Sony needs to be plowed under anyway, since they felt it appropriate to stick a root-kit on people's machines.
Understandable reaction, but a bit daft. Sony is a weird entity and it is huge.
Sony MUSIC needs to be plowed under, badly, yesterday. SCEE has never really wronged me in any significant way, other than putting crap lasers in the original PS2. I don't punish the Xbox team for Windows DRM, or IE6 security flaws. Stop buying Sony Music CDs and you get the message across. Stop buying Sony altogether and they don't know what the reason is. To each his own of course.
Pointing won't work. Any sort of absolute position detection won't work. Add to that the fact that you will have to move two arms to gain any benefit and you have a pretty useless knock off. Nevermind the rumor that Wii has a second accelerometer in the nunchuck. If Sony is lucky, it will work as well as the Eye Toy to control games.
But what about an EyeToy plus the gyroscope controller, working in tandem? That's a little more interesting. You raise a good point but none of these things can be judged fairly until we use these controllers, with the games that support them. I'm certainly not ready to declare the Wii controller a 'recolution' until I actually try the thing.
Except you don't install the game onto the drive, the drive is just for updates, saves, and your personal ATRAC3 collection. Haven't you ever used a console?
You are right, except it will be MP3 and AAC files (and perhaps WMA - the PSP can do it). ATRAC3 was discontinued as a format by Sony almost two years ago.
Blu-Ray : One word : Hype. There has yet to be a game that spans more than 1 DVD and I'm not spending $500 for a movie player AND having to re-buy my movie collection.
Congrats, you get the Bill Gates 640k Award for today. Of course BluRay is hype right now, no one is shipping it yet. Your point about the movie collection is well-taken but I gotta ask, how's that vinyl holding up for you?
Hard drive : Xbox did it years ago. The Xbox360 threw the ball away on it but considering the PS3 is priced at $500~$600, Sony just threw the ball back at Microsoft.
I agree.
Online : Old news and Sony has a poor record of online gameplay. Its SOE division is one of the worst in terms of service and considering they DOMINATED last generation with the PS2, Xbox Live CRUSHED the PS2 in terms of online marketshare.
Online is a mixed bag, there are not nearly so many online Xbox (either gen) players as there are Xbox players total, its a very small percentage of the overall market (less than 10% last I checked). PS2 had some interesting online experiences but you are right, the integration was not there. But also it was free, I've played online with many PS2 games and never payed a dime, which was nice.
Wireless controllers : Two words : Nintendo Wavebird. And the Xbox360's controllers are wireless as well. Sony is really the last man out in this case. (And this doesn't count third party controllers.)
Don't be ridiculous. There are several 3rd party wireless controllers for PS2 and Xbox that work just as well as the Wavebird. It was first but hardly unique at this point.
PS2 and PS1 full compatibility : Considering a PS1 is dirt cheap and insanely plentiful (I've seenen package deals including 10 games and the system for $50 USD) and the inevitable price drop to the all important $100 mark for the PS2 near/after the PS3's launch, this isn't really important.
I agree - however, you try telling a rabid Nintendo fanboy that buying an old cheap Nintendo at a garage sale for $10 is somehow the better than downloading them from some online service. For some reason this is seen as superior. I think backwards compatibility is really only for two reasons: one, because launch titles are sparse and players want to feel like they can play something, and two, the investment in the previous library is not seen as a 'waste'.
Good thing Sony wasn't doing anything illegal like installing rootkits
If we're going to punish Sony Electronics for things that Sony Music is doing, then we need to talk to the Xbox360 team about the abomination that is Clippy. For starters.:)
To your larger point, I agree that it is unclear whether or not these games will be worth the price premium. I'm not writing it off either way at this point. Having said that: go over to gametrailers.com and check out the PS3 videos for WarDevil, Armored Core 4 (wow!), KillZone 2, Alan Wake, and Metal Gear Solid 4. I thought they were very impressive. The WarDevil trailers in particular put to rest some of the 'prerendered' rumours as they break the scene down to polys and up in successive steps to full effects.
