Yeah, it was this point that made me realize the guy is just looking for shit to complain about. Mac OS X has a lot of cross-pollination with Linux software due to it being Unix based. Many open source projects that use to be for Linux & BSD have had someone come along and port them to OS X.
I've really noticed the exact opposite. When I'm on Windows I struggle to find software that does a small simple job similar to software I've used on Linux and Mac OS X. Almost everything I find in the Windows world costs money. I think the HardOCP types don't realize this because they probably pirate all their software anyway.
The DVD (HD, Blu, or Pink with spots) is bound to share the same fate as the CD eventually.
Did the CD just die and I missed the memo? Seems to me that buying music on CDs is still the best way due to the quality and compatibility.
Compatibility is a huge problem. If I go buy or rent a DVD I can use it on any TV I have a dvd player on. I can also bring it over to a friend's house and play it on their TV. If I buy a movie off of iTunes or off of the Xbox Marketplace then I'm going to have a real bitch of a time bringing it over to a friend's place.
There is still a pretty clear reason for most people to stick with buying/renting physical copies of their music and movies.
It doesn't help that a $70 upconverting DVD player makes enough improvement, that most casual viewers consider it "HD". I do agree with this though. I bought a PS3 (yup, I'm the one) and although Blu-Ray movies look good, it's detail that doesn't really matter. Being able to make out the stitching in someone's suit when I get close to TV is cool, but doesn't really make watching the movie that much more enjoyable. Most HDTVs can scale a nice clean DVD signal so well that it's not that big of a difference. There's more detail, but it's not like going from a standard analog TV broadcast to a high-def digital one.
I think we'll see a reduced price PS3 by the fall in the United States, but it will not have hardware emulation for PS2.
I'm surprised. Either I missed some comments or you're the first person to point this out.
There seems to be a lot of things pointing at a price drop. Like you said, they launched in Europe with the Emotion chip removed. It seems pretty obvious if they engineered a version without this chip and started developing software backward compatability that we're going to see that here in the states. There was also just a story about them starting volume production with a company called Foxconn.
It is also interesting that I've read other reports of people who have been looking for a 20gig version and unable to find them. So there seems to be demand for the 20gig that wasn't being met. The excuse that stores weren't ordering them seems a bit odd.
It's possible that they're just trying to minimize their losses, but after this news it would be very hard to believe that they would only offer a $600 version while the 360 is $400 (or $300 if you count the core version).
The ad-supported downloads don't even appear to be full episodes of the G4 shows, just segments. These are already available for free via G4's podcasts, so why in the world would anyone want to go through the trouble of downloading them over bittorrent?
Plus, to make matters worse, the download rate was only 65K/sec, which is pretty very slow for my internet connection. The video quality wasn't even that good, something that would have made the bittorrent.com version better than the podcast version.
Bittorrent.com really needs to stop treating their potential customers like idiots and offer some incentive to use their products instead of the competition. The fact that they use the bittorrent protocol should lower their costs on the bandwidth side, but it increases the complexity on the customer's side. They really need to do something to make up for that (much lower prices or extremely high quality).
I can't find the link but a recent rumor about the PS3 supporting 7 controllers simultaneously based on the FCC report was wrong...it just meant 7 simultaneous bluetooth channels: meaning headsets, joysticks, and any other peripherals were all included.
The PS3 does support up to 7 controllers. The manual even explains how the two of the four lights on the controller will light up to indicate numbers past 4. So if positions 1 and 4 are lit, then that means it is the 5th controller.
I don't know of any games that actually use 7 controllers though.
I suggest you try Super Mario Brothers and play it all the way through. I'd be surprised if you didn't notice at least a couple glitches. And these are not things that existed in the original NES version. I'll bring it up again, a hammer brother completely disappeared from the screen only to kill me when I ran into his invisible body.
It's an odd pattern nowadays that people who have problems with consumer electronics prefer complaining on message boards to contacting the manufacturer and actually working to resolve the issue.
