The term "arms race" is used generically to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors. Evolutionary arms races are common occurrences, e.g. predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is sometimes called the Red Queen effect. In addition to predators, parasites can force their hosts into an arms race.
In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between computer virus writers and anti-virus software writers, or spammers against Internet Service Providers and E-mail software writers. Such analogies are not fully accurate as they describe situations where absolute, not necessarilly relative, gains are the important metric.
Fitting this description as an analogy between Sony and its PSP customers is an exercise I leave to you. As for your satisfaction with recent firmware updates, and your disinterest in homebrew: Good for you. It is your PSP to do with as you wish. I wish to do other (legal) stuff with mine. And I wish Sony would get the fuck out of my way. Until they do, my money spigot will not pour into Sony's sink any longer. Fuck 'em. --M
Cars are just one analogy I can use to describe the completely fucked arms race going on between Sony's customer base and their own marketing department. Shall I use another? Or will you bitch about that one too?
I bought the machine and I'll do whatever the fuck I want with it. Further, I will not buy any more Sony products until they change their bad attitude toward their customers. IOW: Sony can blow me. Here's to HD-DVD!
I own a PSP. I use homebrew tools. I have never downloaded or run a commercial program without a legitimate license. I think many others here are also both ethical in their unwillingness to break copyright law and install / use legal homebrew software on the PSPs they paid for.
Or, IOW: how do you feel about auto-makers requiring you to buy special gas for "their" car that you purchased? Hey! You agreed to the license when you first inserted that key and drove it off the lot! You mean you think you should have the right to fill it up with any 'ol gas? Pshaw! Thief. --M
I skip through all cutscenes because IMO they get in the way of gameplay. I really couldn't care less who the bad guy is, why I have to defeat him/her, and the bullshit backstory. Just show me where to shoot. Consider classic video games from the late '70s and early '80s: Asteroids, Space Invaders, Defender, Pac Man, Battlezone, etc etc etc. Did these games have anything more than a single-sentence concept narrative? Contrast this with Dragon's Lair: All narrative, all the time - and boring as hell. What I want from a videogame is constant over-stimulation... which the classics did well, and which current game narratives interfere with. This is like the debate between Quake 3 and Quake 4: Quake 3 - all over-stimulation all the time; Quake 4 (and Doom 3): Boring narrative gets in the way of fun.
Nope. I'm assuming an unstated number of other devices which draw enough power to waste $1B worth of electricity in the U.S. Further, I stated that was a conservative estimate. --M
That's just for a single PS2 / 360. There have been well over 100 million ps2 units shipped since launch. Now you're talking $350 million / yr electric consumption just for unutilized PS2s. Add another $700 million for 200 million PCs when turned off. Add all those VCRs blinking 12:00, DVD players, chargers for cell phones, razors, laptops, etc etc etc.
Let's conservatively guess in the US we're talking $1 Billion (1000 million) / yr. Compare that to a total US GDP of ~ $10 Trillion (ten thousand billion)... you're talking about 1 ten thousandth of US GDP / yr wasted. Actually... pretty significant.
I have. projected with a high end Sony Qualia 004 SXRD digital projector. 1080i introduces obvious scanline artifacts (even though no Plasma, LCD, or DLP device actually scans an electron bean across a phosphoro-luminescent surface). The point is that 1080p/30 is no different from 1080i because the bandwidth utilization is the same.
There is a dramatic difference between 1080i, 1080p/30, and 1080p/60. As for games using or not using 1080p/60 - you'vr got to be kidding me. If the PS3 CPU/GPU can push out enough graphics horsepower to support 1080p/60 (which I doubt - but they claim it can) then I would expect game developers to support the feature. Or maybe they won't. Beats me. But film and -- especially sports broadcasting -- will make great use of it.
Yeah, that's 1080p/24 and 1080pp/30 (24/30 fps) over component, not 1080p/60 - which is limited to hdmi due to bandwidth requirements. IOW: you are full of shit and have no idea WTF you're talking about.
I have a PS2 and a PSP, and I was expecting to buy a PS3 as soon as I could get ahold of one - primarily for a cheap blu-ray drive, but also for backward compatibility. I have plenty of other Sony products, and like the company's engineering and manufacturing quality control. But the company's arrogance over PSP homebrew and the poor game availability, combined with this ridiculous $600 price tag for a PS3 w/hdmi has convinced me that Sony is in a tailspin. I simply don't want to give them my money any longer.
I \*can\* afford it. I don't want it. Until Sony refocuses on the consumer again, I'm not giving them a dime.
If you purchased a PSP, you own it. You did not purchase a license to use, or a license to rent, or a license which limits certain uses of the device. You own it and can do whatever you wish, including throwing it out a window or bricking it with bad homebrew software.