The PS3 will look the best graphically. That is not everything by any means, but it is a significant advantage. Is it worth the cost of another Wii? Don't know yet. Haven't tried that console either.:)
So fire up a PC with a 7900 in it, you get a pretty good idea what you are going to get with a PS3. You can't run benchmarks and expect them to be spot on, but you get an idea of the kind of visual features and pciture quality you can expect.
To be perfectly fair, you are sort of missing a CELL chip in that example.
Sony's live ripoff will most probably suck, since Sony are worthless at producing usable user interface. Did you ever use the software for their NetMD's?
Live is not everything, at least to some of us. But your comment on the Net MD software - are you for real? Am I going to judge Xbox360's dashboard based on the fact that Microsoft released the abomination known as Word, among many others?
The ignorant masses do not ignore nutjobs like him. Ignoring him will do nothing to ease the minds of those who would listen to him. Thus, they must be informed of his lunacy.
But... but... they're ignorant masses! That's what they do!
I disagree entirely. I thought it was very good -- and I am conservative, and Republican, and a journalist, and I've seen every episode of The Colbert Report -- and I think most people were not laughing because most of what he said was directed at the journalists themselves.
Too true - and how sad is it that the press didn't then take this golden chance to redeem themselves, and actually report Colbert's speech? Even though it would be painful? But no, silence. It figures.
Come on, admit it. You don't want the coolest new console on the block to be adorable. Why is this so hard to say?
Come on, admit it. You really want the new Nintendo to have a good name and be the coolest new console, even though it remains largely a mystery. Why is this so hard to say?
I'd argue with you, since I think the name sucks, but you said seriously, so I must consider the case closed?
Now if the full product name was: "Nintendo Wii. Seriously." I'd give 'em props for that. That's how I always hear it expressed when someone says it the first time.
From a marketing point of view, this name is a colossal success. It worked. You know what their product is, you know what it's for, you remember its name. That's all that matters.
By that argument, the Segway was a raging success.
Thus, it would be logical that all of the PC guy's behaviour in the ad applies to a Mac, too. This actually seems to be the case, though in less significant amounts than in a pure PC.
The Mac guy would start acting like the PC guy if he swapped tshirt for bad jacket + slacks, glasses, and gained 20 pounds. In other words, if he was running Windows.
Indeed, we should all lay off the bullshit, to wit:
No hunting for drivers? I lost days trying to get a Minolta Color printer to work.
If you are gonna get into a pissing match about driver conflicts and issues on a Mac vs a PC, I guarantee you're gonna lose. Apple has an unfair advantage having done away with floppies and legacy ports in 1999. The fact that I can't find a driver for Random Korean Webcam is not much of an indictment.
All of them worked on XP after following the same routine you use for all XP devices: insert CD, follow instructions, plug in device.
And yet, in all of my anecdotes, I come out the winner! Curious.
Next years OS today? There are a lot of feature in OS X that I like, but the fact remains that it runs on the dog slow Mach kernel (not all progress is good) and silly little things like Finder hanging if you loose a connection to a network resource, a problem that was solved many years ago in other OSs. Is it better than XP? Depends what you're doing (my answer is 'yes' YMMV)
Now you're talking - a completely fair observation.
114,000 Viruses on XP! There is nothing about OS X that makes it inherantly immune from viruses...Its all about pay load and kudos to script kiddies and black hats. 3% market share just doesn't do it for them - who knows 5% might.
Even if the 'low marketshare' argument was valid, which it clearly is not (see arm-long list of OSS examaples)... the fact remains that there are not 114,00 viruses (or even one proper 'virus') for Mac. Who cares what the reason is, its true.
Awesome out of the box? Yeah, I was chuffed to bits when I had to handover £20 to watch movies in full screen mode...
Quicktime is lame that way. Also lame is not going to MacUpdate to find one of the dozens of alternative free movieplayers who will do it for you. What, you don't like VLC?
Now you are really scraping the barrel near the end here...
How do I cut and paste
Please. Under Edit, like Windows. Or right-click. Next.
Where are my applications?
In the Finder sidebar, attached to every single Finder window. Impossible to miss. Next.
How do I make things full screen?
I agree that Maximize functionality is inconsistent in the Finder. But I also happen to think that maximizing every single app pretty much kills any multitasking functionality you'd like to have, and is a poor habit to get into. That's just my opinion though. Point taken.