Yeah, imagine that. Somebody discussing their experiences in a discussion forum. What I find to be an odder pattern are the people who seem to get offended when you air actual grievances with a company/product.
I can completely back xtracto up on this one. I've bought a few virtual console games and they are glitchy. Super Mario Bros., to be specific, has the character sprites flicker as they animate. On one level (can't remember which right now), one of the hammer brothers actually disappeared.
If you think Nintendo simply doesn't know about these problems you're kidding yourself.
That's not what I meant. The last update fixed a problem that people were being very vocal about.
What I meant is I don't believe Sony is going the software route because they want the ability to actually improve the graphics of ps2 games. That is, have ps2 games look better on the ps3 than they would if you played them on actual ps2 hardware.
So, the current PS3 with hardware support for PS2 games plus all the extra power of the Cell isn't enough to allow you to play old games at 720p, but removing the hardware assistance will magically enable this?
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I'm guessing you can't use the existing PS2 chips AND do scaling to 720p+ unless you're scaling after the 3D rendering, which would basically be useless as the TV is doing that anyway. There probably just isn't a way to use the PS3 hardware to help out without going fully into software emulation.
However, I'm doubtful Sony even cares about making PS2 games look nicer on the PS3. One big possibility is they have been working very hard on software emulation because they want to allow downloading of playstation and playstation 2 games from their online store to the ps3.
It's anyone's guess as to what's up right now. The fact that they haven't stated even an estimate as to how many titles will be compatible with the software solution is probably an indication that it's going to work like shit.
In this case he announced that he's switching Linux distributions and flamed RedHat/Fedora for the problems it has as he sees it. But he's switching to another Linux distribution, so that seems to reason that he views the problems he has with being fixed in this other distribution. So what's with the drama if there's a solution?
I can understand the CUPS thing, or if he took on the state of software installation on Linux as a whole, but he's not. He's simply crying about something to see if he's popular enough to get a reaction.
Hopefully this is the last time he'll be able to get news for throwing a tantrum. He's really not an important figure in the Free Software world anymore, as much as he wishes he was.
Well it is also outselling HD-DVD movies in the first 2 weeks of 2007. There were also 12 Blu-Ray movies releases this week and only 1 HD-DVD movie. I agree it's too early to declare a winner, but it's not as ridiculous as you're trying to make it sound.
HD-DVD has only one studio that is doing HD-DVD movies exclusively, and that is Universal. Apparently Universal has been very tight-lipped about release dates for their HD-DVD movies while the Blu-Ray making studios have been willing to list many of their upcoming dates. This has lead some to hypothesize that Universal will jump ship.
So like I said, it's still too early, but as of this second Blu-Ray seems to be sitting in a better position than HD-DVD is. Could definitely be the Blu-Ray camp spreading FUD I guess, but if it is, it's working.
No, actually he's not. WoW came on 4 CDs, it did not ship on DVD.
Woops. You're right. And I just checked the install size and it's 6.0gb which should fit on a dual-layer DVD. So I guess technically WoW would be possible for the XBox 360 without a hard drive. They'd probably have to be pretty clever to make up for the slower reading of the DVD drive though.
You do realize you just brought up a game that spans 4 or 5 DVDs as a claim that the Xbox 360 doesn't need to come out with a new HD-DVD version?
I have to agree with the grandparent post that when moving up to 720p/1080p resolutions it probably was a bad decision to stick with the same storage format as last gen. The 360 is doing fine with DVDs so far, but I'd be surprised if we don't start to see it bite them in the ass as PS3 developers start taking advantage of all the space.
The 360's hardware scaler works upon the digital image prior to sending it to the TV. Your TV has to work with an analog signal (because the 360 doesn't do HDMI/DVI). Your TV's scaler in general won't do as well as the 360's scaler, and some TVs can introduce lag when scaling images that's not present when given a signal in their native resolution.
This is interesting. I have been wondering what the deal was with the 360 ever since they added 1080p support via a software update.
