"But megabits are sometimes used, so making a distinction between Mb and MB is neccessary."
In casual conversation? I don't think so. Would you really correct somebody talking about a 640mb CD-ROM? Would YOU really like to be corrected for not being unnecessarily specific?
Do you (syrix Slashdot user 10649) really think (i.e. do you have neurons in your brain firing in a specific pattern that results in the idea that people need to be extremely specific when they type a comment on Slashdot.org located at the IP address 66.35.250.150) that it is really all that important (the theme of any given post severly risks mass mis-comprehension) that every technical (the more specific, the better because otherwise the literal definition of what is stated has a number of ways it can be misconstrued) detail must be painstakingly (i.e. thoroughly researched from places like Google.com or any textbooks you may have nearby.) defined in order to avoid needless (i.e. the world will not suddenly stop rotating or revolving)(rotating around the Earth's axis and revolving around the sun) nitpicking (i.e. corrections made in a condescending tone)?
Yahoo ran this story as well. I found their version of it a little more interesting:
"The goal with DRM systems, Gupta explained, is to make it more convenient for music downloaders to pay the fee than to spend time searching for the song for free."
I'm no fan of DRM, but it's about time SOMEBODY finally has the right goal in mind. Make legitimacy more convenient. I've been paying $10 a month for nearly 2 years now to Rhapsody. Since then, I've made 0 (zero, just in case any of you thought it was a typo.) MP3 downloads. Why? Their subscription service is significantly faster and easier. Okay, subscription's not for everybody, but the price is right and the service beats P2P.
Believe it or not, the *AA can compete with free. I'm looking forward to the day that this is more widely understood. I really want the instant gratification of buying content on-line.
Err I really don't understand your question. My point about the PSP is that, to me, it's overpriced and the extras under-deliver. If those UMDs were writable in my computer, it'd suddenly be a lot more interesting.
"amazed that a site so full of educated geeks has never pointed this out."
I'm happy they haven't. I'm so fricken tired of time and mod points being wasted on needless corrections. Correcting somebody for the difference between Megabytes and Gigabytes is one thing, correcting them over MB or mb is just plain irritating.
"I think most are missing the point. Sony's goal is their so called "convergence." They want to sell you one device that does most of the things that you want - that's what they went for with the PSX and that's what they seem to be going with here."
I'm a big proponent of convergence. Heck, I think it's great that my cell phone has a wimpy camera. The problem I have is that the PSP is just too darned expensive. And, for what, not-so-practical movie viewing? The PSP, to me, is like a $300 cell phone with a 160 by 120 camera, 30 day battery life (i.e. the PSP's undoubtedly a great games machine), and a calendar that only works on even months. Frankly, I think people who are buying it because watching a movie 'pushed them over the top' have been suckered.
" But watching a movie on the plane...the PSP hits the pricepoint that mini-dvd players are at."
I'd care about that if the PSP actually played DVDs. It does not. It plays Sony's proprietary format. Maybe time will prove me wrong (I'd love it if it did) but I just plain don't expect to see a huge library of stuff here. Worse, you can't even play these movies on your TV. Whatcha gonna do, buy two copies of a movie just so you'll have a mobile one?
Even if the PSP was cheaper than a portale DVD player, I still wouldn't buy one to be a portable movie player. It's a games machine. Buy it because it has games you want to play.
"Lose the stylus, drop a screen, and go back to what made Game Boy great."
It already has what the GB made great. Then they added a stylus screen and 802.11. Try to imagine playing games on-line without the stylus screen. [i]"Hold on, give me 10 minutes to enter my nick here."[/i]
"The PSP plays MP3s, movies, games and has wireless connectivity built in. I don't think the price is out of line."
Games: Yep, it does that pretty well.
MP3s: From your MemoryStick(TM). Might as well get a flash based MP3 player.
Movies: Yep, if Sony gets the rights to any movies you want. Hopefully your battery life will be adequate. (Note: I don't understand why 2 screens, one of them being a touch screen like on palm devices is a 'gimmick' and playing movies isn't.)
