that there will be few if any manufacturing defects and the new Bluray drives will operate the almost overwhelming range of launch titles flawlessly as each and every game display 1080p of pure goodness where the difference between the PS3 and 360 will appear so palpable, so distinguishable that Microsoft stock will tumble upon the very whisper of the name, "PS3". Like Chuck Norris before it, the very name PS3 will command respect and strike fear in the competition.
Just wait. Walmart will realize their mistake and allow kids to do things like add hot pink text on top of bright orange, move the text boxes all over the fucking page and feature looping, inane, impossible to shut off Walmart-friendly music that highlights all the best boy bands Walmart has to offer.
The website, content and contest are just a marketing campaign and a pathetic one at that. Kids "customize" their page and upload pictures and video (pending approval from the Walmart mandarins, of course). The entire exercise is directed at getting kids to shop for their fall back to school wardrobe at Wally World as opposed to Target, who apparently have the budget teen fashion market pretty much buttoned up (no pun intended). It's not a blog or even a blog with training wheels, but just a way for kids to yap to their friends about this "cool new web site" and act as shills for Walmart.
Don't tell me you actually check these items, do you? If they allowed these items only as carry-on that would eliminate a lot of baggage theft, methinks, and also allow for the use of safety equipment if there is a fire. Two problems solved in one stroke.
How many times have you typed a snippet of lyrics into Google hoping to find the name of a song so you can either buy the track or check out what other material they offer? I've done it plenty of times and once I find the name of the song and the band I head over to iTunes and buy the song and sometimes the whole album, if it's good enough. Without lyrics sites or pay only lyrics I honestly don't know how you'd find the name of a song that easily.
Another example of the RIAA or whatever entity acting penny wise and pound foolish.
I am all for people experimenting with the web and making their Myspace page their own, but I assume that people would desire substance over style. If someone like me, a fairly experienced web and computer user, can't even navigate your Myspace page and complete a simple task like making a friends request what's the point in even having a page? It's the triumph of superficiality over usabilty and in that regard Myspace is far worse than any Geocities page ever was.
I guess I can't blame Myspace completely for this phenomenon as it seems to be an attitude that is pervading our entire society: it's better to look good than actually be good. Mspace seems to reinforce that message.
I fucking hate Myspace. I am sorry, but everybody on the site seems to love to fuck with their background adding music, pictures and other bullshit making it first of all impossible view to their page correctly, and second the annoy the living hell out of you by playing the same music track continuously. Yes, I know you can "pause" the music, but so many people seem to fuck up their own pages that the text boxes are all screwed up and crap gets moved all over the page. A friend from college asked me join Myspace and hook up with him. I tried to add him as a friend, but his page formatting is whacked and I cannot find his contact box ANYWHERE on the page, so I just gave up.
My friends on Livejournal don't have this stupid problem.
HD-DVD/Blu-ray is just not worth it in my opinion. I have a 50" Sony HDTV and an upconverting DVD player and I am very pleased with the picture. I was at an electronics store watching The Last Samurai on a good sized TV for nearly twenty minutes before a salesman asked me what I thought of the new HD-DVD format. I was completely underwhelmed and didn't even realize I was watching an HD version of the film until the salesman told me. With players that cost C$700 and movies that are over C$35 each it just doesn't make economic sense to me.
Either the retention specialist/customer service agent/phone troll was lying about the usage (huge surprise) or the account was hijacked. I have nothing against a company clarifying why you want to cancel -- they may make you a special offer or fix what is causing the issue -- but this is beyond ridiculous and bordering on criminal.
The problem is I am sure this has been standard operating procedure at AOL every single day for the last decade. Everyone that has experienced this level of customer "service" needs to complain to the FTC and hopefully they will investigate. If memory serves, wasn't AOL already investigated for this by the FTC in years past?
You're right, I forgot the timeline. The Genesis was released in what, 1989? Ideally Sega should have put more support into the Saturn and dropped the 32X/SegaCD concepts all together. I really don't remember much about the Saturn other than one game, Panzer Dragoon, and that fact that it was apparently extremely difficult to program wtih woefully inadequate developer tools.