So, in your opinion, if you have the ps3 with a 720p game hooked up via HDMI to a 1080p display it should be able to upscale it just as well as the 360 does since it's a pristine digital signal? Or is the 360 scaler regarded as being better than what is in most HDTVs?
Also, I have been wondering if a 1080p signal via component is really as good as a 1080p signal via HDMI? Since component is analog is it really reasonable to believe that all those pixels are going to be able to travel to the TV without being degraded? Not that I think it would be that noticeable, but it would be nice to know that your TV is receiving the exact data.
I don't know man. I like Animal Crossing. The entire point of the game is just to collect weird things and find rare items. There's no end goal, it's just a nice relaxing game I can play for 10-20 minutes and then put it back down. Having the local animals come up to me and say ridiculous things, or buying some crazy item like a pimp's hat at the store is all I really need to laugh and have a good time during my short play session.
But yeah, it's not for everyone. People at my work definitely think I'm on crack when I show them Animal Crossing.
You're correct that the game is pretty simple -- which I enjoy. However, there are some methods to making money or finding rare items that seem to be a pain in the ass to me, but might be enjoyable to someone like yourself. One example is the turnip market. You can buy turnips from a character that only appears every Sunday (I think), and then you can ask Tom Nook (at the town store) every day how much he is buying turnips for. The price will fluctuate, but you can't hold on to your turnips for too long or they'll go bad and be worthless. That's just an example, there's plenty of other things like that which you can read about online. That's actually the stuff that my girlfriend loves to do, so she gets me all the cool shit while I just do the mind-numbingly dull stuff that you mentioned.
Why are you telling me to read the article? What is it that you think I missed?
The poster I was replying to said someone was going to get fired over this "decision", so I was pointing out that if they actually thought the console was freezing by design, he was being fooled. That is, after all, why this story made it to Slashdot. It is a ridiculous claim, and it was posted for us to laugh at how stupid this Sony rep is. The very idea that Sony would have designed the demo kiosks to freeze up in order to limit play-time is silly.
I do see your point. I also would have preferred some breakthrough with the PPC chips instead of a transition to x86. However, it was seeming pretty clear that waiting for that was just wishful thinking at this point, and wishful thinking isn't how you run a company.
Apple is being smart and forward thinking. Laptops and other small devices will probably be the best sellers if they aren't already, and you need to go with the chips that will best power those devices.
If Apple is willing to keep pressure on developers to make Universal Binaries of their applications, then Apple could conceivably switch back to PPC whenever it was convenient. Although if Apple's share continues to rise, and the majority becomes Intel machines, I can't imagine game developers bothering to make sure their low-level code also works on PPC.
However, the whole Universal Binary thing is very cool and really shows out-of-the-box thinking on Apple's part (even if it came from way back in the NeXT days).
Intel is a chip maker. IBM is a chip maker. Apple is a computer manufacturer. Your analogy is wrong, and would only have made sense if I was arguing that IBM should make Intel motherboards. Currently Intel's mobile chips are much faster than IBM's offerings, and Intel's roadmap for the future seems to indicate their Core line will have a bright future. IBM on the other hand couldn't even manage to get something better than a G4 for apple's laptops. Not exactly innovative.
If you would stick with IBM regardless, I guess we can all be happy that you're not running Apple and that we can now get a fast Macbook Pro to replace the ridiculously underpowered-for-its-age Powerbook.
Works perfectly on my two macs. Almost every windows person I've talked to hates it. I think it's worth a try if there's a way to go back if you don't like it. I really enjoyed the changes to the podcast section, which is something I use a lot.
I also don't use an iPod. So if most people's problems are related to that, then that would explain why I haven't had any issues.
Remind me again why fans of Apple think Microsoft makes shit products? Yet whenever someone has a problem with Apple software or hardware they're berated for buying something they should have known was a piece of shit.
