It is only the 40GB PS3 that does not have PS2 backwards compatibility (IMHO a stupid decision). I have a 60GB PS3 (PAL edition) that has approx 85% to 85% backwards compatibility even so I can confidently go out and buy all new PS2 games knowing they will work on my PS3. In fact most of the games I currently play are PS2 games because my PS3 upscales and smooths them for display on my HDTV. For me my PS3 gives me a huge amount of flexibility in the games I play and saves me a considerable amount of money in the process.
While native games that I like for the PS3 have over the last 9 months (remember I have a PAL PS3) been a bit light-on although IMHO the same applies to the Wii and the Xbox360 I don't blames Sony for that since it is upto Game Developers to develop and publish games. In fact now there are games for the PS3 that I do like, however like all so called next gen consoles their price is fairly high (even similar Wii games are the same price or marginally cheaper) and since there are plenty of new PS2 games still coming out I don't mind if I wait for native PS3 games to drop.
To people that say that Developers should drop support for the PS2 I say why? If a Game Developer still makes money from developing PS2 games I think they have every right to do so. After all the PS2 is still the cheapest supported console available with a huge game library and from a Sony perspective this means that they have three viable gaming machines on the market with the PSP the PS2 and the PS3 compared to the Xbox360 for Microsoft and the DS and Wii for Nintendo.
You can if you either have a home-brew DS or PSP. Of course if you want other types of emulators (ie. Sega, Mame or even MS-DOS) as well, then the home-brew PSP is the way to go although I do recommend a 1GB or 2GB memory stick even though it is about twice the price of an equivalent SD card however it is a "once off" purchase since you can back it up to your PC (MS Windows, Mac or Linux) and 1GB can hold a huge amount of ROM games.
Actually its is kind of strange to see "Nintendo" appear on the home-brew PSP screen but some of the retro Nintendo games are IMHO still great fun to play when you are on a long flight or even on the road. What is even nicer is the fact that the PSP lite can connect to your TV and if you want stereo system via component or composite video cables so you get the best of all worlds.
It'd be nice to have stats on how many people chose to upgrade to Vista, rather than having it forced upon them with their new PC.
Unfortunately this is just about impossible since those people who decide to put on a different OS rarely advertise the fact that they have done so. Even if the person who changes their OS does advertise, how useful is this since many people will go for a dual boot and it would be very difficult to determine how often the person spends in one bootable partition over another.
From a desktop perspective most people stick with the OS they get and rarely if ever upgrade much less put on an alternative OS until they get a new machine which also has an installed OS. It is different in the Intel/AMD server market where the purchaser can nominate what OS they want.
If you have MS Vista I am not aware of any legitimate XP "downgrade" that is free unless you work for a company that insists you use XP (I actually do work for a company that does) however this only applies to a company PC not to a privately owned PC.
When I got a new laptop six months ago it came with 64bit MS Vista Ultimate I found that while the OS ran fine (Dual Core, 2GB memory) the laptop came with nothing except "shovel ware" and even though the company I work for would let me legitimately install all MS applications for free I chose to backup the MS Vista OS and then totally install Fedora 7 (I now have Fedora 8) on it. My reasons for doing this is because I work on Unix and Linux machines and Fedora to me is much more fun than using MS Vista. I don't even dual boot since as far as I am concerned people who do this always back-slide to MS Windows (yes I am aware of gamers' needs). If you have a work PC then you may not be able to even have a dual boot but since my laptop is my own I can do whatever I want with it.
I suppose anything that uses DRM protection can be considered greed because this uses some form of stealth to stop so called unauthorised use.
Actually I think you really need to define what a root-kit is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit (I particularly like the part about "non-hostile rootkits") and in the case of the Sony-BMG root-kit it all boiled down to DRM and greed if you like which actually installed hidden files which were difficult to find by "normal" means. Ok this was not a good thing but when you really think about it should we not point the finger at the Operating System for allowing a so-called normal user to install files in a system area and the so-called virus protection for not picking it up.
What is even worse quite a lot of software many not create hidden files (some do) but actually create entries in the "registry" and even if the software has a removal tool (ie. Uninstall) some registry entries are not removed. Of course we know these entries are there for the users own good (cough!). The best way of checking this is to download a demo program of some commercial software and test it for the trial period until the license expires. Now remove the demo program and try to re-install it. Depending on the program you may not be able to do this since in some cases hidden files or registry entries are used to protect against re-installation. The definition of rootkit starts to get very murky when considering this, although I suppose if you really read the Eula it would have mentioned this.
Why would you want to run old Linux applications? Surly you run "yum", "apt-get" or whatever your updating tool is that is available for your distribution or purchase an upgrade for any commercial applications. Of course if you have an old Linux application that is not supported anymore then if you have the source you can recompile the source and any bugs, features or optimisation can either be fixed or added by yourself or whoever you can get (normally pay) to do the job. If I could not get an update to an old product and the source was not available I would look for something to replace it.
I do agree that MS Windows does have the ability to run old applications but again why don't you upgrade these old applications since there will be plenty (well maybe) bug fixes with newer releases. Why many people don't do this they don't want to pay for a newer release since they perceive the old release is good enough if they have to pay for the newer product. Actually all commercial products do let you upgrade for a price and this applies to all Operating Systems.
As an aside I run Fedora 8 on my laptop (no dual boot to MS Windows) and to go from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 with an upgrade takes about an hour. Normally I don't do upgrades preferring a pristine install (personally I have found that there are less issues doing this) so it takes me approx 45 minutes to backup my data (30GB), an hour to do the fresh install and approx 50 minutes to recover my data and approx one hour to customize to what I want which normally means installing the latest release applications I use or may use. Actually Fedora 8 is the first Fedora release that wireless just worked for me. Sound works fine as well.