Let he who has no sin cast the first stone. I love my Mac, and I regularly recommend them to anyone who will listen, but I am not afraid to admit that they are less than perfect, and for the most part it makes no difference which system you use if all you do is email and web. Negative advertising like this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If you're going to use examples like How Do I Go Fullscreen, you gotta mention the ocean of difference between Outlook and Mail. Inline image viewing and resizing? A non-fragile message database that doesn't cack after X number of mails? Safari vs IE, I mean really! Who would make that choice? Tabs and antialiased text vs the biggest security fuckup in Internet history. Right.
There are so much better things to pick on in OS X. These are bad examples.
Pretty much all hate campaigns I've seen against another product just didn't work out.
What exactly made you call this a 'hate campaign'? That's a touch strong don't you think? Its a negative ad, at best. And last time I checked, those do indeed work quite well, at least in the political arena.
I wouldn't even call it a negative ad myself since it is not an attack (not the lack of OMINOUS MUSIC, its pretty playful) but rather a gentle ribbing. Unless you feel really insecure about owning a PC, that is.
I'll bet this is a directive from SJ. He's a pretty green dude.
I remember a quote from him once, pretty excellent example of Steve Jobs' mentality actually. It was both very poetic and utterly ridiculous. This was from back in the early Apple days before he was fired by Scully. He said (paraphrasing), 'I want a computer factory that takes raw beach sand in one end and outputs fully assembled Macs from just that raw material.' What a crazy, wonderful idea.
Exactly. I've already got a DVD player, as do most people. Whether the $40 piece of crap from Target or some tricked-out multi-disc-loading thing that cost hundreds. So why would I want to pay extra when I buy a game system so it can play the DVDs that I've already got my DVD player for??
Short answer to that, in two parts: one, the cost diff is negligable (seriously negligable; how much do you think it adds when a whole player goes for $40?) and two, think extra DVD player in the kids room. They can burn out the motor on their Wii (ugh) rewatching Lilo and Stitch without hogging the living room player/tv. I think it was a mistake doing it this way.
DVD video requires CSS keys, licences, region management, DRM, etc.
DRM is not required, that is the CSS (content scrambling system). Licenses are not required. Region management is handled by a litte tiny chip that costs fractions of a cent. There is no good reason to not include this for the sake of convenience.
Not including DRM in a device and not requiring to rebuy features I have is not a gaff. You are a troll.
Er, no. I'm not trying to incite an argument with inflammatory comments. However you are close to that line yourself, with such statements as "DVD players need expensive DRM, license mgmt., region mgmt." which is categorically false.
Don't be so reactionary. I like the Wii (well, not the name), and I'm not some fanboi. But the DVD mechanism is just plain stupid in this regard.
Please note that ennui is a French word. It is pronounced "on-we", not "in-we"
Noted.
Please note, many french words are co-opted by the English language; chandelier may currectly be pronounced with a distinct 'r' sound at the end, no matter how offensive you might find it.
Slashdot Mirror
Understandable reaction, but a bit daft. Sony is a weird entity and it is huge.
Sony MUSIC needs to be plowed under, badly, yesterday. SCEE has never really wronged me in any significant way, other than putting crap lasers in the original PS2. I don't punish the Xbox team for Windows DRM, or IE6 security flaws. Stop buying Sony Music CDs and you get the message across. Stop buying Sony altogether and they don't know what the reason is. To each his own of course.
But what about an EyeToy plus the gyroscope controller, working in tandem? That's a little more interesting. You raise a good point but none of these things can be judged fairly until we use these controllers, with the games that support them. I'm certainly not ready to declare the Wii controller a 'recolution' until I actually try the thing.
You are right, except it will be MP3 and AAC files (and perhaps WMA - the PSP can do it). ATRAC3 was discontinued as a format by Sony almost two years ago.
Congrats, you get the Bill Gates 640k Award for today. Of course BluRay is hype right now, no one is shipping it yet. Your point about the movie collection is well-taken but I gotta ask, how's that vinyl holding up for you?