Sega their own worst enemy and Sony's bullshit...
on
The Rise and Fall of Sega
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think it comes down to two things:
1) Sega was their own worst enemy. With the release of the Sega CD, then the 32X and the Sega Saturn no one knew what worked with what and those that bought the Sega CD probably felt stupid when they saw the Saturn. Sega splintered their own market by trying to make Genesis into a wanna be PlayStation. Nevermind that the Saturn itself seemed poorly supported and thought out. The upgrade path should have been Genesis -> Dreamcast, but Sega farked that up pretty good.
2) Sony, the original PS and their PS2 bullshit. Sony piled on the type about the Emotion Engine and the PS2's rendering abilites (note that it was Microsoft and not Sony that made the claim about rendering Toy Story level graphics in real time). The Dreamcast sold well initially and Sega couldn't keep up with demand, but it lost steam after the PS2 announcement and, if I recall, games were hard to come by in the first year. Sega just didn't have the financial strength to support Dreamcast after the failures of the SegaCD and Saturn and it is my understanding that they took a chance with the Dreamcast and the chance didn't pay off. You can still find many used Dreamcast units at your local EB Games store that were traded in for PS2s.
If you have a good HDTV at home now, like a 50" Sony SXRD as I do, and a progressive capable DVD player (or even one of the newer upconverting DVD players) the difference with HD is going to be completely underwhelming. I was wandering around Futureshop and happened to catch The Last Samurai playing on a widescreen TV. I watched for a few minutes before I noticed the size of the DVD player was huge. I asked a salesman what DVD player that was and was surprised to learn it was the new Toshiba HD-DVD playing the HD version of The Last Samurai. The picture wasn't that much better than what I get at home and even up close though the details were a bit sharper it wasn't the huge difference I was expecting. Sitting on your couch at home I sincerely doubt you would notice much of a difference.
HD-DVD/Blu-ray looks like a complete waste of time and money.
The article is next to useless if you've done any reading about the PS3 or 360 in the last year; you'll know it all anyway. You can basically sum up the advantage of the PS3 over the Xbox is that the Bluray drive is able to store quite a bit more data. The 360 does have the advantage of a mature on-line experience with Xbox Live, besides the price advantage.
There is a much better article at Ars Technica that goes into a little more detail about the visual differences from the point of a game developer. Visually, what does a game designer say the difference is going to be between a 360 and the PS3? None. Hardware wise, the 360 and PS3 are actually pretty evently matched, and considering that there are still going to be a lot of cross platform games even if one machine had a decided advantage over the other game studios aren't going to push that advantage given the time and cost involved in just getting a game out the door in the first place.
According to game developers, side by side you aren't going to be able to see a difference between the two systems playing the same game. Pretty much what I expected.
I remember when the PS2 was released and the only new game worth playing was Gran Tourismo 3 while we waited and waited and waited for new games. Without backwards compatibility I would have shoved it in the closet and gone back to playing my original PS. There are about three games I want to play on the 360, so I feel the same about the 360 as I did the PS2 and I would had bought one by now if it played more than two of the twenty of my current Xbox titles. As games grow ever more expensive and the wait between titles seems to be longer than ever, backwards compatibility seems a lot more important than it used to be.
To top it off, and I say this a lot, I am sorry, is that what you think backwards compatible means and what Microsoft has it its head are two different things. There are plenty of games of the "compatible" list that really aren't -- they freeze, have framerates that drop to near zero, are filled with bugs that make the game unusable, laggy or unusable on-line play, and on and on. Granted, there are some games that were in that category that are now fixed, Ninja Gaiden was one such game, but Microsoft still has a long way to go.
Given all the time and money they've spent getting older games working on the 360, I wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper for Microsoft to simply have thrown at least some of the components from the original Xbox into the machine to ensure compatibility. How long are they going to grind this mill, it's got to cost them money?