What seems to be stupid here is the fact you have to own the PC you are going to run Vista or XP on. Unless you have a PC that you have built yourself you will most likely have Vista or XP on it already since most people pay the Microsoft Tax. Of course if you have a pirated copy I would be surprised if you would volunteer for this Microsoft participation offer.
As for putting Vista on your machine you would want to be confident that you PC could even run Vista. Even if you had a PC that ran Vista Home you would want to be sure that it would even run Vista Ultimate and even if you had Vista Ultimate why would you even want to participate? The same holds true for XP.
For those brave souls that want to take up this latest Microsoft offer you want to be sure that anything you did on your monitored PC does not involve "borrowed" software and did not infringe DRM or copyright otherwise you may find yourself before a judge. Lets be honest how many home users have never "ripped" a CD or watched a downloaded movie or TV file or installed a game or application that was generously borrowed from a "friend"? If you can honestly answer "No!" then the Microsoft offer is for you.
Personally any controller be it keyboard, mouse or even console controller has a certain amount of user preference. I remember the NES and hated that rectangular controller although side sheaves fixed the problem of my hand cramping. At one stage I even used a joystick on the NES, IMHO that was a disaster, although for some it may have been fine.
With regard to the Wii controller there have been PC controllers that used accelerometers years before the Wii mote however few games if any were written for it. The DS uses a touch screen but then so does a PDA and there are plenty of games for them. Is the Wii or the DS innovative, IMHO not really but that is up to the likes and dislikes of the player. From my perspective it is rare to see a truly innovative game (well worth looking at this site) http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1368-Zero-Punctuation-Psychonauts since most games today appear to be a rehash of previous games, still from the gaming house perspective if that is what makes money then why not.
The holy grail of downloads. It will eventually happen but only when network bandwidth and speed increase accordingly and this looks to be many years in the future. Personally I would rather prefer a DVD for Standard Definition movies and BD or HD-DVD for High Definition movies since I don't have to rely on the media being on a computer which is capable of crashing and when you consider a HD movie is approx 15GB to 20GB you really need a home server with multi Terra Byte capacity. If you have one then fine but do you back it up and how long does it take and what is your disaster recovery plan? At least with physical media in the event of a disaster (ie. fire, theft, flood, acts of God.... etc) you can get your collection replaced without to much trouble. Can you say the same with downloaded media? Even if you don't have to pay again which is debatable you are still going to consume enormous amounts of bandwidth and time just rebuilding your "legitimately" paid for collection since your insurance won't pay for pirated games or movies.
It must be noted that some ISP's do offer unlimited downloads but you are going to pay for it. Many ISP's offer restrictive downloads such are 5GB to 50GB (ie. 1 to 3 HD movies) per month but that depends on the country and city or town you live in and the amount of network bandwidth that can used. I do know that Microsoft is diplomatically trying to shame some governments into forcing Telco's into providing greater network infrastructure. This means that Microsoft has a great deal to gain by keeping the HD-DVD vs BD war going. Don't believe me then just use Google (Microsoft government broadband), you will find that Microsoft has not made any secret of what they want to do.
If after all that I have said you still prefer HD downloads since you will most likely end up paying Microsoft and Sony for the privilege that is your prerogative but other people do think differently.
Personally I liked zelda2 although I do know it got "panned" by many. I was actually disappointed in zelda3 on the SNES although IMHO it was still an enjoyable and fun game even though it was very much like zelda1 with better graphics. Zelda on the N64 IMHO was very nice graphically and in game play although in many ways it was still zelda1 again but with 3D graphics which I could definitely forgive. Wind Waker on the Gamecube was different but you can still see zelda1 which was fine and IMHO still made the game enjoyable to play but those long boat rides could get boring, fortunately you could warp which sort of reminds me of zelda1 again.
Still if the formula works and it rakes in lots of money (that is what a gaming company wants) then why change it and the same can be said for the Super Mario and Metroid (loved the first Gamecube one) Franchise as well.
The patent lists other patents some going back to 1980 (take particular note to US 4,304,968 (1981) and even some of those patents point to the even earlier patents such as US 3,728,486 (1973). Some could argue that the patent US 5572576 is an innovation (debatable) over previous patents but where do you draw the line of "patents built on a patent which in turn is built on a patent.... etc".
Even the Liquid Crystal Display which from the patent is a"means for displaying caller identities associated with said stored voice messages" had it's origins in the early 1970's. As for touch screens which the iPhone uses they actually go back to the 1970's as well. You do have to perform some integration which any competent engineer should be able to do (ie. obviousness) but is that worthy of a patent? Apparently the US patent office thinks that is the case.
Cheapest Wii: $565 (it's sold out, and that's the cheapest offer Amazon.com found!)
Cheapest Wii if they were in stock: $250
Come to sunny Australia and you will find plenty of Wii's in stock since they are going for AU$399 (US$351) so they are not exactly flying off the shelf and if you look around you may find a second hand Wii that is approx AU$50 cheaper. Prices also includes all taxes however the flight costs and accommodation would probably be more than the purchase of a PS3, Xbox360 some games as well as a nice HDTV. Still you would get your Wii, unfortunately it would be a setup for PAL not NTSC.:-)
Even if Microsoft or Nintendo got a bad rating the truth is all manufacturers of any product have to conform to the so called "Green" guidelines of the country they do business in otherwise they cannot sell their products. I have not seen or heard of Microsoft or Nintendo products prevented from being sold or even recalled so I think all you can do is take the Greenpeace report with a grain of salt.
It is nice if a company tries to be green without being "forced" into it but it is much cheaper and in also good business sense to just meet what is mandated by the laws (maybe a little better for PR purposes) of the country you do business in.
Actually with regard to the original Xbox Microsoft had an issue with cost of the Nvidia graphics module in that Nvidia would not drop their prices http://www.geek.com/microsoft-and-nvidia-end-xbox-dispute/ which contributed to the overall losses on the Xbox. This dispute actually forced Microsoft to bring the Xbox360 out earlier than they originally wanted.