Hard drive : Xbox did it years ago. The Xbox360 threw the ball away on it but considering the PS3 is priced at $500~$600, Sony just threw the ball back at Microsoft.
I agree.
Online : Old news and Sony has a poor record of online gameplay. Its SOE division is one of the worst in terms of service and considering they DOMINATED last generation with the PS2, Xbox Live CRUSHED the PS2 in terms of online marketshare.
Online is a mixed bag, there are not nearly so many online Xbox (either gen) players as there are Xbox players total, its a very small percentage of the overall market (less than 10% last I checked). PS2 had some interesting online experiences but you are right, the integration was not there. But also it was free, I've played online with many PS2 games and never payed a dime, which was nice.
Wireless controllers : Two words : Nintendo Wavebird. And the Xbox360's controllers are wireless as well. Sony is really the last man out in this case. (And this doesn't count third party controllers.)
Don't be ridiculous. There are several 3rd party wireless controllers for PS2 and Xbox that work just as well as the Wavebird. It was first but hardly unique at this point.
PS2 and PS1 full compatibility : Considering a PS1 is dirt cheap and insanely plentiful (I've seenen package deals including 10 games and the system for $50 USD) and the inevitable price drop to the all important $100 mark for the PS2 near/after the PS3's launch, this isn't really important.
I agree - however, you try telling a rabid Nintendo fanboy that buying an old cheap Nintendo at a garage sale for $10 is somehow the better than downloading them from some online service. For some reason this is seen as superior. I think backwards compatibility is really only for two reasons: one, because launch titles are sparse and players want to feel like they can play something, and two, the investment in the previous library is not seen as a 'waste'.
What do those of us who are watching the whole fiasco with detached bemusement do?
If we're going to punish Sony Electronics for things that Sony Music is doing, then we need to talk to the Xbox360 team about the abomination that is Clippy. For starters. :)
To your larger point, I agree that it is unclear whether or not these games will be worth the price premium. I'm not writing it off either way at this point. Having said that: go over to gametrailers.com and check out the PS3 videos for WarDevil, Armored Core 4 (wow!), KillZone 2, Alan Wake, and Metal Gear Solid 4. I thought they were very impressive. The WarDevil trailers in particular put to rest some of the 'prerendered' rumours as they break the scene down to polys and up in successive steps to full effects.
The PS3 will look the best graphically. That is not everything by any means, but it is a significant advantage. Is it worth the cost of another Wii? Don't know yet. Haven't tried that console either. :)
To be perfectly fair, you are sort of missing a CELL chip in that example.
Live is not everything, at least to some of us. But your comment on the Net MD software - are you for real? Am I going to judge Xbox360's dashboard based on the fact that Microsoft released the abomination known as Word, among many others?
But... but... they're ignorant masses! That's what they do!
Too true - and how sad is it that the press didn't then take this golden chance to redeem themselves, and actually report Colbert's speech? Even though it would be painful? But no, silence. It figures.
My new favourite phrase. Thank you for that.
+5 hysterical
Come on, admit it. You really want the new Nintendo to have a good name and be the coolest new console, even though it remains largely a mystery. Why is this so hard to say?
This is my favourite kind of Slashdot post.
I'd argue with you, since I think the name sucks, but you said seriously, so I must consider the case closed?
Now if the full product name was: "Nintendo Wii. Seriously." I'd give 'em props for that. That's how I always hear it expressed when someone says it the first time.
By that argument, the Segway was a raging success.
The Mac guy would start acting like the PC guy if he swapped tshirt for bad jacket + slacks, glasses, and gained 20 pounds. In other words, if he was running Windows.
Indeed, we should all lay off the bullshit, to wit:
No hunting for drivers? I lost days trying to get a Minolta Color printer to work.
If you are gonna get into a pissing match about driver conflicts and issues on a Mac vs a PC, I guarantee you're gonna lose. Apple has an unfair advantage having done away with floppies and legacy ports in 1999. The fact that I can't find a driver for Random Korean Webcam is not much of an indictment.
All of them worked on XP after following the same routine you use for all XP devices: insert CD, follow instructions, plug in device.
And yet, in all of my anecdotes, I come out the winner! Curious.