I'm mostly a mac guy myself, but this kind of thinking is really annoying. If Apple makes crappy point-oh products, then yell at them for it. Stop sitting on your ass and taking it. You should really stop posting on forums about how other people are dumber than you because they used the point-oh product.
Or find a competent company who can actually release semi-stable products and idolize them.
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Yeah, it was this point that made me realize the guy is just looking for shit to complain about. Mac OS X has a lot of cross-pollination with Linux software due to it being Unix based. Many open source projects that use to be for Linux & BSD have had someone come along and port them to OS X.
I've really noticed the exact opposite. When I'm on Windows I struggle to find software that does a small simple job similar to software I've used on Linux and Mac OS X. Almost everything I find in the Windows world costs money. I think the HardOCP types don't realize this because they probably pirate all their software anyway.
Did the CD just die and I missed the memo? Seems to me that buying music on CDs is still the best way due to the quality and compatibility.
Compatibility is a huge problem. If I go buy or rent a DVD I can use it on any TV I have a dvd player on. I can also bring it over to a friend's house and play it on their TV. If I buy a movie off of iTunes or off of the Xbox Marketplace then I'm going to have a real bitch of a time bringing it over to a friend's place.
There is still a pretty clear reason for most people to stick with buying/renting physical copies of their music and movies.
It doesn't help that a $70 upconverting DVD player makes enough improvement, that most casual viewers consider it "HD". I do agree with this though. I bought a PS3 (yup, I'm the one) and although Blu-Ray movies look good, it's detail that doesn't really matter. Being able to make out the stitching in someone's suit when I get close to TV is cool, but doesn't really make watching the movie that much more enjoyable. Most HDTVs can scale a nice clean DVD signal so well that it's not that big of a difference. There's more detail, but it's not like going from a standard analog TV broadcast to a high-def digital one.I'm surprised. Either I missed some comments or you're the first person to point this out.
There seems to be a lot of things pointing at a price drop. Like you said, they launched in Europe with the Emotion chip removed. It seems pretty obvious if they engineered a version without this chip and started developing software backward compatability that we're going to see that here in the states. There was also just a story about them starting volume production with a company called Foxconn.
It is also interesting that I've read other reports of people who have been looking for a 20gig version and unable to find them. So there seems to be demand for the 20gig that wasn't being met. The excuse that stores weren't ordering them seems a bit odd.
It's possible that they're just trying to minimize their losses, but after this news it would be very hard to believe that they would only offer a $600 version while the 360 is $400 (or $300 if you count the core version).
The ad-supported downloads don't even appear to be full episodes of the G4 shows, just segments. These are already available for free via G4's podcasts, so why in the world would anyone want to go through the trouble of downloading them over bittorrent?
Plus, to make matters worse, the download rate was only 65K/sec, which is pretty very slow for my internet connection. The video quality wasn't even that good, something that would have made the bittorrent.com version better than the podcast version.
Bittorrent.com really needs to stop treating their potential customers like idiots and offer some incentive to use their products instead of the competition. The fact that they use the bittorrent protocol should lower their costs on the bandwidth side, but it increases the complexity on the customer's side. They really need to do something to make up for that (much lower prices or extremely high quality).
The PS3 does support up to 7 controllers. The manual even explains how the two of the four lights on the controller will light up to indicate numbers past 4. So if positions 1 and 4 are lit, then that means it is the 5th controller.
I don't know of any games that actually use 7 controllers though.
I checked the UK version of the list and all 3 of these are listed and have the best possible rating of 3 blocks. Which country did you choose?
No, I am not contradicting. The games are buggy.
I suggest you try Super Mario Brothers and play it all the way through. I'd be surprised if you didn't notice at least a couple glitches. And these are not things that existed in the original NES version. I'll bring it up again, a hammer brother completely disappeared from the screen only to kill me when I ran into his invisible body.
Yeah, imagine that. Somebody discussing their experiences in a discussion forum. What I find to be an odder pattern are the people who seem to get offended when you air actual grievances with a company/product.