I would not say Sony was greedy in keeping the PS2 alive since the sale of each PS3 is a loss (not sure exactly how much though) it makes perfect business sense to offset these losses against the PS2 and at the same time you provide the Gaming market with a cheaper machine than any of the other consoles. While this may not make much sense to some affluent people it is an excellent buy for poorer people who can't even afford a Wii, much less buy games for it. What makes the PS2 such an excellent buy is that good games are still being made for it (OK there are some stinkers as well) that can satisfy just about all gaming needs at a budget price. This is great for people on a limited budget world wide and is also nice for more affluent gamers in that they can save money as well.
As for the poor take-up of the PS3 you should should look at http://vgchartz.com/ and plot the PS3 against the Xbox360 (align the launches) and there is little difference. The Wii is the only console that has literally broken all records for console sales, but how long this will go on remains to be seen.
Actually the only current generation console that you can (sort of) modify is the PS3 since you can use it as a media server and can put Linux on it if you want to run emulators. I do have a Backwards Compatible PS3 (it is annoying to make this distinction now) and my only native PS3 game is Oblivion which is IMHO a great game but I also have plenty of PS2 games (I even buy new ones) that tide me over till the PS3 has more games I like. Sounds weird but a smoothed and unscaled "good" PS2 game on a HDTV really adds to the game play and you can save quite a lot of money doing this, I know I have.
There is no problem buying a Wii in Sydney Australia. In fact you can even get second hand ones in stores like EB's and Game although recently I have not seen that many second hand ones since it is getting close to Christmas.
What's wrong with Nethack? Anyway my vt100 has orange pixels so it's in colour. Windows! hah! 80 columns per 24 rows is good enough for everyone, now were did I put my 8" floppy disks, I need to do a backup.;-)
I have the PS2 version of Psychonauts and it is a very unusual game. It IMHO is funny, has great graphics, challenging without being frustrating to play just to name a few traits so I can see why it got a large cult following. Unfortunately the game sort of slipped passed most people even though it got very good reviews.
The only problem I can see in downloading a game is "do you really own this game"? It is an interesting question to answer and equally applies to the PS3 the Wii and Xbox360 because I would be very surprised if you can back it up, so a hard disk failure (memory card in the case of the Wii) may mean the loss of games you have paid for. The loss of free demos is acceptable since you can download them again although this can be an annoyance. Personally when I buy something I consider I actually own it and in the case of console disks I am at liberty to trade or sell the product as long as I don't make copies and sell them. You cannot do this with software you pay for download although to be fair you do get it cheaper than if you brought the product on a disk.
Actually if you live in the US, Korea or Japan you can get the 80GB PS3 which has BC but only 85% to 95% of PS2 games work since BC is done in software although the PS2 graphics engine is still on board. If you are from Europe, Australia, New Zealand or the UK then the 60GB (BC done in software) is the way to go if you can find one. I personally find BC is the way to go on a PS3 since a smoothed and upscaled PS2 games looks great and improves the replayability of the game although to be fair a bad game still sucks.
If people want BC they also have to realise that PS1 and PS2 games are region locked and a US PS1/2 game will not play on a UK PS3 and vice versa. PS3 games on the other hand will play on all PS3's since they are not region locked. Movies on the other hand are split into three regions but it is up to the movie company to implement region locking.
On a side note with regard to movies. I am currently in the Phillipines and here the VCD (yes I did say VCD) is king. DVD is a poor second and with the exception of PS3 games I cannot find BD or HD-DVD movies. Please note the prices I am quoting are from legitimate department stores. Spiderman 3 and Transformers the movie not the cartoon series is approx US$4.50 on VCD and the DVD release is approx US$8.00. From this you can see why movie studios like region locking.
With regard to DivX this is great proposal although it is not implemented yet. One thing I don't think anyone has thought of yet is the proposal by Sony to add PVR capability to the PS3 and by adding support for different codex's may make the PS3 into one great home entertainment system. The biggest problem is going to be deciding if you wish to watch a BD movie, a smoothed and upscaled DVD or a (name your codex) movie or use it as a PVR or a (dare I say it) a games machine:-)
I use Fedora 7 (soon to be Fedora 8) on my laptop (no dual boot) and I normally use/boot with an ext3 file-system then the rest of the disk assigned to LVM (basically two partitions) and this is where I assign my LVM volumes for swap,/,/usr,/var,/tmp and/home (data and users home directories). I always leave some spare LVM space so I can add extra space were needed. I can even delete if necessary. You can use a GUI or command line to do this. I always set my ext3 file-systems to "noatime" (see/etc/fstab) which improves overall disk performance.
For many this looks complex and to some extent it is but Fedora is not for the novice, however it works well for me since I basically image my disk (160GB) after every kernel update (approx 3 weeks - this is Fedora after all) although you can easily get away with one image every 2 to 3 months. My hard disk contains approx 35GB of data and it takes approx 40 minutes to image and about the same time to recover. I also run a background dump backup to my external hard drive which is formatted with ext3 and takes approx 1:00 hour to backup 35GB. I use this for emergency live recoveries and when I do upgrades.
As for using a fat32 file-system I prefer ext3 (I will try ext4 when I install Fedora 8) since it is a Journaling file-system and does recover quite well from abuse while fat32 does not. This is not to say don't use fat32 since nearly all OS's support it but it is "fragile" and you would never use it in a commercial environment except on USB memory devices.
I DARE you to take steel wool to a BD-ROM and play it flawlessly in a Blu-Ray player. Throw it across the room a few times like a frisbee, run it along your carpet, data-side down. Scratchless? No, clearly not. Scratch resistant? Yes, yes indeed. It needs it, because Blu-Ray's data surface is so close to the outer coating.
