There's another comment elsewhere by Sony that this is a router as well as a Playstation -- those two "output" ports are for other devices to connect to... "external" and "internal" I believe would be the correct firewall terminology.
They said they wanted the overall experience to be 1000 times better.
7 simultaneous players on one console with two screens running at 1080p at high FPS with realtime DTS audio output? That's getting there to me.
If game makers take advantage of this technology, I'd be really excited.
I saw it said on Anandtech's review that he didn't see a point to the dual 1080p outputs -- but he's forgetting the life cycle of a game console is longer than that of a PC. If Sony's going to milk the PS3 for another 5 years, they need to think of what people will have in-house in 5 years.
Also, since it uses HDMI outputs, you could connect dual 21" LCD panels to it instead for some very nice output quality (albeit requiring sitting closer).
As for 1080p vs. 720p, I'd love to play overhead RTS or even FPS games in 1080p since resolution is so important for detail.
1080i would make more sense for racing games, or other high-speed movement games (even FPS if you're not playing a sniper) if the framerates are higher to match.
I've yet to see either comment on maximum framerates or poly fill rates for these.
The GameCube has some of the most impressive graphics I've ever seen in terms of fluidity. I've loved playing every game I've played on it and watching people play games is a joy because of the lack of stutter and excellent rendering.
That said, I don't like most GC games compared to my PS2 in terms of selection.
To be fair, I seem to remember that portable memory formats that weren't easily broken and had good capacity were more expensive than the PS1/PS2's memory cards at the time.
I think the XBox Live Silver is a great idea -- I probably wouldn't use it much, but I know lots of people who will buy an XBox360 for that feature alone (plus a few games). That said, Sony can make a similar system if they want to after the fact, or Sega could bring Heat.net to the PS3.
Audio PS3 has support for DD 5.1, DTS (6.1 maybe?), "etc" (from their site)
All I could find on the XBox360 was "The console has a multi-channel surround sound output that supports 48 KHz, 16-bit for over 256 audio channels. Internally, the console can process 320 independent channels in 32-bit mode." (from the site above)
Performance According to this site, you could try using the 3 x 3.2GHz CPUs in your xFlops calculations instead. Each core also has a vector unit (any performance values anyone?).
Silence The XBox 360 uses a water cooling system which should be quieter than the normal fan systems if done right. How will the PS3 be cooled?
Devkits We won't know much about this right away, but part of the gamer's experience comes from how easy/hard the platform creator makes it for the game developper to bring these features alive. If the SDKs make it easy to render 3D audio automatically based on environment mapping and make pixel shading easy or dynamic lighting simpler, then you'll see more of these features out of the gate.
Some developpers will always push the envelope, but the average game you buy probably won't.
Firewire is Apple's baby. They only like USB because its popular and probably cheaper to manufacture, being dependant on a host has its advantates.
Other devices don't use Firewire much because (I'm told) there are high licensing fees.
Firewire's hostlessness has always been a plus for interconnection of devices, but some cameras/printers are beginning to include enough hardware to be either a client or host on a USB port as well.
What's the difference between clicking the "Contacts" icon in Outlook or launching a Contacts application?
None, well, its in a new window (how I'd prefer my contacts).
What's the difference if the secondary contacts program has CORBA support and is accessible from within my mail software (for adding new names, looking up names), etc.? None.
I'm a programmer; I think like one.
I've used E-mail since 1989 and have tens of thousands of direct contacts. It matters to me.
Exactly my thought -- I'm glad people want to use Linux in their devices, and if its unmodified, they have nothing to lose by releasing source code.
If however they gain from my code, or Linus', or someone else's, they need to release their modifications to their customers just as the rest of us released our code.
I don't want either of them to do contacts management, I want a contacts manager program instead.
I agree that those features are great -- and its one of the few reasons I've ever liked Outlook (contact management), but incorporating those features into Thunderbird or Sunbird makes no sense.
That should be the job of a dedicated piece of software and it should have nice public interfaces for software like Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything else needing to know about people to interface with.
The major problem was that DOS/Windows misreported the sizes in MB/KB... although they weren't being measured in true metric mega and kilo values.
(I'm sure other OS's did too)
At the time that 20MB drives were normal, nobody cared much about a few lost bytes -- I recovered more space from defragmenting.
