Once in a while, I'll pick up a console magazine for the demo disk if I see something interesting. Usually on weekends, when I cash in a good ten or fifteen dollars worth of pop cans, since Kessel's puts the magazine rack right next to the recycling machines so I stand there looking at them for fifteen minutes while I stick cans in the machine.
When this happens, I usually take the disk out, lose the magazine, and shortly thereafter lose the disk too, since I get bored with them in about ten minutes. I used to actually read the magazine, in at attempt to, "get my money's worth," but I quit doing that since everything in them I either knew about a week ago or don't care about but could have known a week ago if I did.
Yeah, that first sentence is awkward, that's my fault. What I meant to say is that I have a fairly short list of sites who I trust for news on any particular topic. When it comes to hardware like this, it tends to be the places that intentional use things until they break, since they generally find realistic limits (although realistic limits sometimes end up being unrealistic scenarios like driving a pickup truck over your laptop). When I see news on those sites, I assume they're onto something. IGN is definitely not on that list. I don't automatically assume their wrong like I do with, say, GameDreams, but I won't quote them on anything.
Actually, no they're not. At least not around here. I called a couple weeks ago. They're actually cutting jobs from the drivethrough. Pretty sad when McDonalds is laying off workers.
Not laughing, actually. IGN isn't really high on my list of sites that I don't automatically assume are wrong. I've seen too many examples of them outright lying not to take this with a grain of salt. But it really has me wondering: Sony themselves were talking aobut FAR less battery life than IGN is reporting. That really sounds off. Sony is the last company to understate their products. If you could realistically expect 5 hours from the PSP, I would expect them to be talking about ten to fifteen hours, not two, one, and less like they have been.
Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear about the moving parts issues. Battery life was the least of my worries. I feel very uncomfortable carrying something around in my pocket or bookbag that could be susceptible to shock damage, and I don't want to have to go and modify my laptop bag again to make a padded spot for one.
I get fragged probably 5 times for every kill I get in most FPS games (Haven't played AA in over a year, though). Why should it get red flagged for bucking the system? Maybe they just plain suck at the game?
I don't excercise because I'm a lazy bastard. I guess you could count that as any of the above depending on how you want to think of it. However, any situtation in which you can't excercise (or just plain can't be bothered, in my case), it's just a matter of taking care of what you eat. I haven't excercised since middle school (and that was mostly trying to get out of trashcans people stuffed me into), but I still maintain a weight of 140 lbs. (5' 9") by paying only moderate attention to what I eat.
I'd like nothing better than to see two spyware companies destroy one another in a glorious battle to the death, but I'd much rather they NOT do it on MY harddrive.
Grants are well and good with industrial polution, because you can stop it. You can't throw money into a volcano and stop is from erupting (and if you could, should you? It's also producing some of the most fertile soil in the world at the same time). You can try to clean it up, but again, it's not that big of a polluter. I didn't RTFA this time, but on CNN last week, they were saying that Mt. St. Helens was producing twice the pollution of the rest of the state. However, in the history of industry (or for that matter settlement) in the area, it's erupted twice for a total of, what, less than two months combined? 2x for 60 days is a lot less than 1x for a year, let alone decades. It's producing more *right now*, but industry has a very wide lead, and it doesn't stop after a few weeks and wait twenty years to start up again.
The load times aren't THAT bad. The article's talking about 10 and 20 seconds, and most of the games tested only have it at the startup, with negligible loads after that. Of course, 20 seconds out of the PSP's battery life is a bit more to worry about than the same would be even on the DS. Personally, I'm still worried more than anything about moving parts, and the sort of abuse my GBA has recieved (and accepted with nary a squeak) over the last couple years. Nobody else seems to share my fears, but I forsee many PSP's plugged into the Great LAN in the Sky next to that laptop I dropped last summer.
I say this under the assumtion that "someday" somebody will figure out a way to take a good file and make an MD5 equivalent file to poison a torrent with. The way I read the blurb, it sounds like both files were specifically crafted to create a collision.