A quick Google search will find lots of examples. Actually the Blu-ray disk did exceptionally well although from my personal experience I had a BD disk with a lot of finger marks on it and it would not play properly. Solution clean the disk with liquid soap and water and pat dry, worked fine after that. I even inspected it for scratches and could not find any. Of course if you want to abuse a BD disk like you suggested it will eventually fail but then again so will any disk be it CD, DVD or even HD-DVD.
Re:Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak
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Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you RTFA the Government donation "was" prior to 1993 was approx 3 cents for every person in the US. After 1993 Government spending on SETI is "zero", so all monies donated to SETI is by private individuals. There are many ways of contributing, one would be to donate money, the other donate a portion of your PC clock cycles and therefore electricity which someone will have to pay for eventually. In some way this is like "Folding at Home" except there are more perceived tangible results to be had but you still have to make a decision to provide the service, however like SETI no one forces you. Basically it is your choice your money and the Government is not involved.
If you had to buy just ONE, which one would you want to buy?
Now if you had to buy 3 as gifts, which one would you want to buy
The Wii wins on both counts.
I fail to see your logic here. If a person wants a PS3, Xbox360 or a Wii then then they are going to buy on price and/or perceived entertainment value and people who buy these machines are not normally going to buy them as a present unless it is for the immediate family or themselves.
Most people looking to give a games machine as a Christmas present will find a cheap brand new (you would not give a second hand one, would you?) PS2 an excellent gift. If you are a person who is looking to buy more than one Wii as a Christmas present then you are going to pay one and half times what the new PS2 costs. In addition the games for the PS2 are relatively cheap and there is such a diversity of games that they cater for nearly all tastes, in addition the graphics are just as good as the Wii's graphics, especially if you don't have a HDTV. Actually my PS2 games as well as my Gamecube games still look good on my 37" HDTV since it smooths Standard Definition output.
I guess you have never talked to a PC gamer with a decent gaming rig, 200W is nothing and in many cases they keep their rig running 24x7. If you look at the F@H stats there are many more PC's than PS3's and many would consume more than 200W. Still the choice of running F@H is up to the individual, after all they or their parents are paying for it.
On a more interesting note. If you have a PS3 you would know that you get a F@H count every time you complete a work unit and each work unit is 8 hours so this is easy to prove and document. It would be interesting to know if it is possible for the tax department to view F@H usage as a tax write off. The best way of getting a tax break on F@H is to contact your local government representative. You may get laughed at but it may work since it could look good from a PR perspective and government reps love that. Any one game to do this? Please inform us cowards if you do and are successful;-)
Including the HD-DVD drive would also drive the cost of the 360 up, driving up the retail price, and turning off potential purchasers with the new, higher, price tag. They'd rather keep it separate, so the price of the HD-DVD drive doesn't overshadow these potential purchases. That's likely what was meant by limiting the user's experience. To someone who would be buying a 360 either way, it wouldn't limit something. But for someone who didn't have that extra $150 or whatever to spend, having no choice to not get HD-DVD limits their choices.
You are right about the increased cost but I can't believe Microsoft would be so stupid to make the new Xbox360HD to replace the original Xbox360 so if this was true it would be a optional all-in-one purchase most likely cheaper than an Xbox360 plus a HD-DVD player. In principle this sounds great for the potential Xbox360 purchaser since you don't need a HD-DVD add-on but you have to pay up-front for the privilege.
I think the main question to ask if something like this happens and it has been denied by both parties is "Will games come out on HD-DVD"? If so then I would assume there are going to be over 11 million pissed off Xbox360 owners since games on HD-DVD will discriminate against them because to play HD-DVD games will require an existing Xbox360 owner to purchase a HD-DVD add-on plus (if they don't have one) a hard disk because the read rate of the HD-DVD drive is not going to be as quick as the original DVD drive.
I run Fedora 7 on my primary machine and don't have any issue with it, but I would not recommend this distribution to a novice although since you run OpenSuSE (nice distribution by the way) I would be surprised if you are a novice.
If you wish to use Fedora the distribution goes on quite easy although like many Linux distributions you may have issues with your graphics drivers. Since I have a laptop with a Nvidia graphics card my installation using graphics was trouble free, however my wireless (PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) did not work however this is not really a problem for me since I can get my wireless working but every time I get a new kernel (approx every three weeks) it breaks.
I normally only have the generic repos plus "livna", "atrpms" and "freshrpms" which are only enabled when required. I know many people use "yum -y...." but I like to know what I am downloading so I always like to be prompted. Personally I have found "livna" is nearly your one stop repo for all things that would get any US repo sued and is great for when you get a new kernel since it automatically loads new nvidia drivers.
While Fedora 7 is great for me other people may find they have a lot of issues with it although there are plenty of really good "how-to" web pages available to make things easier.
On a side note I tried putting Ubuntu 7.04 on a partition on my work laptop (had ATI graphics card) and had quite a few problems. Since I did not have the time to play I installed PCLinuxOS and everything just worked although not optimally. All that was needed was to use the update facility to upgrade my ATI and wireless drives and everything I wanted worked.
In Australia the PS2 was AU$730 (approx US$600) and that was year 2000 prices. I actually got my 60GB PS3 for AU$499 including tax (approx US$407 arround May 2007) because one of the game places offered a special deal, since I was not going to purchase a PS3 at AU$999 including tax.
Around 2000 DVD players were more expensive than the PS2 and a DVD burner for a PC cost approx AU$1300 with single sided DVD's costing AU$15 (write once) to AU$30 RW. When the PS2 came out most gaming magazines stated that having a DVD player was stupid an added expensive and games will not need the capacity of the DVD since CD's were good enough (sounds familiar). Basically the PS2 gave the DVD market a jump start.