Slack space from large allocation units was more of a problem still in the 540MB drive days.
We finally have an official "MiB vs. MB" standard; the industry as a whole is *very young* compared to say cars (which are young compared to metalurgy), its normal to have changing standards.
Even between practically equal countries like the USA and Canada, there are often disputes about the regulations each has. In fact, various states and provinces frequently fight with tax breaks and other incentives to get companies to open up sites in their jurisdictions.
If you can't market it, its not the fault of the original author -- it just means you have no business plan.
I'm tired of hearing about these "poor companies" who can't market their software legally. If you can't sell it, don't cry to me, move on and write something you *can* sell.
If you can't figure out how to make money selling software, change industries.
Besides, all they have to do is provide download links for the sources they used from their own site to those customers they sell the binaries to.
They don't need to "publish" where to get it, or anything besides making a link available to the GPL. Its not hard to be in compliance.
Slashdot Mirror
It was intended as a slightly humourous but honest comparison of weight to join the likes of LoCs in Slashdot measurement history.
Glad to see you got modded funny at least.
There's another comment elsewhere by Sony that this is a router as well as a Playstation -- those two "output" ports are for other devices to connect to ... "external" and "internal" I believe would be the correct firewall terminology.
And I need a new one too ... :(
Well said.
I love firewire, technologically speaking.
I'm quite upset that more companies don't support it for audio/video transport on high end devices to be honest.
IEEE1394 is a much better transport for audio than TOSLink ever was, oh well.
I'd like to know how much they weigh.
I don't use wireless controllers because I like my controller lighter than a can of soup if I'm going to hold it for a few hours.
It takes time to take advantage of a platform because programmers aren't used to it yet.
It took years for a 32 bit protected mode operating system to be available to the public despite the 386 having been spec'd out forever.
In fact Intel even went back to bragging about how fast a 286 was for 16 bit applications to ship more of their lower cost units.
They said they wanted the overall experience to be 1000 times better.
7 simultaneous players on one console with two screens running at 1080p at high FPS with realtime DTS audio output? That's getting there to me.
If game makers take advantage of this technology, I'd be really excited.
I saw it said on Anandtech's review that he didn't see a point to the dual 1080p outputs -- but he's forgetting the life cycle of a game console is longer than that of a PC. If Sony's going to milk the PS3 for another 5 years, they need to think of what people will have in-house in 5 years.
Also, since it uses HDMI outputs, you could connect dual 21" LCD panels to it instead for some very nice output quality (albeit requiring sitting closer).
As for 1080p vs. 720p, I'd love to play overhead RTS or even FPS games in 1080p since resolution is so important for detail.
1080i would make more sense for racing games, or other high-speed movement games (even FPS if you're not playing a sniper) if the framerates are higher to match.
I've yet to see either comment on maximum framerates or poly fill rates for these.
The GameCube has some of the most impressive graphics I've ever seen in terms of fluidity. I've loved playing every game I've played on it and watching people play games is a joy because of the lack of stutter and excellent rendering.
That said, I don't like most GC games compared to my PS2 in terms of selection.
To be fair, I seem to remember that portable memory formats that weren't easily broken and had good capacity were more expensive than the PS1/PS2's memory cards at the time.
A few specs you didn't include:
I think the XBox Live Silver is a great idea -- I probably wouldn't use it much, but I know lots of people who will buy an XBox360 for that feature alone (plus a few games). That said, Sony can make a similar system if they want to after the fact, or Sega could bring Heat.net to the PS3.
Audio
PS3 has support for DD 5.1, DTS (6.1 maybe?), "etc" (from their site)
All I could find on the XBox360 was "The console has a multi-channel surround sound output that supports 48 KHz, 16-bit for over 256 audio channels. Internally, the console can process 320 independent channels in 32-bit mode." (from the site above)
Performance
According to this site, you could try using the 3 x 3.2GHz CPUs in your xFlops calculations instead. Each core also has a vector unit (any performance values anyone?).
Silence
The XBox 360 uses a water cooling system which should be quieter than the normal fan systems if done right. How will the PS3 be cooled?
Devkits
We won't know much about this right away, but part of the gamer's experience comes from how easy/hard the platform creator makes it for the game developper to bring these features alive. If the SDKs make it easy to render 3D audio automatically based on environment mapping and make pixel shading easy or dynamic lighting simpler, then you'll see more of these features out of the gate.
