I'll be getting a Wii as soon as I can find one, and already own a 360. I was thinking the Wii was a great deal, but a friend last week I managed to talk out of getting a PS3 (an old-school Sony faboy) said he's actually getting a 360. MS had a deal on the 360 with 4 games that worked out to less than the Wii with 2 games... I was quite surpised. It's actually a closer battle on price than most people think (they were good games too, Gears of War, GRAW, Ridge Racer, and live arcade, I believe).
I'm still getting a Wii though... it just looks fun, and my GF has expressed intest in playing it as well.
In SOny's defense (and you have no idea how much that hurts to say) some of the xbox 360 features they discuss were added after the initial release, so Sony could do the same. The background downloading was adde after and the music you were listening would stop playing when a game was started (but could be started again) was fixed very recently.
TO be fair, the 360 is not forcing anything... the HD-DVD is an option, as it should have been with the PS3, had Sony not been taken over by their media division. An exec from Sony Canada raved about the Blu-ray drive and HD in an interview before even mentioning the game platform.
Not sure about the Wii yet, but so far, the PS3 only looks like it's targetting people with large quantities of disposable income. Their release games offer very little different than the 360 (which admittedly is targeted more towards the hardcore gamer) other than 2 games, and some of the initial reports refer to poor ports and bad framerates. Of course, this could just the the same FUD was occurred during the xbox launch. I think we'll need to wait at least 6 months before a proper comparisone of the consoles can be done.
It's a nice thing to have, but would be far nicer if these manufacturers played nicely with each other and came up with standard connector and protocols for audio, video, etc. All the ridiculous proprietary formats are getting us nowhere (SOny, I'm looking at you). If you make one of these products, at least donate the patent on the format to the public domain to give some semblance of a willingness to compete.
The problem is that fans of Sony (there are stilla few, despite their recent displays of Evil) would love to buy the latest version of their game console, but don't want to shell out the rediculous price dictated by the forced inclusion of a Blu-Ray player. Sony still insists it's for game content, but we all know it's to get their latest format picked up by the masses.
No too defend him (too much), but from a businesses point of view, there must be a revenue stream somewhere, be it for development, or just support. At some point, people want to get paid. Free works commercially, as long as someone, generally large companies, is willing to pay for guaranteed support.
The Harley analogy is quite appropriate. Many would prefer the copy (Kawasaki, Honda, Suzuki) to the original because of improved handling, reliability, and support. Some prefer functionality over image. Not that the iPod isn't functionaly, I just think it's a bit over-rated.
Exactly. The flip ergonomic is not a 'feature', but rather a simple clean way of making the phone small to carry, but large enough to be a useable size when open. It also negates the need to have a keyboard lock, to avoid the random 2 hours calls to other planets.
It's hard to imagine that MS missed the patent on this one since even people on SlashDot imagined this as a missing piece of obvious functionality. I haven't checked the timing, but could the Penny Arcade comic relating to Zune functionality be considered prior art?
The parent is absolutely correct. At a bare minimum, the socio-political climate in the Middle East must be represented by a breakfast cereal that has nuts in it.
You may laugh, but I do the same. When they ask "where's you're caps-lock key", I tell them that I've remapped it to it's proper position... in my desk drawer. I'm apparently a sloppy typist and hit it a lot when aiming for the tab key when programming. The best feature of windows XP is the feature that will turn off caps-lock if you press shift.
is still the most popular language in terms of operational lines of code.
Heck, just a typical 'Hello World' program in COBOL would do that. Lines of code is probably a bad choice to describe the popularity of COBOL,as that's generally the the thing programers hate the most about it.
There's still a legitimate requirement t back up games you've bought, to cover the possibility of damaged disks. Some are claiming that the 360 frequently damages disks, although it seems to be greatly exaggerated. An MS policy of replacing damaged disks at a nominal or zero fee would eliminate the backup requirement as well though.
There will remain the requirement to hack the box just to see if it can be done though...
The traditional IBM approach seems to be to buy a software product, not improve it, and ride it into the ground, relying on people to keep buying it on name alone. I'm really hoping the open source stuff does not follow this path.
Not OLGA, but the commercial sheet music. I've found many examples where the sheet music I've bought is of lower quality than that available from OLGA. It smeels of the publishing compamies putting out music unrelated to what the original artist actually plays. Protecting a crappy product with lawyers isn't the way to make your customers happy...
Isn't it also a factor even with no monitoring functions if the power switch is on the appliance side of a transformer? I think the big waste in most cases are the 'wall warts' that so many companies use so they don't need to get their own power supplies certified. But then, as the title says, I'm not an EE either.
Sony would disagree with you. A recent newspaper article by an obvios Sony shill stated directly taht the XBox 360 isn't even as powerful as the PS2, much less their new console. I'm guessing Sony's existing marketing department is supplying facts like this along with the rest of their brilliant strategy.
I completely agree with you... but that's not going to help, even if I'm Linus (which I'm not). This is a _religious_ war, and using common sense and reasonable arguments is the last thing you want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll be getting a Wii as soon as I can find one, and already own a 360. I was thinking the Wii was a great deal, but a friend last week I managed to talk out of getting a PS3 (an old-school Sony faboy) said he's actually getting a 360. MS had a deal on the 360 with 4 games that worked out to less than the Wii with 2 games ... I was quite surpised. It's actually a closer battle on price than most people think (they were good games too, Gears of War, GRAW, Ridge Racer, and live arcade, I believe).