A EULA may be attached to copyrighted software and functions as a contractual agreement between the author and the user. This agreement may set terms for duplication of the software, limit certain uses of the software, and as well as set different pricing for various categories of users or regular per-use payments. The EULA is thus expressly bound to copyright and contract law, and lives between the boundaries of the two.
The PSP is not copyrighted (though firmware within it might be). Thus, it should be legal to use or abuse your PSP however you see fit. However, downgrading firmware might constitute a EULA violation since it constitutes duplication and installation of software - which, depending on the contract terms, could be deemed breach of contract and a copyright violation. But installing emacs, cross compiling the source and installing doom/quake/whatever, or even shoving that PSP up one's ass and mailing it back to Sony for service -- all that should be perfectly legal.
Please note: IANAL, but I do own a PSP - bought at launch. Given Sony's obnoxious and rude behavior to the homebrew scene though, I regret that purchase. It has not lived up to my expectations, both as a gaming machine (the games mostly suck) and as a homebrew platform. I think I would have been much happier with a DS.
Oh well, Sony seems intent on economic suicide. Good riddance.
Not me. I've got a 15" TiBook and it goes with me to work, to night classes, and to the local cafe when I feel like getting out of the house but still need to work. And I find the ~5lbs TiBook heavier than I'd prefer. One of the guys I work with has a tiny 2.2lbs Pentium M notebook that's a dream to carry around. That's what I want.:)
I realize the gamer laptop is not my market. But I simply don't see the point even for a gamer. It's just not upgradable. What gamer would buy a machine that (s)he can't upgrade the video card in? What will (s)he do with the machine in a year? How about two?
And as others have pointed out, there are the heat issues associated with a SLI setup as well. This just seems like a 'solution' looking for a problem. I use a laptop primarily for work. I'd much rather lug around a lightweight pint sized notebook that meets my business needs than a huge and heavy non-upgradable laptop that might retain it's state-of-the-art-for-gaming status for -- at most -- a year. As you said, if you want to game: buy a desktop. Or a console.
The price differential vs. performance appears to favor the cheaper MacBook over the pro this year. At the end the author listed the features which a Pro has over the simple MacBook and just about all of them I could live without. The bigger screen on the Pro is nice, but if one simply goes midrange the price is $1300 for the MacBook compared to $2500 for the midrange pro. Is better 3D graphics, a nicer chassis, and a backlit keyboard worth $1200? Not to me. I've got a Powerbook G4 800 that is feeling pretty sluggish. Perhaps if not this model, maybe the next generation might be a good time to buy.
That Sun 3/50 had a megapixel display. And a Sun3/60 with a CG24 card could handle megapixel in 24 bit color. Resolution was 1152x900, BTW. Though for one running a 3/60 with a cg24 card should up the RAM to 16MB. As for the rest of the stuff, Gnome et all, many old-timers consider that extra cruft a waste of RAM. X ran just fine in what most today would consider ridiculously low RAM space.
Note that in 1988ish the common ram chip on the market was still the 256Kb (8 for 256KB) 41256. 1Mb RAM chips were still new and expensive. To get 8MB of ram in one of these systems meant 64 1Mb RAM chips, all of which consumed power. A lot of power. And a lot of money.
Theoretically one should be able to boot Windows Vista on a 500 Kilohertz PDP-11 with 8KW of wire-mesh core and a hacked MMU that supported real paging. I suppose to ease porting one might want to write an x86 emulator though. It would be an interesting proof of concept: I got Windows to boot on my PDP-11! heh.
Long ago X ran under Linux and BSD just fine on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a Hercules graphics card. Hell, before that one could run X on a Sun 3/50 with only 4MB of RAM, though it was pretty tight. A PII with 64MB or more and a modern graphics card is serious hardware overkill.
"That's the general consensus of a wide range of business executives and auditors who gathered Wednesday in Washington, D.C., for an all-day roundtable hosted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)."
Uhhh, so who is networkworld.com, why should I believe what the regulated have to say to the regulators, and why did the article summary assert what they stated to congress as certain truth?
Can a company use monopoly tactics to artificially raise the price of a product, beyond its natural pricepoint, when that exact same product can be had for free (or by a competitor cheaply) with a bit of extra work?
If you answer "YES" then you believe that a company could monopolize the Linux (or FOSS) market, regarless of free market competition. Somehow, I suspect that outcome borders more on impossible than highly unlikely. --M
Slashdot Mirror
Fitting this description as an analogy between Sony and its PSP customers is an exercise I leave to you. As for your satisfaction with recent firmware updates, and your disinterest in homebrew: Good for you. It is your PSP to do with as you wish. I wish to do other (legal) stuff with mine. And I wish Sony would get the fuck out of my way. Until they do, my money spigot will not pour into Sony's sink any longer. Fuck 'em. --M
Dear Coward,
Cars are just one analogy I can use to describe the completely fucked arms race going on between Sony's customer base and their own marketing department. Shall I use another? Or will you bitch about that one too?
