wrong.
Probably 95% of third party OSX drivers are user space drivers. Some user space drivers leave little proccesses running to detect when devices are plugged in which can add a few seconds to the boot time.
Everything on my Mac is user-space or apple-supplied-kernel-space: Airport card, firewire DVD burner, LEGO USB infra-red tower, USB flash drive, keyboard/mouse, Sony Digital Camera, iPod, and an XBox controller. The XBox controller driver leaves a process to check when it is plugged in and iPhoto and iTunes have options to leave processes so that they can be notified of camera and iPod connections.
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The article was a bit scarce on details, but they made it sound like the Compact Flash and SD slots announced at E3 will not be used. I hate these stupid "leaked stories"....
Nope, inflation is generally considered a very good thing, a country's economy is best off when inflation is slow and steady. Now the opposite of inflation, "deflation" is generally considered a bad thing
Besides, I won't be surprised if Sony does drop Blue-Ray from the PS3 before ship, since they're already shedding features like they did with the PS2
The wifi router capability is the only feature I know of that has been "shed" from the PS3. What features were "shed" from the PS2 before launch?
I doubt Sony will drop Blue-Ray, especially if MS is dropping HD-DVD. Establishing Blue-Ray as the standard for HD Movie discs would give Sony a licensing cash bonanza. A Blue-Ray drive shouldn't cost much more than a standard DVD drive once Sony gets production ramped up(the only real difference is a more sophisticated read head). Putting Blue-Ray video players in millions of homes would fix the current chicken/egg problem that both HD-DVD and Blue-Ray currently have.
I would think it's much more likely MS announces that they are going to include a HD-DVD drive in the 360 at launch. There is a lot of money in establishing the HD movie disc standard and this announcement may just be Microsoft scheming for a bigger part of the pie.
You may want to look into modding your XBox so you no longer need to use the crappy crappy crappy XBox DVD drive. As long as you can get the drive to read the game disc once then you don't have to worry about dirty disc errors again. The drive in my XBox has almost completely crapped out now so I primarily load games onto it's HD via the network now.... On the down side XBLive will ban you if they catch you with a modded XBox, but you do get to use XBMC which was one of the reasons I originally bought an XBox for.
I must agree with you about the games available for the XBox, it's pretty pathetic. All the games I like are available on all consoles(Burnout3, Worms 3D, Beyond Good and Evil, Prince of Persia, Psychonauts). If it weren't for the fact that the XBox is easily moddable, then the it would have been hands-down the worst console ever.
My XBox SUCKS ass at reading any disc, so I don't use it to play DVDs. I have watched more DVDs on PS2s in the last year than stand-alone players, although I generally watch DVDs n computers.
I think the cross-licencing in your article was refering to the Windows Media WMV9 codec (a.k.a. VC-1, a.k.a. VC-9). Microsoft has been pushing both the Blue-Ray and HD-DVD standards bodies to accept mandatory Microsoft codecs for players. What this means is that Microsft will get paid part of that licencing fees for every HD-DVD and Blue-Ray player sold. The HD-DVD group has been much more freindly with Microsoft thus their link with HD-DVD. At this point Microsoft could even stab the HD-DVD group in the back and go with Blue Ray, Microsft has the HD-DVD group by the balls right now.
This whole announcment could easily be just a ploy to get all the licencing fees dropped indefinately for the XBox 360. Microsoft has shown their willingness to throw money at the XBox to make it an eventual success, another half billion loss by releasing the 360 in Nov with a HD-DVD drive fits in with their current business style.
This isn't a technical choice but an economic one. MS cant afford to pay for the license fees of the 2 million 360's that will get sold before the upgrade or version 2.
The HD-DVD consortium NEEDS to get some players into the market if they expect for their format to catch on(chicken and egg problem). Microsoft is one of the players in this group so I doubt MS would be paying ANY licencing fees to include this drive at launch.
Are you sure that you didn't recieve a bad batch of discs. Most people had/have the older model which explains why most of the returns were for the it.
Hardly. It'll make a difference sure, but think about what the bulk of space on game discs is. It's sound files and video clips. That's not going to make a huge impact on these games. It's telling that DVD drives have been common on PC's for a while now and there's really not much in games that's taking advatange of it. It's just a nice way to consolidate 3 or 4 cd's.
The cut scenes on PC games are also generally VERY brief, where games for consoles are much much longer.
Some console cutscenes look like crap because they were severely compressed to make sure they fit on standard DVDs. I've been playing Jade Empire and the pixelization of the cutscenes really hurts the feel of the game*. If all your cutscenes are now going to be 1080i HD then your space to hold the video goes up several times. Not to mention textures, with textures going from 256x256 pixel to 2048x2048 pixel textures are going to start eating up space. Filling up a DVD with a next-gen title should be very easy.
* It's not a dirty disk problem because I'm playing it off of the HD.
