Exactly, if sony had ANY brains at all they would make it 100% PSX compatible and provide some sort of dual thumbstick or equivalent button controls. Even easier with PSP re: control layout, but needs better hardware I'm guessing + more work has been done re: emulating PSX as opposed to PSP. Still being the manufacturer there is no reason why they can't create some sort of shrunken clone for the original PSX for 100% compatibility. Surely the tech is there.
From what I've seen on my now pitiful Nexus 1 the gpu is well above that of PSX and yes there are emulators, I think the latest droids can run a lot of PSX games emulated no worries.
Instant massive game library for relatively low cost. Heck make is super attractive by bundling games or say DL coupons good for 6 titles or whatever. I know I'd rather take the entire PSX/PSP back library over the current iOS offerings
no we don't use it to refer to end user PCs. We use it to refer to the MS server stack and OS, and the guys who work in that environment.
e.g. 'people can't connect to exchange - call the wintel techs'. Seen it everywhere - conversations, ticket system queues and reports, department names (e.g. Servers, Wintel vs Servers, unix), resumes (listing skillsets etc.)
guess maybe its just still prevalent in Oz but not where you are.
er you've not worked in enterprise IT have you, or maybe its just something us strange Aussies say. MS server techs are universally referred to as 'wintel' (as distinct from unix, mainframes etc.)
the only people who would need that feature is some kind of thin client / citrix type scenario. Even many conventional server functions (e.g. LAMP stacks etc.) don't need it. And those people wouldn't be using ubuntu anyway (in fact its probably citrix or vmware,. I realise a lot of that stuff has linux backends but once again they're not likely to be using ubuntu)
considering ubuntu is aiming this at 'normal' end users I cannot see why everyone has their panties in a knot. If you don't like it use debian or whatever
I don't know if doing online banking or even email is considered mission critical, but you do realise that they can nick your passwords. If your email is compromised then most of your other logins can be finessed. of course the real killer is paypal or online banking. I know people who have lost thousands due to keyloggers getting ahold of their online banking passwords.
Because for whatever reason the publishers / devs decide not to code them/port them?
Probably due to fact that very few people have PCs under their lounge TV?
Personally I run a media centre with a 100 dollar video card and a 3 year old C2Duo proc, guess what, street fighter 4, Dirt 2 etc. all run maxed out w/ 4xAA at 720p and play just fine with xbox wireless controllers for windows. Beats the heck out of getting an xbox as well. Only drawback is as you said considerably smaller game selection and no xbox live (but OTOH I have steam).
Sorry you are wrong re: hardware. The hardware is still advancing but for a variety of reasons there is less incentive to utilise it given that revenues are fantastic using the old stuff. Of course over time this will lead to less impetus to drive hardware but for now hardware is still plowing ahead, thank god.
The proof in the pudding is how a 100 dollar mainstream PC video card can pretty much max out any console port (i.e. most PC titles) on 720p or even 1080p. Five years ago your 100 dollar card would struggle to run the latest AAA title at medium-low detail, now is no longer the case.
from the comments, most engadget readers (and I'm one but I digress) are pro-sumers at best and often sound like high schoolers fighting over whose gadget is coolest. You don't seem to get any actual techs or engineers (at least those of us there are smart enough to keep our mouth shut since the SNR is so darned high) unlike here where you can (sometimes) get engaged in interesting discussions on the real technical specifics.
There are TONNES of 3rd party apps that allow you to use offline maps. I use copilot live on android, it cost me under 40 bucks AUD, works as advertised. I understand N900 still doens't have turn by turn (mistaken maybe?) so I can only compare to my old N5800 which did have turn by turn, but it ran like a dog compared to any 3rd party nav app on my droid
The other massive impediment is just learning the maps. Say you've never been on a map before and there is a T junction. Do you look left or right. Wrong choice BOOM HEADSHOT. I reckon it takes ~ an hour to learn a map and thats on a team that is NOT getting pwned, if your team is getting pwned/spawn killed etc. then you learn nothing.
Someone has to fix online multiplayer FPS and when they do it will be bigger than WoW. Not rewarding XP (i.e. time put into game) with better guns would be a good freakin start. Matchmaking based on XP is also so obvious I am facepalming that nobody has tried it yet.
As an OSX lover (who games so thats out for my main OS, ROTFL), admirer of Apple's ecosystem at the same time as I loathe their image, and a keen gambler I mean investor, the answer seems simple
Can facebook demonstrate it can monetize its user base. I haven't checked in a bit but they're not cashflow positive are they, and the valuation seems to be in dot-com boom territory. potential potential potential but pay up for the risk.