Granted that VHS to DVD was a huge leap but DVD players did not record while VHS recorder/players did (stating the obvious). Basically people only started to get rid of their VHS recorders when Hard Disk DVD player/burner became affordable from 2004. The HD-DVD Bluray wars have actually reduced the cost of players within the space of one year compared to years for DVD players.
Now all we need is HD Hard Disk recorders with Bluray and/or HD-DVD burners and they are due out in 2008 (at least Bluray ones are). I know you can get HD Hard Disk DVD recorders for a few 100 dollars that can take the output from the inbuilt HD tuner but you can only burn to DVD in Standard definition in addition the inputs are still composite or AV so you can only record in Standard Definition. DRM rears it's ugly head here.
As to comparing DVD (Standard definition) to High Definition HD-DVD and Bluray. If you don't have a HDTV then you can hardly pick the difference but if you have a HDTV (above 26") you definitely can see the difference in fact that difference becomes painfully obvious when you look at 1080p 47" and greater HDTV's even if you have an upscaling DVD player. like it or not HDTV is taking off and SDTV will eventually become obsolete although this will take a few years.
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It is only the 40GB PS3 that does not have PS2 backwards compatibility (IMHO a stupid decision). I have a 60GB PS3 (PAL edition) that has approx 85% to 85% backwards compatibility even so I can confidently go out and buy all new PS2 games knowing they will work on my PS3. In fact most of the games I currently play are PS2 games because my PS3 upscales and smooths them for display on my HDTV. For me my PS3 gives me a huge amount of flexibility in the games I play and saves me a considerable amount of money in the process.
While native games that I like for the PS3 have over the last 9 months (remember I have a PAL PS3) been a bit light-on although IMHO the same applies to the Wii and the Xbox360 I don't blames Sony for that since it is upto Game Developers to develop and publish games. In fact now there are games for the PS3 that I do like, however like all so called next gen consoles their price is fairly high (even similar Wii games are the same price or marginally cheaper) and since there are plenty of new PS2 games still coming out I don't mind if I wait for native PS3 games to drop.
To people that say that Developers should drop support for the PS2 I say why? If a Game Developer still makes money from developing PS2 games I think they have every right to do so. After all the PS2 is still the cheapest supported console available with a huge game library and from a Sony perspective this means that they have three viable gaming machines on the market with the PSP the PS2 and the PS3 compared to the Xbox360 for Microsoft and the DS and Wii for Nintendo.
Actually its is kind of strange to see "Nintendo" appear on the home-brew PSP screen but some of the retro Nintendo games are IMHO still great fun to play when you are on a long flight or even on the road. What is even nicer is the fact that the PSP lite can connect to your TV and if you want stereo system via component or composite video cables so you get the best of all worlds.
From a desktop perspective most people stick with the OS they get and rarely if ever upgrade much less put on an alternative OS until they get a new machine which also has an installed OS. It is different in the Intel/AMD server market where the purchaser can nominate what OS they want.
If you have MS Vista I am not aware of any legitimate XP "downgrade" that is free unless you work for a company that insists you use XP (I actually do work for a company that does) however this only applies to a company PC not to a privately owned PC.
When I got a new laptop six months ago it came with 64bit MS Vista Ultimate I found that while the OS ran fine (Dual Core, 2GB memory) the laptop came with nothing except "shovel ware" and even though the company I work for would let me legitimately install all MS applications for free I chose to backup the MS Vista OS and then totally install Fedora 7 (I now have Fedora 8) on it. My reasons for doing this is because I work on Unix and Linux machines and Fedora to me is much more fun than using MS Vista. I don't even dual boot since as far as I am concerned people who do this always back-slide to MS Windows (yes I am aware of gamers' needs). If you have a work PC then you may not be able to even have a dual boot but since my laptop is my own I can do whatever I want with it.
I suppose anything that uses DRM protection can be considered greed because this uses some form of stealth to stop so called unauthorised use.
Actually I think you really need to define what a root-kit is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit (I particularly like the part about "non-hostile rootkits") and in the case of the Sony-BMG root-kit it all boiled down to DRM and greed if you like which actually installed hidden files which were difficult to find by "normal" means. Ok this was not a good thing but when you really think about it should we not point the finger at the Operating System for allowing a so-called normal user to install files in a system area and the so-called virus protection for not picking it up.
What is even worse quite a lot of software many not create hidden files (some do) but actually create entries in the "registry" and even if the software has a removal tool (ie. Uninstall) some registry entries are not removed. Of course we know these entries are there for the users own good (cough!). The best way of checking this is to download a demo program of some commercial software and test it for the trial period until the license expires. Now remove the demo program and try to re-install it. Depending on the program you may not be able to do this since in some cases hidden files or registry entries are used to protect against re-installation. The definition of rootkit starts to get very murky when considering this, although I suppose if you really read the Eula it would have mentioned this.
Why would you want to run old Linux applications? Surly you run "yum", "apt-get" or whatever your updating tool is that is available for your distribution or purchase an upgrade for any commercial applications. Of course if you have an old Linux application that is not supported anymore then if you have the source you can recompile the source and any bugs, features or optimisation can either be fixed or added by yourself or whoever you can get (normally pay) to do the job. If I could not get an update to an old product and the source was not available I would look for something to replace it.
I do agree that MS Windows does have the ability to run old applications but again why don't you upgrade these old applications since there will be plenty (well maybe) bug fixes with newer releases. Why many people don't do this they don't want to pay for a newer release since they perceive the old release is good enough if they have to pay for the newer product. Actually all commercial products do let you upgrade for a price and this applies to all Operating Systems.
As an aside I run Fedora 8 on my laptop (no dual boot to MS Windows) and to go from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 with an upgrade takes about an hour. Normally I don't do upgrades preferring a pristine install (personally I have found that there are less issues doing this) so it takes me approx 45 minutes to backup my data (30GB), an hour to do the fresh install and approx 50 minutes to recover my data and approx one hour to customize to what I want which normally means installing the latest release applications I use or may use. Actually Fedora 8 is the first Fedora release that wireless just worked for me. Sound works fine as well.