It doesn't have to be harmful to break a ptp system. There's a pretty common exploit on Kazaa where people have a file just containing random junk that registers as a match to a popular file. If you download taht file, and get any portion of it from the fake, the file is corrupted and useless. Somebody could use these fake files to "poison" popular torrents, making it very unlikely that anybody on them will get uncorrupted files.
The main difference between load times on the PSP and load times on any disk-based console is where you are. The PS2, Xbox, GameCube, whatever is plugged into the wall, and won't run out of power at any point. You're also usually in a more comfortable environment, sitting on a couch or something. With a portable, you're on battery time (and not very much battery time in the PSP's case), and you may be standing in line, on a bus, or some other uncomfortable situation as likely as you'd be sitting on the couch.
Ganymede and Callisto are actually far enough away from Jupiter that they aren't always occluded with the planet. Ganymede is over 1,070,000 kilometers from Jupiter, and Callisto is 1,883,000 kilometers from Jupiter.
It'd be pretty interesting. As most gamer's are probably familiar, when you're doing really good at a game, you sorta enter a "zone," where the game just sorta plays itself (no Star Trek reference intended). Things just start happening a bit faster than you can consciously handle, but you still pull it off. When you've either won or lost, it can be hard to remember exactly what happened along the way. This kind of game control would really push that to its limit.
I'm banned from Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort for card counting. Just basic deck-weighting, nothing fancy. Usually if they think you're card counting, they offer you free drinks. They always watch gamblers who aren't drinking (espeically if the drinks are comp) extra closely, and they will at the very least take away your notes or calculator, if not ask you to leave.
One thing about the graphics: they didn't have to be as bad as they were. Far too many games tried to stretch the console for 3D, but a few didn't. The biggest one that comes to my mind is Valkyrie Profile, which did a great job of showing that the Playstation could do excellent 2D graphics. VP has more detailed environments, fluid animations, and fancy particle-based spell effects than anything the SNES could accomplish, without the boxy lego-man effect that so many 3D games on the PSX had.
Play Valkyrie Profile. PSX game, but it's entirely 2D. Very beatuiful visuals, smoothly animatec characters. Far above and beyond anything the SNES could provide, and it looks better than 90% of the 3D games on the Playstation.
It's a pitty everybody struggled to get 3D on the Playstation 1. It was a far better system for 2D games, which Valkyrie Profile demonstrates quite well.
In the case of the Squaresoft titles, actually, there'd be some question to that effect. Square and Nintendo had a falling out after the SNES era, so it's unlikely that there would have been any N64 Square games. That leaves the Sega Saturn, and well... it's the Saturn.
I think that would set a very bad precident on what the government would accept as grounds for capitol punishment. Afterwards, people would be saying, "You killed those bastards for making spyware, why is my neighbor still alive? He walked on my goddamn lawn!" and so forth.
Now angry mobs armed with torches and pitchforks, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the government and I hear they make for some damn fine keggars afterwards.
That if they ever decided to try to legally enforce that EULA that the fact that their software installs itself without permission or intervention from the user invalidates it. The legitimacy of EULA's aside, they usually say they're activated by using the software. You don't really use Gator/Claria/whatever they're calling themselves now, and most of the people who have it probably don't even know they have it, so you don't do anything to enter into the agreement.
Pretty legit, actually. Talons is already being used for bomb disposal and other things. It can be mounted with a shotgun for forced-entry, mostly in law enforcement sector though. Equipping it with heavier weapons for military combat isn't much of a step. It's likely uses will probably be very simmilar to what it's already used for: Bomb disposal, entering biologically, chemically, or radiologically contaminated areas, serving as first-in during building invasions, or foreward lines sighting for artillery or laser-painting for guided missiles. I'm honestly suprised that it isn't already being used for many of these jobs.
That may be cool, but I doubt it's something controllable To that extent. A TI-86 will mess up an FM radio. I had the same issue with my old GBC, but on different stations. Isn't the FCC regulation that a device has to accept outisde interferance, not that it can't produce any itself?
I find their thing about the SNES emulation to be very iffy, though. Sure, many games should work just fine, you could emulate them with sound on a 486 after all, but there are some serious sticky points. There are a few SNES games that have never been playably emulated ever, even on high end PCs.