On that basis alone the long-term investor in me says HECK NO. I'd much rather they say bought up flash manufacturing or more hardware expertise as they have been doing.
the really evil investor in me says do a deal with google to integrate ads, if any design team can pull it off without urinating on the user experience its AAPL, they never wanted to rule the world, the low volume high margin space suits them fine even if the iphone rampant success is pushing them the other way.
yeah good points. Issue is that gaming graphics are now undeniably console driven, and consoles don't do DX11/tesselation yet, so that featureset I suspect will be a bit niche. For every stalker/crysis type of envelope pushing gfx-whore-heaven fps (which I do oh so love) there will be 4-5 multiplatform releases that don't even push a 5770 let alone higher.
I'm considering an upgrade from my 5850 purely from a noise POV, I have the HIS icoolerV variant (stock not OCed) and reviews say its quiet but under load it sounds like a 360 with spinning disk at max volume. Runs like a dream but dang the noise is actually annoying , its louder than my old 4850 crossfire!!!! and no I'm not returning it due to noise alone lol
Where I am the term sysadmin is almost never used (Australia). They're just server engineers, exchange admins, or whatnot. Funny how on/dot it seems to figure as a term of abuse. Seems to me there is a big difference between 'creating a virtual machine' and designing, speccing, configuring and implementing an ESX cluster, yet I've seen both functions performed by guys whom I would just call server engineers.
Of course as infrastructure guys (I'm a network engineer) we do yes very often see that kinda behaviour from the apps side of the fence. Also the converse is equally funny, where they start ludicrously over-speccing and blaming minor everyday inconveniences (OMG WAN latency is 40ms and the app is sensitive, guess what, that app is not suited for WAN deployment end of story its not a problem with the WAN itself LOLOLOL) because their app doesn't work properly. Though I must mitigate that angle as usually by 'app doesn't work properly' its usually 'outsourced team has zero idea how the app works'. Sometimes it does seem that to a DBA, where their datastore resides is kinda like where babies come from to a 3 year old, a magic stork brings the data to them and its no concern of theirs which server or DB they parked their data in.
I just realised I went stupid off topic so apologies
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
Off topic but that is hysterical. I have seen one mainframe migration project fail miserably from afar, and am now up close and personal with a company whose most valuable machines are their Tandems (ok not mainframes but close enough), apparently every couple of hours downtime is a million or something similar. This same company won't pay to upgrade the IP stack so we're stuck with X25, so as network techies we have to improvise this hilarious X25 over IP solution to get them WAN, backup and alarm monitoring capability. I'm now wondering whether your solution could get them over the line LOL
J Freakin Christ on a stick will you people stop putting up straw men.
All work no play makes jack a dull boy yada yada yada The grasshopper goes hungry in winter whilst the hardworking ant stays warm and fed yada yada yada
WOW I NEVER REALISED THAT TAKING AN EXTREME APPROACH TO WORK OR PLAY RESULTS IN CRAPPY OUTCOME
Get some common sense and stop acting like college kids arguing about whether X indie band has lost their indie cred
I don't think HD vs SD is the same as this 3D thing though. With the revolution in tech over the last 10 years, its now possible to shoot HD on an indie budget (like how home audio production has taken off and is good enough to make big expensive studios redundant for most). In fact most indie films seem to come out in HD these days (unlike say 10 years ago)
3D on the other hand still has these massive barriers to entry.
WTF does art have to do with HD res of SD res. That's a straw man if I ever saw one.
HD res of crap film = still crap film. HD res of good film = better than SD res of good film.
So there are old films that will never be in HD, and many new HD releases are intrinsically bad films. Are you so blinkered to think that 'the world of today' will never produce new movies as good or better as the old classics?
Whats to stop Sony from issuing a mandatory firmware update that blocks this attack vector?
Sure if you don't care about multiplayer, PSN etc. then you don't have to update but majority of PS3 users do. Of course the situation changes if sony in its wisdom insisted on current firmware to play newer games, even in single player. If there's one thing that the MW2 uproar (and lack of actual effectiveness on sales/bottomline) taught us is that the mass consumer market will happily continue to toe the line so don't count on the potential outrage of the few internet disconnected PS3 owners preventing this.
Personally I only have a PS3 to play AAA exclusives (GOW, MGS4 etc.) so I'm not terribly fussed if I'm locked out of multiplayer.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, if sony had ANY brains at all they would make it 100% PSX compatible and provide some sort of dual thumbstick or equivalent button controls.
Even easier with PSP re: control layout, but needs better hardware I'm guessing + more work has been done re: emulating PSX as opposed to PSP.
Still being the manufacturer there is no reason why they can't create some sort of shrunken clone for the original PSX for 100% compatibility. Surely the tech is there.
From what I've seen on my now pitiful Nexus 1 the gpu is well above that of PSX and yes there are emulators, I think the latest droids can run a lot of PSX games emulated no worries.