I can completely back xtracto up on this one. I've bought a few virtual console games and they are glitchy. Super Mario Bros., to be specific, has the character sprites flicker as they animate. On one level (can't remember which right now), one of the hammer brothers actually disappeared.
If you think Nintendo simply doesn't know about these problems you're kidding yourself.
That's not what I meant. The last update fixed a problem that people were being very vocal about.
What I meant is I don't believe Sony is going the software route because they want the ability to actually improve the graphics of ps2 games. That is, have ps2 games look better on the ps3 than they would if you played them on actual ps2 hardware.
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I'm guessing you can't use the existing PS2 chips AND do scaling to 720p+ unless you're scaling after the 3D rendering, which would basically be useless as the TV is doing that anyway. There probably just isn't a way to use the PS3 hardware to help out without going fully into software emulation.
However, I'm doubtful Sony even cares about making PS2 games look nicer on the PS3. One big possibility is they have been working very hard on software emulation because they want to allow downloading of playstation and playstation 2 games from their online store to the ps3.
It's anyone's guess as to what's up right now. The fact that they haven't stated even an estimate as to how many titles will be compatible with the software solution is probably an indication that it's going to work like shit.
In this case he announced that he's switching Linux distributions and flamed RedHat/Fedora for the problems it has as he sees it. But he's switching to another Linux distribution, so that seems to reason that he views the problems he has with being fixed in this other distribution. So what's with the drama if there's a solution?
I can understand the CUPS thing, or if he took on the state of software installation on Linux as a whole, but he's not. He's simply crying about something to see if he's popular enough to get a reaction.
Hopefully this is the last time he'll be able to get news for throwing a tantrum. He's really not an important figure in the Free Software world anymore, as much as he wishes he was.
Well it is also outselling HD-DVD movies in the first 2 weeks of 2007. There were also 12 Blu-Ray movies releases this week and only 1 HD-DVD movie. I agree it's too early to declare a winner, but it's not as ridiculous as you're trying to make it sound.
HD-DVD has only one studio that is doing HD-DVD movies exclusively, and that is Universal. Apparently Universal has been very tight-lipped about release dates for their HD-DVD movies while the Blu-Ray making studios have been willing to list many of their upcoming dates. This has lead some to hypothesize that Universal will jump ship.
So like I said, it's still too early, but as of this second Blu-Ray seems to be sitting in a better position than HD-DVD is. Could definitely be the Blu-Ray camp spreading FUD I guess, but if it is, it's working.
I guess around the same time we decide we should buy everything from 1 company and always rely on them to have exactly the product that we want.
Woops. You're right. And I just checked the install size and it's 6.0gb which should fit on a dual-layer DVD. So I guess technically WoW would be possible for the XBox 360 without a hard drive. They'd probably have to be pretty clever to make up for the slower reading of the DVD drive though.
You do realize you just brought up a game that spans 4 or 5 DVDs as a claim that the Xbox 360 doesn't need to come out with a new HD-DVD version?
I have to agree with the grandparent post that when moving up to 720p/1080p resolutions it probably was a bad decision to stick with the same storage format as last gen. The 360 is doing fine with DVDs so far, but I'd be surprised if we don't start to see it bite them in the ass as PS3 developers start taking advantage of all the space.
This is interesting. I have been wondering what the deal was with the 360 ever since they added 1080p support via a software update.
So, in your opinion, if you have the ps3 with a 720p game hooked up via HDMI to a 1080p display it should be able to upscale it just as well as the 360 does since it's a pristine digital signal? Or is the 360 scaler regarded as being better than what is in most HDTVs?
Also, I have been wondering if a 1080p signal via component is really as good as a 1080p signal via HDMI? Since component is analog is it really reasonable to believe that all those pixels are going to be able to travel to the TV without being degraded? Not that I think it would be that noticeable, but it would be nice to know that your TV is receiving the exact data.
WarioWare Smooth Moves is definitely just as stupid as the others.