While it is true that Canada signed the 1996 WIPO treaty it does not mean that we have to pass a law anything like the DMCA in the U.S. Before it was killed due to the last Federal election, the copyright reform act that was proposed did contain provisions for criminalizing the circumvention of digital copy controls, but only if the intent was to pirate. Circumvention of a copy control for personal use was excepted, so ripping a copy of a DVD to your hard drive or cracking e-book encryption to interopt with text to speech software and anything else that could fall under personal was permitted. Huge, huge difference. That's not to say the bill was perfect, libraries and universities were not happy with some of the provisions. I am sure they are happy the bill died.
Also, the personal exemption for private copying of audio works was untouched, so one could continue to make copies of CDs and tapes without worry of prosecution.
Hey, it might be cold in Cananda, but were not stupid. When the previous bill went to committee it was brought up again and again how the DMCA in the U.S. had failed and was a model for how not to implement the digital copy controls outlined in the WIPO treaty. I don't think the current Conservative government wants to go through all that again, so I doubt that any copyright bill they propose would differ substantially from the previous one, although you can be sure that libraries, schools and universities are going to make themselves a little better heard.
I live in Canada and the announced price of the Samsung BD-P1000 is C$1299 versus C$699 for already released Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player. That's almost double the price! Why would I pay C$600 more for the Bluray player, especially when you factor in that all the major movie studios have announced support for both formats? $1299 for a DVD player, that just insane.
Granted, the Bluray movies have an expected price of around C$20 versus C$30-$35 for HD-DVD, but I could still purchase fifteen to twenty HD-DVD movies for the difference in the price of the Bluray player. I would also expect that if HD-DVD takes off, the price of movies will drop to that of the Bluray titles.
That price is even more insane when you consider that the release of the PS3 at ~C$700 is sure to cannibalize sales at half the price. Why not just sell the Bluray player at that price? It's going to make those that buy a player now feel like idiots come November. Is HD really worth spending $1300 bucks on (and there are only a handful of titles to choose from)?
Just saw one in Zellers here in Canada. Remember those Game and Watch dual LCD screen games (Donkey Kong)? Well, that's what the DS Lite more closely resembles in its new form factor: smaller, lighter, and crap are the new screens bright! It is easier to hold, but the buttons do feel mushier and don't "click" as much as the original DS buttons. The power button has been moved to side, thank god, where it should have been in the first place and the cosmetics are much improved. The white case is very sexy.
I can't emphasize just how bright the new screens are. I actually turned the brightness down a notch or two while playing with one in the brightly lit store. That's fairly impressive.
From TFA: University of Arkansas researchers have created assemblies of nanowires that show potential in applications such as armor, flame-retardant fabric, bacteria filters, oil cracking, controlled drug release, decomposition of pollutants and chemical warfare agents.
The usefulness of the material extends to the decomposition of chemical agents, not their creation. The sentence could be a little clearer.
When I seven I was in our very large backyard swinging on our swingset with my friends one summer when we saw this streak of light high in the sky. It was only visible for a few seconds, but as we watched the streak grew brighter until it streaked over the roof of our house. About twenty or thirty feet above the ground it seemed to disintigrate with a popping sound. We searched the backyard for debris but didn't find anything. The meteorite was so small that I am not surprised, but it sure was bright for something so small. That was very cool. Even our neighbor on the hill above us came running down and said he saw the meteorite and wondered if it hit our house.
Years later as a teenager I was sleeping out on our deck to avoid the summer heat inside the house and I was woken by this shrieking sound, like fireworks, except much louder. I jumped up and saw a very bright, long streak of light screaching across the sky over the lake our house overlooked. As the meteor approached the ground the screaching got louder and higher in pitch until it seemed to "pop" into nothingness. Besides the incredibly high pitched shriek, I was awed by how bright the meteor was as it lit up our deck like a very bright lantern.
Obviously, both these meteorites do not compare in size to the one that hit Norway, but it was still an awe inspiring sight.