Sorry, I was rambling.... What I was trying to say was that this announcement will hurt the 360 and possibly kill HD-DVD unless MS is actually planning to include a HD-DVD drive at launch.
There is no technical reason the 360 couldn't have a HD-DVD drive at launch and MS doesn't mind losing lots of money on the XBox. If MS doesn't kill Sony this console war then the billions they lost on the XBox1 were spent in vain. Right now I think the 360 has at least a 50% chance of launching with a HD-DVD drive.
What's the alternative? Delay the launch 6 months or a year and come out the same time or after the PS3? Look like a bunch of idiots after promising a November release? And have no sales at all while waiting to add a HD-DVD drive which has no HD-DVDs to play on it anyway?
I think the real news is that they confirmed it, I was pretty sure this is what they were going to do before reading this. Since MS isn't trying to sweep this under the rug I'm wondering if they aren't planning on having a "surprise" at realease and include an HD-DVD drive. Microsft definately doesn't mind throwing money at their XBox problems. Not having a HD-DVD drive on launch will probably hurt 360 sales a bit, but it could kill the HD-DVD format. It looks like the 360 will be the vehicle that might bring HD-DVDs to comsumers. If you can only say some 360s will play HD-DVDs then HD-DVD will lose a lot of mindshare.
If MS is confirming this, then I think they are planning on incluing a HD-DVD drive.
I have Linux installed on my XBox as well, but MS most certainly doesn't want people installing Linux on the current XBox, much less the 360. At best you are looking at hackers getting Linux running O.K. about 1 year after launch, but I'm betting it's never going to as simple and functional as it is on the XBox1. Until Linux runs on the 360 you are looking at very few apps on the 360. MS hasn't even said that Internet Explorer will come with the 360. It's very likely MS doesn't want to include IE on the 360 because it's a support nightmere! The only thing MS could do would be to include a reformat disk with every 360, so when people call with problems MS can tell them to just reformat their console.....
The main problem I have with Google Earth is that it only runs on Windows and Google Earth doesn't seem to really work with Wine.. Welll... seeing as I've never gotten it to work, that is the also the only problem I have with it.
The grandparent was talking about MSN's map data, which for Virginia Tech seems to be good(MSN map, Google map). For my campus MSN's maps are worthless
MSN does seem to have a LOT more aerial photos; however supplimenting bad map data with old aerial photos just doesn't cut it.
Microsoft's maps of around ETSU are nearly worthless. It's sorta fun to see what things may have looked like a decade ago, but I like my maps to be updated. MSN has roads going through buildings that are 30 years old and a lot of missing roads, the few on-campus roads that are named on the map are wrong. I know for a fact that their aerial photos are at least 3 years old for ETSU.
Microsoft's map of ETSU
Google's map of ETSU(very accurate)
And what's with MS's maps inability to render curved roads?
Now I might forgive them for messing up my campus, but the WHOLE the map for Johnson City, TN at MSN has SERIOUS problems. (try comparing the area surrounding ETSU(Google's is correct).
Why?
- Firefox
- Open Office, MythTV, etc...
- Blue-Ray HD-Movies
- No built-in Bluetooth/WiFi on the 360, both are in the PS3.
- The 360 will require either a USB keyboard or a "special" wireless keyboard.(bluetooth is much nicer)
- WiFi makes running a home network much easier.(I know you can add optional WiFi to the 360)
Anyhooo, I'm looking forward to seeing all the new consoles released. If iIf you do decide to splurge on a kick ass pointing device, I recommend the Kensington Expert Mouse. It is the best trackball ever made.
I'm in the same boat but I don't think I'm going to bother with graduate school. I'll be graduating this spring from ETSU.
Anyone with job advise for a new CS/IS graduate please reply to this.
WOW! I can't believe I hadn't heard of this! THANKS!!!!
Entourage is really just an IMAP email client with LDAP and WebDAV support that happens to work with Exchange. Outlook uses Microsoft's MAPI proprietary protocol. You run into a lot of stupid limitations when trying to use Entourage with Exchange.
Novell's GroupWise is the most complete groupware package I've ever seen from the little I've messed with it. I have used Novell's NetMail extensively and it is the best email system I've ever used.
to bad they aren't free...
that sounds like bull. iDVD is one of the few apps that REQUIRE a G4 while Rosetta only emulates a G3. I'd be very VERY surprised if all the iLife apps weren't included with the shipping Intel Macs.
Probably 95% of third party OSX drivers are user space drivers. Some user space drivers leave little proccesses running to detect when devices are plugged in which can add a few seconds to the boot time.
Everything on my Mac is user-space or apple-supplied-kernel-space: Airport card, firewire DVD burner, LEGO USB infra-red tower, USB flash drive, keyboard/mouse, Sony Digital Camera, iPod, and an XBox controller. The XBox controller driver leaves a process to check when it is plugged in and iPhoto and iTunes have options to leave processes so that they can be notified of camera and iPod connections.