"I wasn't saying that you were anti-Linux, but I've been watching you for, what, five years now (we both got our present accounts at the same time) and you have always seemed to be hard on the "I prefer Win" side, IIRC. Just curious."
Ah, I apologize for my false assumption.
Though I do prefer Windows, I'd like to move to something more secure and more 'open'. Unfortunately, from an end-desktop-user point of view, Linux is rather weak. One of the reasons I'm noisy about Windows is that I want Linux to improve so I can switch without losing more than I gain.
"BTW, I am no security guru, but I installed Debian over the net, run Snort, chkrootkit, and Portsentry daily, and never have any problems, despite having a server up in the non-demilitarized internet zone of S. Korea."
"When did you start using anything but Win, Nano?"
I've actually tried switching to Linux twice. I also built a Linux webserver using RedHat + Apache. Popped it up on the web, two weeks later it was rooted. As I said before, this was due to my own stupidity.
"No, it's perfectly possible to be a Linux using dipshit. Users who have unsecured Redhat machines running services like Sendmail or BIND."
I'm one of those dipshits. Part of the reason I was a dipshit was because of all the "Linux is secure!!!!!!!!" hype on Slashdot. I can't blame anybody but myself for it, but I do wish the attitudes here were a little more sensible.
" However common it may be, it always seems a tragedy when a big corporation stomps its heavy foot on a fledgling but very successful piece of web software that is close to many people's heart."
Tragedy? Um, no. He really should have known he was going to get a C&D over that. If Scabble were some obscure game that nobody heard of, I could call this tragic.
"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"
She did the right thing, good for her.
She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.
"Even in the PC world, the percentage of people that will rush out to pick up the newest video card seems to be dropping. There isn't quite the anticipation that there once was."
Well, to be fair, what games are demanding to be run (and with good cause) on new hardware? With PC games, that's a serious issue. With console games, it's a given that new games will come along and take advanate of the hardware.
We have 3 or 4 generations to go, at least before new consoles start losing their appeal. Earlier I would have said 1 or 2, but then San Andreas landed in my lap.
"Easy answer: You can't play games on your "standard portable mini tv set"?"
Right, but are you going to be doing much more than playing games on your PSP? At least on a practical level? A portable TV is "Turn on, watch". A PSP is "capture content, convert content, manage storage, transfer content."
I'm still not sold on the idea of the PSP becoming a multi-media Walkman. (Heck, I want to get a PocketPC/Palm for this type of stuff, but I still can't work out a practical way of doing it.) Wake me when memory sticks handle a good deal more memory and there's an iTunes like service for video.
" It was rather late in the day, clearly those copies were going to sit there all night, but their only response was to come back tomorrow and buy it. How they could pass up an easy sale on a non-so-hot game suprised me, but they wouldn't budge."
A.) They want people to pre-order. The value of pre-ordering diminishes if it's a flip of the coin whether you'll get it or not just because you can't get there by 6pm.
B.) They had probably already taken money for it. Not every place has that policy, but some do.
c.) Customer service people don't like unhappy customers.
"It makes me sick that religious wackos are given all the freedom to worship/teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their righteous bullshit."
I'm sick of extremists in general. Okay, maybe I'm being a little off-topic here, but I can't help but wonder if extremism is really the heart of the matter here. What do we do? I dunno. Frankly, I'm sick of religious and Star Wars extremism.
Slashdot Mirror
"Thank you, Utah, for boldy diving head first into the shallow end of the pool to prove how stupid it is for the rest of us."
Eh, it's hard to feel motivated to polish my pitchfork over this one when it's optional.
I don't have a problem with the V-Chip, for example. Don't like what's on TV? Fine, don't ruin it for me.
"But megabits are sometimes used, so making a distinction between Mb and MB is neccessary."
In casual conversation? I don't think so. Would you really correct somebody talking about a 640mb CD-ROM? Would YOU really like to be corrected for not being unnecessarily specific?