Look, I am as excited as you are about the PS3, it definitely has everything going for it, but you jumped the gun when you mentioned that 1080p TV sets will be available by September for around $1000. Not to be picky, but we are just getting HDTVs with native 1080p resolution on the market now and they aren't anywhere close to $1000. Before now, all HDTVs would down convert or blend the 1080i/p resolution down to the set's native resolution -- in some cases 720, in others 840 or 1000. I think Microsoft was wise to choose 720p as their base HD resolution as that is typically the highest resolution available to the installed base of HDTVs in the U.S. at the moment, and the price of the 360 reflects that.
One thing many North Americans cannot seem to get their heads around is that Sony is primarily a Japanese company and their strategy is long term. Everything they've done to this point bears this out: the initially high cost, the choice of 1080p as the base resolution, the choice of Bluray, an exceptionally powerful yet expensive custom microprocessor, including HDMI, and rolling out an untested Internet service. Viewed through the lens of long term strategy all of these choices make sense; game data storage and processing requirements will only increase, Bluray will emerge as the HD-DVD standard, 1080p TVs will be standard and HDMI will provide the connection, and the high cost will come down thanks to mass production. Sony expects tbhe PS3 to be on the market a long time.
Microsoft, on the other hand, looked at what is currently available and built their machine around those standards.
Taken from the backward compatibility FAQ on the 360 web site:
Q: Are you intentionally trying to keep a game off the list because you want us to buy the Xbox 360 version?
A: Not at all. Our goal remains to get every game to be backward compatible. The only things influencing what games we're working on are how popular the title is, and how easy it is to make backward compatible. Several original Xbox games on the list already have Xbox 360 counterparts.
Emphasis mine.
Seems that eventually they want all games to be compatible. True, Microsoft hasn't claimed that every game is compatible right now. From what they've said, they certainly leave you with the impression that games on the compatibility will run fine and anyone with a 360 knows that is simply not the case. Compatibility is improving every month, but regardless of what Microsoft claims there will be many games that never make the list. It's just not worth the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
What were you talking about?
that there will be few if any manufacturing defects and the new Bluray drives will operate the almost overwhelming range of launch titles flawlessly as each and every game display 1080p of pure goodness where the difference between the PS3 and 360 will appear so palpable, so distinguishable that Microsoft stock will tumble upon the very whisper of the name, "PS3". Like Chuck Norris before it, the very name PS3 will command respect and strike fear in the competition.
Just wait. Walmart will realize their mistake and allow kids to do things like add hot pink text on top of bright orange, move the text boxes all over the fucking page and feature looping, inane, impossible to shut off Walmart-friendly music that highlights all the best boy bands Walmart has to offer.
The website, content and contest are just a marketing campaign and a pathetic one at that. Kids "customize" their page and upload pictures and video (pending approval from the Walmart mandarins, of course). The entire exercise is directed at getting kids to shop for their fall back to school wardrobe at Wally World as opposed to Target, who apparently have the budget teen fashion market pretty much buttoned up (no pun intended). It's not a blog or even a blog with training wheels, but just a way for kids to yap to their friends about this "cool new web site" and act as shills for Walmart.
Don't tell me you actually check these items, do you? If they allowed these items only as carry-on that would eliminate a lot of baggage theft, methinks, and also allow for the use of safety equipment if there is a fire. Two problems solved in one stroke.
How many times have you typed a snippet of lyrics into Google hoping to find the name of a song so you can either buy the track or check out what other material they offer? I've done it plenty of times and once I find the name of the song and the band I head over to iTunes and buy the song and sometimes the whole album, if it's good enough. Without lyrics sites or pay only lyrics I honestly don't know how you'd find the name of a song that easily.
Another example of the RIAA or whatever entity acting penny wise and pound foolish.
I am all for people experimenting with the web and making their Myspace page their own, but I assume that people would desire substance over style. If someone like me, a fairly experienced web and computer user, can't even navigate your Myspace page and complete a simple task like making a friends request what's the point in even having a page? It's the triumph of superficiality over usabilty and in that regard Myspace is far worse than any Geocities page ever was.
I guess I can't blame Myspace completely for this phenomenon as it seems to be an attitude that is pervading our entire society: it's better to look good than actually be good. Mspace seems to reinforce that message.