I really enjoy it.
I don't know man. I like Animal Crossing. The entire point of the game is just to collect weird things and find rare items. There's no end goal, it's just a nice relaxing game I can play for 10-20 minutes and then put it back down. Having the local animals come up to me and say ridiculous things, or buying some crazy item like a pimp's hat at the store is all I really need to laugh and have a good time during my short play session.
But yeah, it's not for everyone. People at my work definitely think I'm on crack when I show them Animal Crossing.
You're correct that the game is pretty simple -- which I enjoy. However, there are some methods to making money or finding rare items that seem to be a pain in the ass to me, but might be enjoyable to someone like yourself. One example is the turnip market. You can buy turnips from a character that only appears every Sunday (I think), and then you can ask Tom Nook (at the town store) every day how much he is buying turnips for. The price will fluctuate, but you can't hold on to your turnips for too long or they'll go bad and be worthless. That's just an example, there's plenty of other things like that which you can read about online. That's actually the stuff that my girlfriend loves to do, so she gets me all the cool shit while I just do the mind-numbingly dull stuff that you mentioned.
I look forward to you calling me an idiot.
Why are you telling me to read the article? What is it that you think I missed?
The poster I was replying to said someone was going to get fired over this "decision", so I was pointing out that if they actually thought the console was freezing by design, he was being fooled. That is, after all, why this story made it to Slashdot. It is a ridiculous claim, and it was posted for us to laugh at how stupid this Sony rep is. The very idea that Sony would have designed the demo kiosks to freeze up in order to limit play-time is silly.
Are we on the same page here?
This decision? Don't tell me you actually believe that they designed it to freeze.
They've had demos that automatically return to the main menu back in the PlayStation 1 days.
I do see your point. I also would have preferred some breakthrough with the PPC chips instead of a transition to x86. However, it was seeming pretty clear that waiting for that was just wishful thinking at this point, and wishful thinking isn't how you run a company.
Apple is being smart and forward thinking. Laptops and other small devices will probably be the best sellers if they aren't already, and you need to go with the chips that will best power those devices.
If Apple is willing to keep pressure on developers to make Universal Binaries of their applications, then Apple could conceivably switch back to PPC whenever it was convenient. Although if Apple's share continues to rise, and the majority becomes Intel machines, I can't imagine game developers bothering to make sure their low-level code also works on PPC.
However, the whole Universal Binary thing is very cool and really shows out-of-the-box thinking on Apple's part (even if it came from way back in the NeXT days).
Intel is a chip maker. IBM is a chip maker. Apple is a computer manufacturer. Your analogy is wrong, and would only have made sense if I was arguing that IBM should make Intel motherboards. Currently Intel's mobile chips are much faster than IBM's offerings, and Intel's roadmap for the future seems to indicate their Core line will have a bright future. IBM on the other hand couldn't even manage to get something better than a G4 for apple's laptops. Not exactly innovative.
If you would stick with IBM regardless, I guess we can all be happy that you're not running Apple and that we can now get a fast Macbook Pro to replace the ridiculously underpowered-for-its-age Powerbook.
Works perfectly on my two macs. Almost every windows person I've talked to hates it. I think it's worth a try if there's a way to go back if you don't like it. I really enjoyed the changes to the podcast section, which is something I use a lot.
I also don't use an iPod. So if most people's problems are related to that, then that would explain why I haven't had any issues.
Remind me again why fans of Apple think Microsoft makes shit products? Yet whenever someone has a problem with Apple software or hardware they're berated for buying something they should have known was a piece of shit.
I'm mostly a mac guy myself, but this kind of thinking is really annoying. If Apple makes crappy point-oh products, then yell at them for it. Stop sitting on your ass and taking it. You should really stop posting on forums about how other people are dumber than you because they used the point-oh product.
Or find a competent company who can actually release semi-stable products and idolize them.
Yes, if only they would have stuck with those slower more innovative chips. That's the ticket.