I bought the machine and I'll do whatever the fuck I want with it. Further, I will not buy any more Sony products until they change their bad attitude toward their customers. IOW: Sony can blow me. Here's to HD-DVD!
Sincerely,
--Maynard
Fuck you.
I own a PSP. I use homebrew tools. I have never downloaded or run a commercial program without a legitimate license. I think many others here are also both ethical in their unwillingness to break copyright law and install / use legal homebrew software on the PSPs they paid for.
Or, IOW: how do you feel about auto-makers requiring you to buy special gas for "their" car that you purchased? Hey! You agreed to the license when you first inserted that key and drove it off the lot! You mean you think you should have the right to fill it up with any 'ol gas? Pshaw! Thief. --M
I skip through all cutscenes because IMO they get in the way of gameplay. I really couldn't care less who the bad guy is, why I have to defeat him/her, and the bullshit backstory. Just show me where to shoot. Consider classic video games from the late '70s and early '80s: Asteroids, Space Invaders, Defender, Pac Man, Battlezone, etc etc etc. Did these games have anything more than a single-sentence concept narrative? Contrast this with Dragon's Lair: All narrative, all the time - and boring as hell. What I want from a videogame is constant over-stimulation... which the classics did well, and which current game narratives interfere with. This is like the debate between Quake 3 and Quake 4: Quake 3 - all over-stimulation all the time; Quake 4 (and Doom 3): Boring narrative gets in the way of fun.
JMO...
Nope. I'm assuming an unstated number of other devices which draw enough power to waste $1B worth of electricity in the U.S. Further, I stated that was a conservative estimate. --M
That's just for a single PS2 / 360. There have been well over 100 million ps2 units shipped since launch. Now you're talking $350 million / yr electric consumption just for unutilized PS2s. Add another $700 million for 200 million PCs when turned off. Add all those VCRs blinking 12:00, DVD players, chargers for cell phones, razors, laptops, etc etc etc.
Let's conservatively guess in the US we're talking $1 Billion (1000 million) / yr. Compare that to a total US GDP of ~ $10 Trillion (ten thousand billion)... you're talking about 1 ten thousandth of US GDP / yr wasted. Actually... pretty significant.
"works great" means that it works great!
I have. projected with a high end Sony Qualia 004 SXRD digital projector. 1080i introduces obvious scanline artifacts (even though no Plasma, LCD, or DLP device actually scans an electron bean across a phosphoro-luminescent surface). The point is that 1080p/30 is no different from 1080i because the bandwidth utilization is the same.
There is a dramatic difference between 1080i, 1080p/30, and 1080p/60. As for games using or not using 1080p/60 - you'vr got to be kidding me. If the PS3 CPU/GPU can push out enough graphics horsepower to support 1080p/60 (which I doubt - but they claim it can) then I would expect game developers to support the feature. Or maybe they won't. Beats me. But film and -- especially sports broadcasting -- will make great use of it.
Yeah, that's 1080p/24 and 1080pp/30 (24/30 fps) over component, not 1080p/60 - which is limited to hdmi due to bandwidth requirements. IOW: you are full of shit and have no idea WTF you're talking about.
I own a Sony CD player from 1987 that still works great after almost twenty years of use.
I have a PS2 and a PSP, and I was expecting to buy a PS3 as soon as I could get ahold of one - primarily for a cheap blu-ray drive, but also for backward compatibility. I have plenty of other Sony products, and like the company's engineering and manufacturing quality control. But the company's arrogance over PSP homebrew and the poor game availability, combined with this ridiculous $600 price tag for a PS3 w/hdmi has convinced me that Sony is in a tailspin. I simply don't want to give them my money any longer.
I \*can\* afford it. I don't want it. Until Sony refocuses on the consumer again, I'm not giving them a dime.
If you purchased a PSP, you own it. You did not purchase a license to use, or a license to rent, or a license which limits certain uses of the device. You own it and can do whatever you wish, including throwing it out a window or bricking it with bad homebrew software.
A EULA may be attached to copyrighted software and functions as a contractual agreement between the author and the user. This agreement may set terms for duplication of the software, limit certain uses of the software, and as well as set different pricing for various categories of users or regular per-use payments. The EULA is thus expressly bound to copyright and contract law, and lives between the boundaries of the two.
The PSP is not copyrighted (though firmware within it might be). Thus, it should be legal to use or abuse your PSP however you see fit. However, downgrading firmware might constitute a EULA violation since it constitutes duplication and installation of software - which, depending on the contract terms, could be deemed breach of contract and a copyright violation. But installing emacs, cross compiling the source and installing doom/quake/whatever, or even shoving that PSP up one's ass and mailing it back to Sony for service -- all that should be perfectly legal.