I fucking hate Myspace. I am sorry, but everybody on the site seems to love to fuck with their background adding music, pictures and other bullshit making it first of all impossible view to their page correctly, and second the annoy the living hell out of you by playing the same music track continuously. Yes, I know you can "pause" the music, but so many people seem to fuck up their own pages that the text boxes are all screwed up and crap gets moved all over the page. A friend from college asked me join Myspace and hook up with him. I tried to add him as a friend, but his page formatting is whacked and I cannot find his contact box ANYWHERE on the page, so I just gave up.
My friends on Livejournal don't have this stupid problem.
HD-DVD/Blu-ray is just not worth it in my opinion. I have a 50" Sony HDTV and an upconverting DVD player and I am very pleased with the picture. I was at an electronics store watching The Last Samurai on a good sized TV for nearly twenty minutes before a salesman asked me what I thought of the new HD-DVD format. I was completely underwhelmed and didn't even realize I was watching an HD version of the film until the salesman told me. With players that cost C$700 and movies that are over C$35 each it just doesn't make economic sense to me.
I think both HD-DVD and Blu-ray are a bust.
but it was just a joke. You must be a riot at parties.
Richard Nixon was on Futurama, or rather his head was, why not Phil Hartman's?
Either the retention specialist/customer service agent/phone troll was lying about the usage (huge surprise) or the account was hijacked. I have nothing against a company clarifying why you want to cancel -- they may make you a special offer or fix what is causing the issue -- but this is beyond ridiculous and bordering on criminal.
The problem is I am sure this has been standard operating procedure at AOL every single day for the last decade. Everyone that has experienced this level of customer "service" needs to complain to the FTC and hopefully they will investigate. If memory serves, wasn't AOL already investigated for this by the FTC in years past?
You're right, I forgot the timeline. The Genesis was released in what, 1989? Ideally Sega should have put more support into the Saturn and dropped the 32X/SegaCD concepts all together. I really don't remember much about the Saturn other than one game, Panzer Dragoon, and that fact that it was apparently extremely difficult to program wtih woefully inadequate developer tools.
I think it comes down to two things:
1) Sega was their own worst enemy. With the release of the Sega CD, then the 32X and the Sega Saturn no one knew what worked with what and those that bought the Sega CD probably felt stupid when they saw the Saturn. Sega splintered their own market by trying to make Genesis into a wanna be PlayStation. Nevermind that the Saturn itself seemed poorly supported and thought out. The upgrade path should have been Genesis -> Dreamcast, but Sega farked that up pretty good.
2) Sony, the original PS and their PS2 bullshit. Sony piled on the type about the Emotion Engine and the PS2's rendering abilites (note that it was Microsoft and not Sony that made the claim about rendering Toy Story level graphics in real time). The Dreamcast sold well initially and Sega couldn't keep up with demand, but it lost steam after the PS2 announcement and, if I recall, games were hard to come by in the first year. Sega just didn't have the financial strength to support Dreamcast after the failures of the SegaCD and Saturn and it is my understanding that they took a chance with the Dreamcast and the chance didn't pay off. You can still find many used Dreamcast units at your local EB Games store that were traded in for PS2s.
If you have a good HDTV at home now, like a 50" Sony SXRD as I do, and a progressive capable DVD player (or even one of the newer upconverting DVD players) the difference with HD is going to be completely underwhelming. I was wandering around Futureshop and happened to catch The Last Samurai playing on a widescreen TV. I watched for a few minutes before I noticed the size of the DVD player was huge. I asked a salesman what DVD player that was and was surprised to learn it was the new Toshiba HD-DVD playing the HD version of The Last Samurai. The picture wasn't that much better than what I get at home and even up close though the details were a bit sharper it wasn't the huge difference I was expecting. Sitting on your couch at home I sincerely doubt you would notice much of a difference.
HD-DVD/Blu-ray looks like a complete waste of time and money.