What seems to be stupid here is the fact you have to own the PC you are going to run Vista or XP on. Unless you have a PC that you have built yourself you will most likely have Vista or XP on it already since most people pay the Microsoft Tax. Of course if you have a pirated copy I would be surprised if you would volunteer for this Microsoft participation offer.
As for putting Vista on your machine you would want to be confident that you PC could even run Vista. Even if you had a PC that ran Vista Home you would want to be sure that it would even run Vista Ultimate and even if you had Vista Ultimate why would you even want to participate? The same holds true for XP.
For those brave souls that want to take up this latest Microsoft offer you want to be sure that anything you did on your monitored PC does not involve "borrowed" software and did not infringe DRM or copyright otherwise you may find yourself before a judge. Lets be honest how many home users have never "ripped" a CD or watched a downloaded movie or TV file or installed a game or application that was generously borrowed from a "friend"? If you can honestly answer "No!" then the Microsoft offer is for you.
Personally any controller be it keyboard, mouse or even console controller has a certain amount of user preference. I remember the NES and hated that rectangular controller although side sheaves fixed the problem of my hand cramping. At one stage I even used a joystick on the NES, IMHO that was a disaster, although for some it may have been fine.
.... etc) you can get your collection replaced without to much trouble. Can you say the same with downloaded media? Even if you don't have to pay again which is debatable you are still going to consume enormous amounts of bandwidth and time just rebuilding your "legitimately" paid for collection since your insurance won't pay for pirated games or movies.
With regard to the Wii controller there have been PC controllers that used accelerometers years before the Wii mote however few games if any were written for it. The DS uses a touch screen but then so does a PDA and there are plenty of games for them. Is the Wii or the DS innovative, IMHO not really but that is up to the likes and dislikes of the player. From my perspective it is rare to see a truly innovative game (well worth looking at this site) http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/1368-Zero-Punctuation-Psychonauts since most games today appear to be a rehash of previous games, still from the gaming house perspective if that is what makes money then why not.
The holy grail of downloads. It will eventually happen but only when network bandwidth and speed increase accordingly and this looks to be many years in the future. Personally I would rather prefer a DVD for Standard Definition movies and BD or HD-DVD for High Definition movies since I don't have to rely on the media being on a computer which is capable of crashing and when you consider a HD movie is approx 15GB to 20GB you really need a home server with multi Terra Byte capacity. If you have one then fine but do you back it up and how long does it take and what is your disaster recovery plan? At least with physical media in the event of a disaster (ie. fire, theft, flood, acts of God
It must be noted that some ISP's do offer unlimited downloads but you are going to pay for it. Many ISP's offer restrictive downloads such are 5GB to 50GB (ie. 1 to 3 HD movies) per month but that depends on the country and city or town you live in and the amount of network bandwidth that can used. I do know that Microsoft is diplomatically trying to shame some governments into forcing Telco's into providing greater network infrastructure. This means that Microsoft has a great deal to gain by keeping the HD-DVD vs BD war going. Don't believe me then just use Google (Microsoft government broadband), you will find that Microsoft has not made any secret of what they want to do.
If after all that I have said you still prefer HD downloads since you will most likely end up paying Microsoft and Sony for the privilege that is your prerogative but other people do think differently.
Personally I liked zelda2 although I do know it got "panned" by many. I was actually disappointed in zelda3 on the SNES although IMHO it was still an enjoyable and fun game even though it was very much like zelda1 with better graphics. Zelda on the N64 IMHO was very nice graphically and in game play although in many ways it was still zelda1 again but with 3D graphics which I could definitely forgive. Wind Waker on the Gamecube was different but you can still see zelda1 which was fine and IMHO still made the game enjoyable to play but those long boat rides could get boring, fortunately you could warp which sort of reminds me of zelda1 again.
Still if the formula works and it rakes in lots of money (that is what a gaming company wants) then why change it and the same can be said for the Super Mario and Metroid (loved the first Gamecube one) Franchise as well.
The patent lists other patents some going back to 1980 (take particular note to US 4,304,968 (1981) and even some of those patents point to the even earlier patents such as US 3,728,486 (1973). Some could argue that the patent US 5572576 is an innovation (debatable) over previous patents but where do you draw the line of "patents built on a patent which in turn is built on a patent .... etc".
Even the Liquid Crystal Display which from the patent is a"means for displaying caller identities associated with said stored voice messages" had it's origins in the early 1970's. As for touch screens which the iPhone uses they actually go back to the 1970's as well. You do have to perform some integration which any competent engineer should be able to do (ie. obviousness) but is that worthy of a patent? Apparently the US patent office thinks that is the case.
Even if Microsoft or Nintendo got a bad rating the truth is all manufacturers of any product have to conform to the so called "Green" guidelines of the country they do business in otherwise they cannot sell their products. I have not seen or heard of Microsoft or Nintendo products prevented from being sold or even recalled so I think all you can do is take the Greenpeace report with a grain of salt.
It is nice if a company tries to be green without being "forced" into it but it is much cheaper and in also good business sense to just meet what is mandated by the laws (maybe a little better for PR purposes) of the country you do business in.
Actually with regard to the original Xbox Microsoft had an issue with cost of the Nvidia graphics module in that Nvidia would not drop their prices http://www.geek.com/microsoft-and-nvidia-end-xbox-dispute/ which contributed to the overall losses on the Xbox. This dispute actually forced Microsoft to bring the Xbox360 out earlier than they originally wanted.