The other big one is SDD-1 emulation. There are dozens of addon chips that need to be emulated, but the SDD-1 (Used by Street Fighter Alpha, Star Ocean, and so forth for graphics compression) has proven to be one of the most elusive, and takes a great deal of horsepower to emulate. A PC considerably more powerful than the GBA (or even DS), running Snes9x in real-mode DOS (without Windows running at all) still can't handle SDD-1. ZSNES can do it with the pre-decompressed graphics packs, but you'll get some serious slowdowns on low-end PCs (On a p2 266, I had bad slowdowns with Star Ocean if there were multiple characters and effects on screen at once).
Anyway, aren't these also the same people who were talking about flawless PS1 emulation on the DS? Sorry, keep dreaming. Again, that's something that is still elusive even on the PC. Lots of games aren't working completely, and a great many require extensive settings tweaks to get running correctly.
And need I remind you of the current state of NES emulation on the GBA? It's one thing to say that it can emulate the SNES and PSX and Genesis and Atari and your toaster, but it's another to even get it emulating the NES.
They've been doing pretty good compared to Microsoft overall. It's just in the US that Microsoft's been doing better. But after reading this article, I'm not sure how long they can keep that up on either front. I hate to say it, but I think Nintendo's going to keep losing ground to Microsoft in the US and Sony in Japan, just like they have been. They still have a good shot with the DS, but I think they dropped the ball with it. The PSP's going to have to have some intrinsic flaw at this point for the DS to hold its ground. Thankfully, moving parts and talk of bad battery life look to suggest that a design flaw isn't something to rule out in the DS by any means.
Not only that, they've been mainstream for years. However, Nintendo has neglected them for their entire history, and actively opposed them for a very long time. Last year, it was said that the Sega Saturn had more online games than the Nintendo GameCube. The numbers may have shifted by now, but that's still pretty sad compared to Sony and Microsoft (not to mention the PC, which has had online games almost longer than there's been a way to play them online).
Nintendo's caught playing catchup with Sony yet again because of that mistake. I can only hope they don't manage to bumble the DS In the next couple days bad enough to give the PSP the opening it needs to get off the ground.
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Once in a while, I'll pick up a console magazine for the demo disk if I see something interesting. Usually on weekends, when I cash in a good ten or fifteen dollars worth of pop cans, since Kessel's puts the magazine rack right next to the recycling machines so I stand there looking at them for fifteen minutes while I stick cans in the machine. When this happens, I usually take the disk out, lose the magazine, and shortly thereafter lose the disk too, since I get bored with them in about ten minutes. I used to actually read the magazine, in at attempt to, "get my money's worth," but I quit doing that since everything in them I either knew about a week ago or don't care about but could have known a week ago if I did.
Yeah, that first sentence is awkward, that's my fault. What I meant to say is that I have a fairly short list of sites who I trust for news on any particular topic. When it comes to hardware like this, it tends to be the places that intentional use things until they break, since they generally find realistic limits (although realistic limits sometimes end up being unrealistic scenarios like driving a pickup truck over your laptop). When I see news on those sites, I assume they're onto something. IGN is definitely not on that list. I don't automatically assume their wrong like I do with, say, GameDreams, but I won't quote them on anything.
Actually, no they're not. At least not around here. I called a couple weeks ago. They're actually cutting jobs from the drivethrough. Pretty sad when McDonalds is laying off workers.
Not laughing, actually. IGN isn't really high on my list of sites that I don't automatically assume are wrong. I've seen too many examples of them outright lying not to take this with a grain of salt. But it really has me wondering: Sony themselves were talking aobut FAR less battery life than IGN is reporting. That really sounds off. Sony is the last company to understate their products. If you could realistically expect 5 hours from the PSP, I would expect them to be talking about ten to fifteen hours, not two, one, and less like they have been. Anyway, I'm still waiting to hear about the moving parts issues. Battery life was the least of my worries. I feel very uncomfortable carrying something around in my pocket or bookbag that could be susceptible to shock damage, and I don't want to have to go and modify my laptop bag again to make a padded spot for one.
I get fragged probably 5 times for every kill I get in most FPS games (Haven't played AA in over a year, though). Why should it get red flagged for bucking the system? Maybe they just plain suck at the game?