The article is next to useless if you've done any reading about the PS3 or 360 in the last year; you'll know it all anyway. You can basically sum up the advantage of the PS3 over the Xbox is that the Bluray drive is able to store quite a bit more data. The 360 does have the advantage of a mature on-line experience with Xbox Live, besides the price advantage.
There is a much better article at Ars Technica that goes into a little more detail about the visual differences from the point of a game developer. Visually, what does a game designer say the difference is going to be between a 360 and the PS3? None. Hardware wise, the 360 and PS3 are actually pretty evently matched, and considering that there are still going to be a lot of cross platform games even if one machine had a decided advantage over the other game studios aren't going to push that advantage given the time and cost involved in just getting a game out the door in the first place.
According to game developers, side by side you aren't going to be able to see a difference between the two systems playing the same game. Pretty much what I expected.
I remember when the PS2 was released and the only new game worth playing was Gran Tourismo 3 while we waited and waited and waited for new games. Without backwards compatibility I would have shoved it in the closet and gone back to playing my original PS. There are about three games I want to play on the 360, so I feel the same about the 360 as I did the PS2 and I would had bought one by now if it played more than two of the twenty of my current Xbox titles. As games grow ever more expensive and the wait between titles seems to be longer than ever, backwards compatibility seems a lot more important than it used to be.
To top it off, and I say this a lot, I am sorry, is that what you think backwards compatible means and what Microsoft has it its head are two different things. There are plenty of games of the "compatible" list that really aren't -- they freeze, have framerates that drop to near zero, are filled with bugs that make the game unusable, laggy or unusable on-line play, and on and on. Granted, there are some games that were in that category that are now fixed, Ninja Gaiden was one such game, but Microsoft still has a long way to go.
Given all the time and money they've spent getting older games working on the 360, I wonder if it wouldn't have been cheaper for Microsoft to simply have thrown at least some of the components from the original Xbox into the machine to ensure compatibility. How long are they going to grind this mill, it's got to cost them money?
While it is true that Canada signed the 1996 WIPO treaty it does not mean that we have to pass a law anything like the DMCA in the U.S. Before it was killed due to the last Federal election, the copyright reform act that was proposed did contain provisions for criminalizing the circumvention of digital copy controls, but only if the intent was to pirate. Circumvention of a copy control for personal use was excepted, so ripping a copy of a DVD to your hard drive or cracking e-book encryption to interopt with text to speech software and anything else that could fall under personal was permitted. Huge, huge difference. That's not to say the bill was perfect, libraries and universities were not happy with some of the provisions. I am sure they are happy the bill died.
Also, the personal exemption for private copying of audio works was untouched, so one could continue to make copies of CDs and tapes without worry of prosecution.
Hey, it might be cold in Cananda, but were not stupid. When the previous bill went to committee it was brought up again and again how the DMCA in the U.S. had failed and was a model for how not to implement the digital copy controls outlined in the WIPO treaty. I don't think the current Conservative government wants to go through all that again, so I doubt that any copyright bill they propose would differ substantially from the previous one, although you can be sure that libraries, schools and universities are going to make themselves a little better heard.
I live in Canada and the announced price of the Samsung BD-P1000 is C$1299 versus C$699 for already released Toshiba HD-A1 HD-DVD player. That's almost double the price! Why would I pay C$600 more for the Bluray player, especially when you factor in that all the major movie studios have announced support for both formats? $1299 for a DVD player, that just insane.
Granted, the Bluray movies have an expected price of around C$20 versus C$30-$35 for HD-DVD, but I could still purchase fifteen to twenty HD-DVD movies for the difference in the price of the Bluray player. I would also expect that if HD-DVD takes off, the price of movies will drop to that of the Bluray titles.
That price is even more insane when you consider that the release of the PS3 at ~C$700 is sure to cannibalize sales at half the price. Why not just sell the Bluray player at that price? It's going to make those that buy a player now feel like idiots come November. Is HD really worth spending $1300 bucks on (and there are only a handful of titles to choose from)?
I still don't understand Sony's strategy here.