Do you (syrix Slashdot user 10649) really think (i.e. do you have neurons in your brain firing in a specific pattern that results in the idea that people need to be extremely specific when they type a comment on Slashdot.org located at the IP address 66.35.250.150) that it is really all that important (the theme of any given post severly risks mass mis-comprehension) that every technical (the more specific, the better because otherwise the literal definition of what is stated has a number of ways it can be misconstrued) detail must be painstakingly (i.e. thoroughly researched from places like Google.com or any textbooks you may have nearby.) defined in order to avoid needless (i.e. the world will not suddenly stop rotating or revolving) (rotating around the Earth's axis and revolving around the sun) nitpicking (i.e. corrections made in a condescending tone)?
I'm no fan of DRM, but it's about time SOMEBODY finally has the right goal in mind. Make legitimacy more convenient. I've been paying $10 a month for nearly 2 years now to Rhapsody. Since then, I've made 0 (zero, just in case any of you thought it was a typo.) MP3 downloads. Why? Their subscription service is significantly faster and easier. Okay, subscription's not for everybody, but the price is right and the service beats P2P.
Believe it or not, the *AA can compete with free. I'm looking forward to the day that this is more widely understood. I really want the instant gratification of buying content on-line.
Err I really don't understand your question. My point about the PSP is that, to me, it's overpriced and the extras under-deliver. If those UMDs were writable in my computer, it'd suddenly be a lot more interesting.
"amazed that a site so full of educated geeks has never pointed this out."
I'm happy they haven't. I'm so fricken tired of time and mod points being wasted on needless corrections. Correcting somebody for the difference between Megabytes and Gigabytes is one thing, correcting them over MB or mb is just plain irritating.
"I think most are missing the point. Sony's goal is their so called "convergence." They want to sell you one device that does most of the things that you want - that's what they went for with the PSX and that's what they seem to be going with here."
I'm a big proponent of convergence. Heck, I think it's great that my cell phone has a wimpy camera. The problem I have is that the PSP is just too darned expensive. And, for what, not-so-practical movie viewing? The PSP, to me, is like a $300 cell phone with a 160 by 120 camera, 30 day battery life (i.e. the PSP's undoubtedly a great games machine), and a calendar that only works on even months. Frankly, I think people who are buying it because watching a movie 'pushed them over the top' have been suckered.
" But watching a movie on the plane...the PSP hits the pricepoint that mini-dvd players are at."
I'd care about that if the PSP actually played DVDs. It does not. It plays Sony's proprietary format. Maybe time will prove me wrong (I'd love it if it did) but I just plain don't expect to see a huge library of stuff here. Worse, you can't even play these movies on your TV. Whatcha gonna do, buy two copies of a movie just so you'll have a mobile one?
Even if the PSP was cheaper than a portale DVD player, I still wouldn't buy one to be a portable movie player. It's a games machine. Buy it because it has games you want to play.
"So, we're supposed to get angry at all anti-piracy groups now because this one planted evidence?"
As opposed to not letting them know this behaviour won't be tolerated?
"Lose the stylus, drop a screen, and go back to what made Game Boy great."
It already has what the GB made great. Then they added a stylus screen and 802.11. Try to imagine playing games on-line without the stylus screen. [i]"Hold on, give me 10 minutes to enter my nick here."[/i]
"The PSP plays MP3s, movies, games and has wireless connectivity built in. I don't think the price is out of line."
Games: Yep, it does that pretty well.
MP3s: From your MemoryStick(TM). Might as well get a flash based MP3 player.
Movies: Yep, if Sony gets the rights to any movies you want. Hopefully your battery life will be adequate. (Note: I don't understand why 2 screens, one of them being a touch screen like on palm devices is a 'gimmick' and playing movies isn't.)
Wireless Connectivity: So does the DS.
"I wasn't saying that you were anti-Linux, but I've been watching you for, what, five years now (we both got our present accounts at the same time) and you have always seemed to be hard on the "I prefer Win" side, IIRC. Just curious."
:) G'day.
Ah, I apologize for my false assumption.