I don't excercise because I'm a lazy bastard. I guess you could count that as any of the above depending on how you want to think of it. However, any situtation in which you can't excercise (or just plain can't be bothered, in my case), it's just a matter of taking care of what you eat. I haven't excercised since middle school (and that was mostly trying to get out of trashcans people stuffed me into), but I still maintain a weight of 140 lbs. (5' 9") by paying only moderate attention to what I eat.
I'd like nothing better than to see two spyware companies destroy one another in a glorious battle to the death, but I'd much rather they NOT do it on MY harddrive.
Grants are well and good with industrial polution, because you can stop it. You can't throw money into a volcano and stop is from erupting (and if you could, should you? It's also producing some of the most fertile soil in the world at the same time). You can try to clean it up, but again, it's not that big of a polluter. I didn't RTFA this time, but on CNN last week, they were saying that Mt. St. Helens was producing twice the pollution of the rest of the state. However, in the history of industry (or for that matter settlement) in the area, it's erupted twice for a total of, what, less than two months combined? 2x for 60 days is a lot less than 1x for a year, let alone decades. It's producing more *right now*, but industry has a very wide lead, and it doesn't stop after a few weeks and wait twenty years to start up again.
The load times aren't THAT bad. The article's talking about 10 and 20 seconds, and most of the games tested only have it at the startup, with negligible loads after that. Of course, 20 seconds out of the PSP's battery life is a bit more to worry about than the same would be even on the DS. Personally, I'm still worried more than anything about moving parts, and the sort of abuse my GBA has recieved (and accepted with nary a squeak) over the last couple years. Nobody else seems to share my fears, but I forsee many PSP's plugged into the Great LAN in the Sky next to that laptop I dropped last summer.
I say this under the assumtion that "someday" somebody will figure out a way to take a good file and make an MD5 equivalent file to poison a torrent with. The way I read the blurb, it sounds like both files were specifically crafted to create a collision.
It doesn't have to be harmful to break a ptp system. There's a pretty common exploit on Kazaa where people have a file just containing random junk that registers as a match to a popular file. If you download taht file, and get any portion of it from the fake, the file is corrupted and useless. Somebody could use these fake files to "poison" popular torrents, making it very unlikely that anybody on them will get uncorrupted files.
The main difference between load times on the PSP and load times on any disk-based console is where you are. The PS2, Xbox, GameCube, whatever is plugged into the wall, and won't run out of power at any point. You're also usually in a more comfortable environment, sitting on a couch or something. With a portable, you're on battery time (and not very much battery time in the PSP's case), and you may be standing in line, on a bus, or some other uncomfortable situation as likely as you'd be sitting on the couch.
Ganymede and Callisto are actually far enough away from Jupiter that they aren't always occluded with the planet. Ganymede is over 1,070,000 kilometers from Jupiter, and Callisto is 1,883,000 kilometers from Jupiter.
It'd be pretty interesting. As most gamer's are probably familiar, when you're doing really good at a game, you sorta enter a "zone," where the game just sorta plays itself (no Star Trek reference intended). Things just start happening a bit faster than you can consciously handle, but you still pull it off. When you've either won or lost, it can be hard to remember exactly what happened along the way. This kind of game control would really push that to its limit.
I'm banned from Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort for card counting. Just basic deck-weighting, nothing fancy. Usually if they think you're card counting, they offer you free drinks. They always watch gamblers who aren't drinking (espeically if the drinks are comp) extra closely, and they will at the very least take away your notes or calculator, if not ask you to leave.
One thing about the graphics: they didn't have to be as bad as they were. Far too many games tried to stretch the console for 3D, but a few didn't. The biggest one that comes to my mind is Valkyrie Profile, which did a great job of showing that the Playstation could do excellent 2D graphics. VP has more detailed environments, fluid animations, and fancy particle-based spell effects than anything the SNES could accomplish, without the boxy lego-man effect that so many 3D games on the PSX had.
Play Valkyrie Profile. PSX game, but it's entirely 2D. Very beatuiful visuals, smoothly animatec characters. Far above and beyond anything the SNES could provide, and it looks better than 90% of the 3D games on the Playstation. It's a pitty everybody struggled to get 3D on the Playstation 1. It was a far better system for 2D games, which Valkyrie Profile demonstrates quite well.