Just saw one in Zellers here in Canada. Remember those Game and Watch dual LCD screen games (Donkey Kong)? Well, that's what the DS Lite more closely resembles in its new form factor: smaller, lighter, and crap are the new screens bright! It is easier to hold, but the buttons do feel mushier and don't "click" as much as the original DS buttons. The power button has been moved to side, thank god, where it should have been in the first place and the cosmetics are much improved. The white case is very sexy.
I can't emphasize just how bright the new screens are. I actually turned the brightness down a notch or two while playing with one in the brightly lit store. That's fairly impressive.
From TFA: University of Arkansas researchers have created assemblies of nanowires that show potential in applications such as armor, flame-retardant fabric, bacteria filters, oil cracking, controlled drug release, decomposition of pollutants and chemical warfare agents.
The usefulness of the material extends to the decomposition of chemical agents, not their creation. The sentence could be a little clearer.
When I seven I was in our very large backyard swinging on our swingset with my friends one summer when we saw this streak of light high in the sky. It was only visible for a few seconds, but as we watched the streak grew brighter until it streaked over the roof of our house. About twenty or thirty feet above the ground it seemed to disintigrate with a popping sound. We searched the backyard for debris but didn't find anything. The meteorite was so small that I am not surprised, but it sure was bright for something so small. That was very cool. Even our neighbor on the hill above us came running down and said he saw the meteorite and wondered if it hit our house.
Years later as a teenager I was sleeping out on our deck to avoid the summer heat inside the house and I was woken by this shrieking sound, like fireworks, except much louder. I jumped up and saw a very bright, long streak of light screaching across the sky over the lake our house overlooked. As the meteor approached the ground the screaching got louder and higher in pitch until it seemed to "pop" into nothingness. Besides the incredibly high pitched shriek, I was awed by how bright the meteor was as it lit up our deck like a very bright lantern.
Obviously, both these meteorites do not compare in size to the one that hit Norway, but it was still an awe inspiring sight.
Look, I am as excited as you are about the PS3, it definitely has everything going for it, but you jumped the gun when you mentioned that 1080p TV sets will be available by September for around $1000. Not to be picky, but we are just getting HDTVs with native 1080p resolution on the market now and they aren't anywhere close to $1000. Before now, all HDTVs would down convert or blend the 1080i/p resolution down to the set's native resolution -- in some cases 720, in others 840 or 1000. I think Microsoft was wise to choose 720p as their base HD resolution as that is typically the highest resolution available to the installed base of HDTVs in the U.S. at the moment, and the price of the 360 reflects that.
One thing many North Americans cannot seem to get their heads around is that Sony is primarily a Japanese company and their strategy is long term. Everything they've done to this point bears this out: the initially high cost, the choice of 1080p as the base resolution, the choice of Bluray, an exceptionally powerful yet expensive custom microprocessor, including HDMI, and rolling out an untested Internet service. Viewed through the lens of long term strategy all of these choices make sense; game data storage and processing requirements will only increase, Bluray will emerge as the HD-DVD standard, 1080p TVs will be standard and HDMI will provide the connection, and the high cost will come down thanks to mass production. Sony expects tbhe PS3 to be on the market a long time.
Microsoft, on the other hand, looked at what is currently available and built their machine around those standards.
Hell, it's actually $50 less than a PS3! Buy two at that price, one for each hand so you don't feel compelled to shoot Jack Thompson in the face.
Taken from the backward compatibility FAQ on the 360 web site:
Q: Are you intentionally trying to keep a game off the list because you want us to buy the Xbox 360 version?
A: Not at all. Our goal remains to get every game to be backward compatible. The only things influencing what games we're working on are how popular the title is, and how easy it is to make backward compatible. Several original Xbox games on the list already have Xbox 360 counterparts.
Emphasis mine.
Seems that eventually they want all games to be compatible. True, Microsoft hasn't claimed that every game is compatible right now. From what they've said, they certainly leave you with the impression that games on the compatibility will run fine and anyone with a 360 knows that is simply not the case. Compatibility is improving every month, but regardless of what Microsoft claims there will be many games that never make the list. It's just not worth the effort.