Though I do prefer Windows, I'd like to move to something more secure and more 'open'. Unfortunately, from an end-desktop-user point of view, Linux is rather weak. One of the reasons I'm noisy about Windows is that I want Linux to improve so I can switch without losing more than I gain.
"BTW, I am no security guru, but I installed Debian over the net, run Snort, chkrootkit, and Portsentry daily, and never have any problems, despite having a server up in the non-demilitarized internet zone of S. Korea."
Thanks for the info.
"When did you start using anything but Win, Nano?"
:)
I've actually tried switching to Linux twice. I also built a Linux webserver using RedHat + Apache. Popped it up on the web, two weeks later it was rooted. As I said before, this was due to my own stupidity.
For the record, I'm not anti-Linux.
"No, it's perfectly possible to be a Linux using dipshit. Users who have unsecured Redhat machines running services like Sendmail or BIND."
I'm one of those dipshits. Part of the reason I was a dipshit was because of all the "Linux is secure!!!!!!!!" hype on Slashdot. I can't blame anybody but myself for it, but I do wish the attitudes here were a little more sensible.
"Was it just me or did anyone read that as the Pentium D "Seinfeld"?
;)
Not that there's anything wrong with it..."
Shrinkage!!
Uh, no offense.
" However common it may be, it always seems a tragedy when a big corporation stomps its heavy foot on a fledgling but very successful piece of web software that is close to many people's heart."
Tragedy? Um, no. He really should have known he was going to get a C&D over that. If Scabble were some obscure game that nobody heard of, I could call this tragic.
"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"
She did the right thing, good for her.
She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.
You should be happy she made that choice.
"Sony's next-gen consoles don't have stupid names?"
You don't think "Playstation" sounds stupid?
"Even in the PC world, the percentage of people that will rush out to pick up the newest video card seems to be dropping. There isn't quite the anticipation that there once was."
Well, to be fair, what games are demanding to be run (and with good cause) on new hardware? With PC games, that's a serious issue. With console games, it's a given that new games will come along and take advanate of the hardware.
We have 3 or 4 generations to go, at least before new consoles start losing their appeal. Earlier I would have said 1 or 2, but then San Andreas landed in my lap.
"I had a laptop once, it wooden go..."
I had a Compaq once, too.
"Easy answer: You can't play games on your "standard portable mini tv set"?"
Right, but are you going to be doing much more than playing games on your PSP? At least on a practical level? A portable TV is "Turn on, watch". A PSP is "capture content, convert content, manage storage, transfer content."
I'm still not sold on the idea of the PSP becoming a multi-media Walkman. (Heck, I want to get a PocketPC/Palm for this type of stuff, but I still can't work out a practical way of doing it.) Wake me when memory sticks handle a good deal more memory and there's an iTunes like service for video.
"you've gotten us again with your clever insight into SlashDot and nerd culture.
Oh how I wish I could ignore any post referencing a "meme"
Or posts that hit close to home?
"You put everything on a Memory Stick Duo. Theres no way to write disks for it (yet?)"
In other words, it's just about as interesting as PocketPC-Casting.
" It was rather late in the day, clearly those copies were going to sit there all night, but their only response was to come back tomorrow and buy it. How they could pass up an easy sale on a non-so-hot game suprised me, but they wouldn't budge."
A.) They want people to pre-order. The value of pre-ordering diminishes if it's a flip of the coin whether you'll get it or not just because you can't get there by 6pm.
B.) They had probably already taken money for it. Not every place has that policy, but some do.
c.) Customer service people don't like unhappy customers.
"WTF is an "impuse shopper"?"
Quesiton: Is this an indication that whoever posted it is stupid, or are YOU stupid for not being able to replace the missing L?
"It makes me sick that religious wackos are given all the freedom to worship/teach/live as they please, but fuck everyone else over with their righteous bullshit."
I'm sick of extremists in general. Okay, maybe I'm being a little off-topic here, but I can't help but wonder if extremism is really the heart of the matter here. What do we do? I dunno. Frankly, I'm sick of religious and Star Wars extremism.