Some developpers will always push the envelope, but the average game you buy probably won't.
I haven't used the Bluetooth versions but I know the RF mice drive me nuts trying to aim in 3D shooters.
According to one thread though, it seems that the Logitech Desktop MX doesn't have this problem.
Firewire is Apple's baby. They only like USB because its popular and probably cheaper to manufacture, being dependant on a host has its advantates.
Other devices don't use Firewire much because (I'm told) there are high licensing fees.
Firewire's hostlessness has always been a plus for interconnection of devices, but some cameras/printers are beginning to include enough hardware to be either a client or host on a USB port as well.
You made no point whatsoever.
What's the difference between clicking the "Contacts" icon in Outlook or launching a Contacts application?
None, well, its in a new window (how I'd prefer my contacts).
What's the difference if the secondary contacts program has CORBA support and is accessible from within my mail software (for adding new names, looking up names), etc.? None.
I'm a programmer; I think like one.
I've used E-mail since 1989 and have tens of thousands of direct contacts. It matters to me.
Actually, the GPL *does* say that.
If you modify my code and distribute the results, you must allow the recipient access to the source code, including the changes you made.
Exactly my thought -- I'm glad people want to use Linux in their devices, and if its unmodified, they have nothing to lose by releasing source code.
If however they gain from my code, or Linus', or someone else's, they need to release their modifications to their customers just as the rest of us released our code.
I don't want either of them to do contacts management, I want a contacts manager program instead.
I agree that those features are great -- and its one of the few reasons I've ever liked Outlook (contact management), but incorporating those features into Thunderbird or Sunbird makes no sense.
That should be the job of a dedicated piece of software and it should have nice public interfaces for software like Thunderbird, Sunbird and anything else needing to know about people to interface with.
"Potential" crimes are interpreted based on the likelihood of the crime happening.
If you had a mistress whose husband is in the mob, and told the police you thought he might want you dead, that has a high probability.
Common confusion -- capitalists are about free enterprise, not freedom of the press (necessarily).
Conservatives (Republicans in the USA) *often* value privacy and free enterprise, and often not the freedom of the press.
The press tends toward the liberal perspective in terms of freedoms.
The major problem was that DOS/Windows misreported the sizes in MB/KB ... although they weren't being measured in true metric mega and kilo values.
(I'm sure other OS's did too)
At the time that 20MB drives were normal, nobody cared much about a few lost bytes -- I recovered more space from defragmenting.
Slack space from large allocation units was more of a problem still in the 540MB drive days.
We finally have an official "MiB vs. MB" standard; the industry as a whole is *very young* compared to say cars (which are young compared to metalurgy), its normal to have changing standards.
Having perspective helps.
"I don't like the memory footprint of Java programs"
How's that?
Don't tell me how you can write small footprint Java programs and big-footprint C programs, I know already.
What I mean is that *most* Java programmers don't seem to care about memory usage the way C programmers do.
I prefer Python myself of course.
WebDAV strikes me as much more useful in this regard, especially since mounting WebDAV sites is a built in feature of most OS's already.
It helps here if you know what a truly vegetarian diet in the animal sense would mean.
No processed foods -- including soy products -- only those you could find by foraging or picking yourself.
You'll find that surviving on berries and bark and vegetables with no processed foods like soy enriched or veggie burgers will be very difficult.
Its been tried -- the last study I saw required eating over twice your body weight in food per day.
Even between practically equal countries like the USA and Canada, there are often disputes about the regulations each has. In fact, various states and provinces frequently fight with tax breaks and other incentives to get companies to open up sites in their jurisdictions.
If you can't market it, its not the fault of the original author -- it just means you have no business plan.
I'm tired of hearing about these "poor companies" who can't market their software legally. If you can't sell it, don't cry to me, move on and write something you *can* sell.
If you can't figure out how to make money selling software, change industries.
Besides, all they have to do is provide download links for the sources they used from their own site to those customers they sell the binaries to.
They don't need to "publish" where to get it, or anything besides making a link available to the GPL. Its not hard to be in compliance.
There was actually a discussion about how this could be handled recently, in the Firefox 1.1 discussion.