I would not say Sony was greedy in keeping the PS2 alive since the sale of each PS3 is a loss (not sure exactly how much though) it makes perfect business sense to offset these losses against the PS2 and at the same time you provide the Gaming market with a cheaper machine than any of the other consoles. While this may not make much sense to some affluent people it is an excellent buy for poorer people who can't even afford a Wii, much less buy games for it. What makes the PS2 such an excellent buy is that good games are still being made for it (OK there are some stinkers as well) that can satisfy just about all gaming needs at a budget price. This is great for people on a limited budget world wide and is also nice for more affluent gamers in that they can save money as well.
As for the poor take-up of the PS3 you should should look at http://vgchartz.com/ and plot the PS3 against the Xbox360 (align the launches) and there is little difference. The Wii is the only console that has literally broken all records for console sales, but how long this will go on remains to be seen.
Actually the only current generation console that you can (sort of) modify is the PS3 since you can use it as a media server and can put Linux on it if you want to run emulators. I do have a Backwards Compatible PS3 (it is annoying to make this distinction now) and my only native PS3 game is Oblivion which is IMHO a great game but I also have plenty of PS2 games (I even buy new ones) that tide me over till the PS3 has more games I like. Sounds weird but a smoothed and unscaled "good" PS2 game on a HDTV really adds to the game play and you can save quite a lot of money doing this, I know I have.
There is no problem buying a Wii in Sydney Australia. In fact you can even get second hand ones in stores like EB's and Game although recently I have not seen that many second hand ones since it is getting close to Christmas.
Thanks for the reply. The reason I asked in the first place was my son was thinking of getting a second hand Xbox360 and it pays to be informed.
What's wrong with Nethack? Anyway my vt100 has orange pixels so it's in colour. Windows! hah! 80 columns per 24 rows is good enough for everyone, now were did I put my 8" floppy disks, I need to do a backup. ;-)
I have the PS2 version of Psychonauts and it is a very unusual game. It IMHO is funny, has great graphics, challenging without being frustrating to play just to name a few traits so I can see why it got a large cult following. Unfortunately the game sort of slipped passed most people even though it got very good reviews.
The only problem I can see in downloading a game is "do you really own this game"? It is an interesting question to answer and equally applies to the PS3 the Wii and Xbox360 because I would be very surprised if you can back it up, so a hard disk failure (memory card in the case of the Wii) may mean the loss of games you have paid for. The loss of free demos is acceptable since you can download them again although this can be an annoyance. Personally when I buy something I consider I actually own it and in the case of console disks I am at liberty to trade or sell the product as long as I don't make copies and sell them. You cannot do this with software you pay for download although to be fair you do get it cheaper than if you brought the product on a disk.
Actually if you live in the US, Korea or Japan you can get the 80GB PS3 which has BC but only 85% to 95% of PS2 games work since BC is done in software although the PS2 graphics engine is still on board. If you are from Europe, Australia, New Zealand or the UK then the 60GB (BC done in software) is the way to go if you can find one. I personally find BC is the way to go on a PS3 since a smoothed and upscaled PS2 games looks great and improves the replayability of the game although to be fair a bad game still sucks.
:-)
If people want BC they also have to realise that PS1 and PS2 games are region locked and a US PS1/2 game will not play on a UK PS3 and vice versa. PS3 games on the other hand will play on all PS3's since they are not region locked. Movies on the other hand are split into three regions but it is up to the movie company to implement region locking.
On a side note with regard to movies. I am currently in the Phillipines and here the VCD (yes I did say VCD) is king. DVD is a poor second and with the exception of PS3 games I cannot find BD or HD-DVD movies. Please note the prices I am quoting are from legitimate department stores. Spiderman 3 and Transformers the movie not the cartoon series is approx US$4.50 on VCD and the DVD release is approx US$8.00. From this you can see why movie studios like region locking.
With regard to DivX this is great proposal although it is not implemented yet. One thing I don't think anyone has thought of yet is the proposal by Sony to add PVR capability to the PS3 and by adding support for different codex's may make the PS3 into one great home entertainment system. The biggest problem is going to be deciding if you wish to watch a BD movie, a smoothed and upscaled DVD or a (name your codex) movie or use it as a PVR or a (dare I say it) a games machine
I use Fedora 7 (soon to be Fedora 8) on my laptop (no dual boot) and I normally use /boot with an ext3 file-system then the rest of the disk assigned to LVM (basically two partitions) and this is where I assign my LVM volumes for swap, /, /usr, /var, /tmp and /home (data and users home directories). I always leave some spare LVM space so I can add extra space were needed. I can even delete if necessary. You can use a GUI or command line to do this. I always set my ext3 file-systems to "noatime" (see /etc/fstab) which improves overall disk performance.
For many this looks complex and to some extent it is but Fedora is not for the novice, however it works well for me since I basically image my disk (160GB) after every kernel update (approx 3 weeks - this is Fedora after all) although you can easily get away with one image every 2 to 3 months. My hard disk contains approx 35GB of data and it takes approx 40 minutes to image and about the same time to recover. I also run a background dump backup to my external hard drive which is formatted with ext3 and takes approx 1:00 hour to backup 35GB. I use this for emergency live recoveries and when I do upgrades.
As for using a fat32 file-system I prefer ext3 (I will try ext4 when I install Fedora 8) since it is a Journaling file-system and does recover quite well from abuse while fat32 does not. This is not to say don't use fat32 since nearly all OS's support it but it is "fragile" and you would never use it in a commercial environment except on USB memory devices.
http://www.gizmowatch.com/entry/durabis-2-coating-helps-blu-ray-survive-steel-wool-use-abuse/ and http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/sadistic-ps3-owner-creates-homemade-blu+ray-torture-test-231420.php
A quick Google search will find lots of examples. Actually the Blu-ray disk did exceptionally well although from my personal experience I had a BD disk with a lot of finger marks on it and it would not play properly. Solution clean the disk with liquid soap and water and pat dry, worked fine after that. I even inspected it for scratches and could not find any. Of course if you want to abuse a BD disk like you suggested it will eventually fail but then again so will any disk be it CD, DVD or even HD-DVD.