Please note: IANAL, but I do own a PSP - bought at launch. Given Sony's obnoxious and rude behavior to the homebrew scene though, I regret that purchase. It has not lived up to my expectations, both as a gaming machine (the games mostly suck) and as a homebrew platform. I think I would have been much happier with a DS.
Oh well, Sony seems intent on economic suicide. Good riddance.
Not me. I've got a 15" TiBook and it goes with me to work, to night classes, and to the local cafe when I feel like getting out of the house but still need to work. And I find the ~5lbs TiBook heavier than I'd prefer. One of the guys I work with has a tiny 2.2lbs Pentium M notebook that's a dream to carry around. That's what I want. :)
I realize the gamer laptop is not my market. But I simply don't see the point even for a gamer. It's just not upgradable. What gamer would buy a machine that (s)he can't upgrade the video card in? What will (s)he do with the machine in a year? How about two?
*shrug*
And as others have pointed out, there are the heat issues associated with a SLI setup as well. This just seems like a 'solution' looking for a problem. I use a laptop primarily for work. I'd much rather lug around a lightweight pint sized notebook that meets my business needs than a huge and heavy non-upgradable laptop that might retain it's state-of-the-art-for-gaming status for -- at most -- a year. As you said, if you want to game: buy a desktop. Or a console.
Feh.
Dimension and Weight: ._1.85" x 15.65" x 11.75" ._Starting at 8.5 lbs.
I would call that more a luggable than a notebook. As powerful as it might be, that's no laptop I'd want to carry around...
The price differential vs. performance appears to favor the cheaper MacBook over the pro this year. At the end the author listed the features which a Pro has over the simple MacBook and just about all of them I could live without. The bigger screen on the Pro is nice, but if one simply goes midrange the price is $1300 for the MacBook compared to $2500 for the midrange pro. Is better 3D graphics, a nicer chassis, and a backlit keyboard worth $1200? Not to me. I've got a Powerbook G4 800 that is feeling pretty sluggish. Perhaps if not this model, maybe the next generation might be a good time to buy.
I still have two 3/80s in my basement. They're worthless. Fun NetBSD toys, I suppose, but I just don't have the time.
That Sun 3/50 had a megapixel display. And a Sun3/60 with a CG24 card could handle megapixel in 24 bit color. Resolution was 1152x900, BTW. Though for one running a 3/60 with a cg24 card should up the RAM to 16MB. As for the rest of the stuff, Gnome et all, many old-timers consider that extra cruft a waste of RAM. X ran just fine in what most today would consider ridiculously low RAM space.
:)
Note that in 1988ish the common ram chip on the market was still the 256Kb (8 for 256KB) 41256. 1Mb RAM chips were still new and expensive. To get 8MB of ram in one of these systems meant 64 1Mb RAM chips, all of which consumed power. A lot of power. And a lot of money.
You're just spoiled.
Theoretically one should be able to boot Windows Vista on a 500 Kilohertz PDP-11 with 8KW of wire-mesh core and a hacked MMU that supported real paging. I suppose to ease porting one might want to write an x86 emulator though. It would be an interesting proof of concept: I got Windows to boot on my PDP-11! heh.
Long ago X ran under Linux and BSD just fine on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a Hercules graphics card. Hell, before that one could run X on a Sun 3/50 with only 4MB of RAM, though it was pretty tight. A PII with 64MB or more and a modern graphics card is serious hardware overkill.
When your CPU only supports 20 bits of address space, it's plenty.
Crutchfield has a side by side comparison between the two first generation HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players, along with price here.
HD-DVD: The Toshiba HDA1 costs $499, and Toshiba HDXA1 $799.
Blu-Ray: The Samsung BDP-1000 and the Sony BDP-S1 are both $999.
The buy-in for Blu-Ray is significantly more expensive. If you must go Blu-Ray then the PS3 at $599 is the cheapest alternative.
"That's the general consensus of a wide range of business executives and auditors who gathered Wednesday in Washington, D.C., for an all-day roundtable hosted by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)."
Uhhh, so who is networkworld.com, why should I believe what the regulated have to say to the regulators, and why did the article summary assert what they stated to congress as certain truth?
Uh... did I really just read that?
Can a company use monopoly tactics to artificially raise the price of a product, beyond its natural pricepoint, when that exact same product can be had for free (or by a competitor cheaply) with a bit of extra work?
If you answer "YES" then you believe that a company could monopolize the Linux (or FOSS) market, regarless of free market competition. Somehow, I suspect that outcome borders more on impossible than highly unlikely. --M