... it just looks fun, and my GF has expressed intest in playing it as well.
I'm still getting a Wii though
In SOny's defense (and you have no idea how much that hurts to say) some of the xbox 360 features they discuss were added after the initial release, so Sony could do the same. The background downloading was adde after and the music you were listening would stop playing when a game was started (but could be started again) was fixed very recently.
TO be fair, the 360 is not forcing anything ... the HD-DVD is an option, as it should have been with the PS3, had Sony not been taken over by their media division. An exec from Sony Canada raved about the Blu-ray drive and HD in an interview before even mentioning the game platform.
I can't see avoiding a large degree of power loss, and the last thing we need right now is something more inefficient than wll-warts.
...
It would also suck to have a random bdy part resonate in a similar frequency
Not sure about the Wii yet, but so far, the PS3 only looks like it's targetting people with large quantities of disposable income. Their release games offer very little different than the 360 (which admittedly is targeted more towards the hardcore gamer) other than 2 games, and some of the initial reports refer to poor ports and bad framerates. Of course, this could just the the same FUD was occurred during the xbox launch. I think we'll need to wait at least 6 months before a proper comparisone of the consoles can be done.
It's a nice thing to have, but would be far nicer if these manufacturers played nicely with each other and came up with standard connector and protocols for audio, video, etc. All the ridiculous proprietary formats are getting us nowhere (SOny, I'm looking at you). If you make one of these products, at least donate the patent on the format to the public domain to give some semblance of a willingness to compete.
The problem is that fans of Sony (there are stilla few, despite their recent displays of Evil) would love to buy the latest version of their game console, but don't want to shell out the rediculous price dictated by the forced inclusion of a Blu-Ray player. Sony still insists it's for game content, but we all know it's to get their latest format picked up by the masses.
No too defend him (too much), but from a businesses point of view, there must be a revenue stream somewhere, be it for development, or just support. At some point, people want to get paid. Free works commercially, as long as someone, generally large companies, is willing to pay for guaranteed support.
Just think ... to save even more space, we can use several layers of reflectors ... oh, wait ....
The Harley analogy is quite appropriate. Many would prefer the copy (Kawasaki, Honda, Suzuki) to the original because of improved handling, reliability, and support. Some prefer functionality over image. Not that the iPod isn't functionaly, I just think it's a bit over-rated.
Exactly. The flip ergonomic is not a 'feature', but rather a simple clean way of making the phone small to carry, but large enough to be a useable size when open. It also negates the need to have a keyboard lock, to avoid the random 2 hours calls to other planets.
It's hard to imagine that MS missed the patent on this one since even people on SlashDot imagined this as a missing piece of obvious functionality. I haven't checked the timing, but could the Penny Arcade comic relating to Zune functionality be considered prior art?
The parent is absolutely correct. At a bare minimum, the socio-political climate in the Middle East must be represented by a breakfast cereal that has nuts in it.
Sorry, but you are totally wrong.
(I had to)
Osama?
We can leave your friends behind
This is one of those sentences that's a perfect example of why proper use of the apostrophe is important.
You may laugh, but I do the same. When they ask "where's you're caps-lock key", I tell them that I've remapped it to it's proper position ... in my desk drawer. I'm apparently a sloppy typist and hit it a lot when aiming for the tab key when programming. The best feature of windows XP is the feature that will turn off caps-lock if you press shift.
is still the most popular language in terms of operational lines of code.
Heck, just a typical 'Hello World' program in COBOL would do that. Lines of code is probably a bad choice to describe the popularity of COBOL,as that's generally the the thing programers hate the most about it.
There's always employment in the free software industry.
It's an excellent idea, but in general, the money sucks.
Yeah, I know there's companies that develop free, and make money on the services, but it's still not a widely accepted business practice.
There will remain the requirement to hack the box just to see if it can be done though ...
The traditional IBM approach seems to be to buy a software product, not improve it, and ride it into the ground, relying on people to keep buying it on name alone. I'm really hoping the open source stuff does not follow this path.
Not OLGA, but the commercial sheet music. I've found many examples where the sheet music I've bought is of lower quality than that available from OLGA. It smeels of the publishing compamies putting out music unrelated to what the original artist actually plays. Protecting a crappy product with lawyers isn't the way to make your customers happy ...
Isn't it also a factor even with no monitoring functions if the power switch is on the appliance side of a transformer? I think the big waste in most cases are the 'wall warts' that so many companies use so they don't need to get their own power supplies certified. But then, as the title says, I'm not an EE either.
Sony would disagree with you. A recent newspaper article by an obvios Sony shill stated directly taht the XBox 360 isn't even as powerful as the PS2, much less their new console. I'm guessing Sony's existing marketing department is supplying facts like this along with the rest of their brilliant strategy.
I completely agree with you ... but that's not going to help, even if I'm Linus (which I'm not). This is a _religious_ war, and using common sense and reasonable arguments is the last thing you want to do.