In the case of the Squaresoft titles, actually, there'd be some question to that effect. Square and Nintendo had a falling out after the SNES era, so it's unlikely that there would have been any N64 Square games. That leaves the Sega Saturn, and well... it's the Saturn.
I think that would set a very bad precident on what the government would accept as grounds for capitol punishment. Afterwards, people would be saying, "You killed those bastards for making spyware, why is my neighbor still alive? He walked on my goddamn lawn!" and so forth.
Now angry mobs armed with torches and pitchforks, on the other hand, have nothing to do with the government and I hear they make for some damn fine keggars afterwards.
That if they ever decided to try to legally enforce that EULA that the fact that their software installs itself without permission or intervention from the user invalidates it. The legitimacy of EULA's aside, they usually say they're activated by using the software. You don't really use Gator/Claria/whatever they're calling themselves now, and most of the people who have it probably don't even know they have it, so you don't do anything to enter into the agreement.
Pretty legit, actually. Talons is already being used for bomb disposal and other things. It can be mounted with a shotgun for forced-entry, mostly in law enforcement sector though. Equipping it with heavier weapons for military combat isn't much of a step. It's likely uses will probably be very simmilar to what it's already used for: Bomb disposal, entering biologically, chemically, or radiologically contaminated areas, serving as first-in during building invasions, or foreward lines sighting for artillery or laser-painting for guided missiles. I'm honestly suprised that it isn't already being used for many of these jobs.
That may be cool, but I doubt it's something controllable To that extent. A TI-86 will mess up an FM radio. I had the same issue with my old GBC, but on different stations. Isn't the FCC regulation that a device has to accept outisde interferance, not that it can't produce any itself?
I find their thing about the SNES emulation to be very iffy, though. Sure, many games should work just fine, you could emulate them with sound on a 486 after all, but there are some serious sticky points. There are a few SNES games that have never been playably emulated ever, even on high end PCs.
The other big one is SDD-1 emulation. There are dozens of addon chips that need to be emulated, but the SDD-1 (Used by Street Fighter Alpha, Star Ocean, and so forth for graphics compression) has proven to be one of the most elusive, and takes a great deal of horsepower to emulate. A PC considerably more powerful than the GBA (or even DS), running Snes9x in real-mode DOS (without Windows running at all) still can't handle SDD-1. ZSNES can do it with the pre-decompressed graphics packs, but you'll get some serious slowdowns on low-end PCs (On a p2 266, I had bad slowdowns with Star Ocean if there were multiple characters and effects on screen at once).
Anyway, aren't these also the same people who were talking about flawless PS1 emulation on the DS? Sorry, keep dreaming. Again, that's something that is still elusive even on the PC. Lots of games aren't working completely, and a great many require extensive settings tweaks to get running correctly.
And need I remind you of the current state of NES emulation on the GBA? It's one thing to say that it can emulate the SNES and PSX and Genesis and Atari and your toaster, but it's another to even get it emulating the NES.
They've been doing pretty good compared to Microsoft overall. It's just in the US that Microsoft's been doing better. But after reading this article, I'm not sure how long they can keep that up on either front. I hate to say it, but I think Nintendo's going to keep losing ground to Microsoft in the US and Sony in Japan, just like they have been. They still have a good shot with the DS, but I think they dropped the ball with it. The PSP's going to have to have some intrinsic flaw at this point for the DS to hold its ground. Thankfully, moving parts and talk of bad battery life look to suggest that a design flaw isn't something to rule out in the DS by any means.
Not only that, they've been mainstream for years. However, Nintendo has neglected them for their entire history, and actively opposed them for a very long time. Last year, it was said that the Sega Saturn had more online games than the Nintendo GameCube. The numbers may have shifted by now, but that's still pretty sad compared to Sony and Microsoft (not to mention the PC, which has had online games almost longer than there's been a way to play them online).
Nintendo's caught playing catchup with Sony yet again because of that mistake. I can only hope they don't manage to bumble the DS In the next couple days bad enough to give the PSP the opening it needs to get off the ground.