Instant massive game library for relatively low cost. Heck make is super attractive by bundling games or say DL coupons good for 6 titles or whatever. I know I'd rather take the entire PSX/PSP back library over the current iOS offerings
no we don't use it to refer to end user PCs. We use it to refer to the MS server stack and OS, and the guys who work in that environment.
e.g. 'people can't connect to exchange - call the wintel techs'. Seen it everywhere - conversations, ticket system queues and reports, department names (e.g. Servers, Wintel vs Servers, unix), resumes (listing skillsets etc.)
guess maybe its just still prevalent in Oz but not where you are.
er you've not worked in enterprise IT have you, or maybe its just something us strange Aussies say.
MS server techs are universally referred to as 'wintel' (as distinct from unix, mainframes etc.)
99% of normal desktop/notebook users disagree
the only people who would need that feature is some kind of thin client / citrix type scenario. Even many conventional server functions (e.g. LAMP stacks etc.) don't need it. And those people wouldn't be using ubuntu anyway (in fact its probably citrix or vmware,. I realise a lot of that stuff has linux backends but once again they're not likely to be using ubuntu)
considering ubuntu is aiming this at 'normal' end users I cannot see why everyone has their panties in a knot. If you don't like it use debian or whatever
I don't know if doing online banking or even email is considered mission critical, but you do realise that they can nick your passwords.
If your email is compromised then most of your other logins can be finessed.
of course the real killer is paypal or online banking.
I know people who have lost thousands due to keyloggers getting ahold of their online banking passwords.
Give me a console that can do what my current rig can do and I'll be set.
including mouse + kb and I'm with you lol
Because for whatever reason the publishers / devs decide not to code them/port them?
Probably due to fact that very few people have PCs under their lounge TV?
Personally I run a media centre with a 100 dollar video card and a 3 year old C2Duo proc, guess what, street fighter 4, Dirt 2 etc. all run maxed out w/ 4xAA at 720p and play just fine with xbox wireless controllers for windows. Beats the heck out of getting an xbox as well. Only drawback is as you said considerably smaller game selection and no xbox live (but OTOH I have steam).
Try Metro 2033, maxed out it will make any card crawl. In many respects its even more impressive than crysis.
As a bonus its also a good game lol
I'd be fine with that if they started letting us use kb+mouse.
RPGs, strategy, FPS, all I prefer on PC due to kb+mouse even with technical issues etc.
Sorry you are wrong re: hardware.
The hardware is still advancing but for a variety of reasons there is less incentive to utilise it given that revenues are fantastic using the old stuff. Of course over time this will lead to less impetus to drive hardware but for now hardware is still plowing ahead, thank god.
The proof in the pudding is how a 100 dollar mainstream PC video card can pretty much max out any console port (i.e. most PC titles) on 720p or even 1080p. Five years ago your 100 dollar card would struggle to run the latest AAA title at medium-low detail, now is no longer the case.
Lol point taken
from the comments, most engadget readers (and I'm one but I digress) are pro-sumers at best and often sound like high schoolers fighting over whose gadget is coolest. You don't seem to get any actual techs or engineers (at least those of us there are smart enough to keep our mouth shut since the SNR is so darned high) unlike here where you can (sometimes) get engaged in interesting discussions on the real technical specifics.
In Australia were gsm but no problems with our new fangled gizmos. Get over 1mb most places. Of course our telcos charge through the nose
you obviously missed the joke
the famous verizon phone rep conversation where they can't do math.... google it
There are TONNES of 3rd party apps that allow you to use offline maps.
I use copilot live on android, it cost me under 40 bucks AUD, works as advertised.
I understand N900 still doens't have turn by turn (mistaken maybe?) so I can only compare to my old N5800 which did have turn by turn, but it ran like a dog compared to any 3rd party nav app on my droid
The other massive impediment is just learning the maps. Say you've never been on a map before and there is a T junction. Do you look left or right. Wrong choice BOOM HEADSHOT. I reckon it takes ~ an hour to learn a map and thats on a team that is NOT getting pwned, if your team is getting pwned/spawn killed etc. then you learn nothing.
Someone has to fix online multiplayer FPS and when they do it will be bigger than WoW. Not rewarding XP (i.e. time put into game) with better guns would be a good freakin start. Matchmaking based on XP is also so obvious I am facepalming that nobody has tried it yet.
As an OSX lover (who games so thats out for my main OS, ROTFL), admirer of Apple's ecosystem at the same time as I loathe their image, and a keen gambler I mean investor, the answer seems simple
Can facebook demonstrate it can monetize its user base. I haven't checked in a bit but they're not cashflow positive are they, and the valuation seems to be in dot-com boom territory. potential potential potential but pay up for the risk.