If you RTFA the Government donation "was" prior to 1993 was approx 3 cents for every person in the US. After 1993 Government spending on SETI is "zero", so all monies donated to SETI is by private individuals. There are many ways of contributing, one would be to donate money, the other donate a portion of your PC clock cycles and therefore electricity which someone will have to pay for eventually. In some way this is like "Folding at Home" except there are more perceived tangible results to be had but you still have to make a decision to provide the service, however like SETI no one forces you. Basically it is your choice your money and the Government is not involved.
Most people looking to give a games machine as a Christmas present will find a cheap brand new (you would not give a second hand one, would you?) PS2 an excellent gift. If you are a person who is looking to buy more than one Wii as a Christmas present then you are going to pay one and half times what the new PS2 costs. In addition the games for the PS2 are relatively cheap and there is such a diversity of games that they cater for nearly all tastes, in addition the graphics are just as good as the Wii's graphics, especially if you don't have a HDTV. Actually my PS2 games as well as my Gamecube games still look good on my 37" HDTV since it smooths Standard Definition output.
I guess you have never talked to a PC gamer with a decent gaming rig, 200W is nothing and in many cases they keep their rig running 24x7. If you look at the F@H stats there are many more PC's than PS3's and many would consume more than 200W. Still the choice of running F@H is up to the individual, after all they or their parents are paying for it.
;-)
On a more interesting note. If you have a PS3 you would know that you get a F@H count every time you complete a work unit and each work unit is 8 hours so this is easy to prove and document. It would be interesting to know if it is possible for the tax department to view F@H usage as a tax write off. The best way of getting a tax break on F@H is to contact your local government representative. You may get laughed at but it may work since it could look good from a PR perspective and government reps love that. Any one game to do this? Please inform us cowards if you do and are successful
I think the main question to ask if something like this happens and it has been denied by both parties is "Will games come out on HD-DVD"? If so then I would assume there are going to be over 11 million pissed off Xbox360 owners since games on HD-DVD will discriminate against them because to play HD-DVD games will require an existing Xbox360 owner to purchase a HD-DVD add-on plus (if they don't have one) a hard disk because the read rate of the HD-DVD drive is not going to be as quick as the original DVD drive.
For people interested here is a side by side table comparing Bluray, HD-DVD and DVD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Blu-ray_Disc_.2F_HD_DVD_comparison and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_DVD#HD_DVD_.2F_Blu-ray_disc_comparison. The comparison tables are identical but I don't want to be accused of favoritism. I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions although in all cases DVD sucks (see video resolution, audio codex, max bit-rates and capacity) in comparison to both HD-DVD and Bluray, still if you have not got a HDTV (at least 26" and up) then DVD is fine.
I run Fedora 7 on my primary machine and don't have any issue with it, but I would not recommend this distribution to a novice although since you run OpenSuSE (nice distribution by the way) I would be surprised if you are a novice.
...." but I like to know what I am downloading so I always like to be prompted. Personally I have found "livna" is nearly your one stop repo for all things that would get any US repo sued and is great for when you get a new kernel since it automatically loads new nvidia drivers.
If you wish to use Fedora the distribution goes on quite easy although like many Linux distributions you may have issues with your graphics drivers. Since I have a laptop with a Nvidia graphics card my installation using graphics was trouble free, however my wireless (PRO/Wireless 3945ABG) did not work however this is not really a problem for me since I can get my wireless working but every time I get a new kernel (approx every three weeks) it breaks.
I normally only have the generic repos plus "livna", "atrpms" and "freshrpms" which are only enabled when required. I know many people use "yum -y
While Fedora 7 is great for me other people may find they have a lot of issues with it although there are plenty of really good "how-to" web pages available to make things easier.
On a side note I tried putting Ubuntu 7.04 on a partition on my work laptop (had ATI graphics card) and had quite a few problems. Since I did not have the time to play I installed PCLinuxOS and everything just worked although not optimally. All that was needed was to use the update facility to upgrade my ATI and wireless drives and everything I wanted worked.
In Australia the PS2 was AU$730 (approx US$600) and that was year 2000 prices. I actually got my 60GB PS3 for AU$499 including tax (approx US$407 arround May 2007) because one of the game places offered a special deal, since I was not going to purchase a PS3 at AU$999 including tax.
Around 2000 DVD players were more expensive than the PS2 and a DVD burner for a PC cost approx AU$1300 with single sided DVD's costing AU$15 (write once) to AU$30 RW. When the PS2 came out most gaming magazines stated that having a DVD player was stupid an added expensive and games will not need the capacity of the DVD since CD's were good enough (sounds familiar). Basically the PS2 gave the DVD market a jump start.
Granted that VHS to DVD was a huge leap but DVD players did not record while VHS recorder/players did (stating the obvious). Basically people only started to get rid of their VHS recorders when Hard Disk DVD player/burner became affordable from 2004. The HD-DVD Bluray wars have actually reduced the cost of players within the space of one year compared to years for DVD players.
Now all we need is HD Hard Disk recorders with Bluray and/or HD-DVD burners and they are due out in 2008 (at least Bluray ones are). I know you can get HD Hard Disk DVD recorders for a few 100 dollars that can take the output from the inbuilt HD tuner but you can only burn to DVD in Standard definition in addition the inputs are still composite or AV so you can only record in Standard Definition. DRM rears it's ugly head here.
As to comparing DVD (Standard definition) to High Definition HD-DVD and Bluray. If you don't have a HDTV then you can hardly pick the difference but if you have a HDTV (above 26") you definitely can see the difference in fact that difference becomes painfully obvious when you look at 1080p 47" and greater HDTV's even if you have an upscaling DVD player. like it or not HDTV is taking off and SDTV will eventually become obsolete although this will take a few years.