Next years OS today? There are a lot of feature in OS X that I like, but the fact remains that it runs on the dog slow Mach kernel (not all progress is good) and silly little things like Finder hanging if you loose a connection to a network resource, a problem that was solved many years ago in other OSs. Is it better than XP? Depends what you're doing (my answer is 'yes' YMMV)
Now you're talking - a completely fair observation.
114,000 Viruses on XP! There is nothing about OS X that makes it inherantly immune from viruses...Its all about pay load and kudos to script kiddies and black hats. 3% market share just doesn't do it for them - who knows 5% might.
Even if the 'low marketshare' argument was valid, which it clearly is not (see arm-long list of OSS examaples)... the fact remains that there are not 114,00 viruses (or even one proper 'virus') for Mac. Who cares what the reason is, its true.
Awesome out of the box? Yeah, I was chuffed to bits when I had to handover £20 to watch movies in full screen mode...
Quicktime is lame that way. Also lame is not going to MacUpdate to find one of the dozens of alternative free movieplayers who will do it for you. What, you don't like VLC?
Now you are really scraping the barrel near the end here...
How do I cut and paste
Please. Under Edit, like Windows. Or right-click. Next.
Where are my applications?
In the Finder sidebar, attached to every single Finder window. Impossible to miss. Next.
How do I make things full screen?
I agree that Maximize functionality is inconsistent in the Finder. But I also happen to think that maximizing every single app pretty much kills any multitasking functionality you'd like to have, and is a poor habit to get into. That's just my opinion though. Point taken.
Let he who has no sin cast the first stone. I love my Mac, and I regularly recommend them to anyone who will listen, but I am not afraid to admit that they are less than perfect, and for the most part it makes no difference which system you use if all you do is email and web. Negative advertising like this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If you're going to use examples like How Do I Go Fullscreen, you gotta mention the ocean of difference between Outlook and Mail. Inline image viewing and resizing? A non-fragile message database that doesn't cack after X number of mails? Safari vs IE, I mean really! Who would make that choice? Tabs and antialiased text vs the biggest security fuckup in Internet history. Right.
There are so much better things to pick on in OS X. These are bad examples.
What exactly made you call this a 'hate campaign'? That's a touch strong don't you think? Its a negative ad, at best. And last time I checked, those do indeed work quite well, at least in the political arena.
I wouldn't even call it a negative ad myself since it is not an attack (not the lack of OMINOUS MUSIC, its pretty playful) but rather a gentle ribbing. Unless you feel really insecure about owning a PC, that is.
Ah, yes. The old 'there are only negative rights' argument.
No privacy, eh? Tell you what: I'm coming over. And I'm not gonna knock.
I remember a quote from him once, pretty excellent example of Steve Jobs' mentality actually. It was both very poetic and utterly ridiculous. This was from back in the early Apple days before he was fired by Scully. He said (paraphrasing), 'I want a computer factory that takes raw beach sand in one end and outputs fully assembled Macs from just that raw material.' What a crazy, wonderful idea.
Short answer to that, in two parts: one, the cost diff is negligable (seriously negligable; how much do you think it adds when a whole player goes for $40?) and two, think extra DVD player in the kids room. They can burn out the motor on their Wii (ugh) rewatching Lilo and Stitch without hogging the living room player/tv. I think it was a mistake doing it this way.
DRM is not required, that is the CSS (content scrambling system). Licenses are not required. Region management is handled by a litte tiny chip that costs fractions of a cent. There is no good reason to not include this for the sake of convenience.
Not including DRM in a device and not requiring to rebuy features I have is not a gaff. You are a troll.
Er, no. I'm not trying to incite an argument with inflammatory comments. However you are close to that line yourself, with such statements as "DVD players need expensive DRM, license mgmt., region mgmt." which is categorically false.
Don't be so reactionary. I like the Wii (well, not the name), and I'm not some fanboi. But the DVD mechanism is just plain stupid in this regard.
The same fucktards that want to make pirating games difficult without breaking the game or your system.
The important thing here is: we agree that they are fucktards.
Noted.
Please note, many french words are co-opted by the English language; chandelier may currectly be pronounced with a distinct 'r' sound at the end, no matter how offensive you might find it.