On that basis alone the long-term investor in me says HECK NO. I'd much rather they say bought up flash manufacturing or more hardware expertise as they have been doing.
the really evil investor in me says do a deal with google to integrate ads, if any design team can pull it off without urinating on the user experience its AAPL, they never wanted to rule the world, the low volume high margin space suits them fine even if the iphone rampant success is pushing them the other way.
yeah good points. Issue is that gaming graphics are now undeniably console driven, and consoles don't do DX11/tesselation yet, so that featureset I suspect will be a bit niche. For every stalker/crysis type of envelope pushing gfx-whore-heaven fps (which I do oh so love) there will be 4-5 multiplatform releases that don't even push a 5770 let alone higher.
I'm considering an upgrade from my 5850 purely from a noise POV, I have the HIS icoolerV variant (stock not OCed) and reviews say its quiet but under load it sounds like a 360 with spinning disk at max volume. Runs like a dream but dang the noise is actually annoying , its louder than my old 4850 crossfire!!!! and no I'm not returning it due to noise alone lol
Where I am the term sysadmin is almost never used (Australia). They're just server engineers, exchange admins, or whatnot. Funny how on /dot it seems to figure as a term of abuse.
Seems to me there is a big difference between 'creating a virtual machine' and designing, speccing, configuring and implementing an ESX cluster, yet I've seen both functions performed by guys whom I would just call server engineers.
Of course as infrastructure guys (I'm a network engineer) we do yes very often see that kinda behaviour from the apps side of the fence. Also the converse is equally funny, where they start ludicrously over-speccing and blaming minor everyday inconveniences (OMG WAN latency is 40ms and the app is sensitive, guess what, that app is not suited for WAN deployment end of story its not a problem with the WAN itself LOLOLOL) because their app doesn't work properly. Though I must mitigate that angle as usually by 'app doesn't work properly' its usually 'outsourced team has zero idea how the app works'. Sometimes it does seem that to a DBA, where their datastore resides is kinda like where babies come from to a 3 year old, a magic stork brings the data to them and its no concern of theirs which server or DB they parked their data in.
I just realised I went stupid off topic so apologies
It's just like the Y2K madness. With mainframe and proprietary locked code that could not be updated in time, one of my biggest customer had a big team of engineers working around the clock to find a way to move data out of the mainframe before the crash. And the most efficient solution they came up with was "Marge Protocol": bring in shitloads of data-entry clerks to read on one machine and type on the other one. Did the job pretty well. Cheap labor 1, software engineering 0.
Off topic but that is hysterical. I have seen one mainframe migration project fail miserably from afar, and am now up close and personal with a company whose most valuable machines are their Tandems (ok not mainframes but close enough), apparently every couple of hours downtime is a million or something similar. This same company won't pay to upgrade the IP stack so we're stuck with X25, so as network techies we have to improvise this hilarious X25 over IP solution to get them WAN, backup and alarm monitoring capability. I'm now wondering whether your solution could get them over the line LOL
Exactly esp the steam monster and its CHRISTMAS SALE MUST BUY MORE GAM
J Freakin Christ on a stick will you people stop putting up straw men.
All work no play makes jack a dull boy yada yada yada
The grasshopper goes hungry in winter whilst the hardworking ant stays warm and fed yada yada yada
WOW I NEVER REALISED THAT TAKING AN EXTREME APPROACH TO WORK OR PLAY RESULTS IN CRAPPY OUTCOME
Get some common sense and stop acting like college kids arguing about whether X indie band has lost their indie cred
For the record, you both sound like idiots
OK point taken.
I don't think HD vs SD is the same as this 3D thing though. With the revolution in tech over the last 10 years, its now possible to shoot HD on an indie budget (like how home audio production has taken off and is good enough to make big expensive studios redundant for most). In fact most indie films seem to come out in HD these days (unlike say 10 years ago)
3D on the other hand still has these massive barriers to entry.
WTF does art have to do with HD res of SD res. That's a straw man if I ever saw one.
HD res of crap film = still crap film.
HD res of good film = better than SD res of good film.
So there are old films that will never be in HD, and many new HD releases are intrinsically bad films. Are you so blinkered to think that 'the world of today' will never produce new movies as good or better as the old classics?
HD wins every time, only issue is budget.
Whats to stop Sony from issuing a mandatory firmware update that blocks this attack vector?
Sure if you don't care about multiplayer, PSN etc. then you don't have to update but majority of PS3 users do. Of course the situation changes if sony in its wisdom insisted on current firmware to play newer games, even in single player. If there's one thing that the MW2 uproar (and lack of actual effectiveness on sales/bottomline) taught us is that the mass consumer market will happily continue to toe the line so don't count on the potential outrage of the few internet disconnected PS3 owners preventing this.
Personally I only have a PS3 to play AAA exclusives (GOW, MGS4 etc.) so I'm not terribly fussed if I'm locked out of multiplayer.