Well, the problem is that the good dance pads out there (cobalt flux, red octane) are made only for xbox and ps2. And I don't want to have to rebuy my pads just to play on the wii. Maybe if there's a usb-to-gamecube converter, I could do it, since there are ps2-to-USB converters out there.
I've long hoped that they would make some realistic dancing game in which you strap a Wiimote to each limb and it infers the absolute location of each Wiimote from the sensor bar and the accelerometer time histories. Then it would give you dance instructions somehow (either with a "dancer" you have to model, or, similar to the Eyetoy's Kinetic, symbols appear that dictate what you have to do) that you have to follow with your arms and legs.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any game yet use this kind of "dead reckoning" to figure out the absolute position of the Wiimotes, despite what the Wikipedia article says it does. I mean, I've seen games detect your acceleration, and I've seen games detect where you're pointing, but not together in a way that would sense your absolute positiong. Yet you can see how with just a little trigonometry, you can infer the Wiimote's absolute position when it's pointing at the sensor bar by using the apparent locations of the sensor bar lights in the Wiimote's camera and the inclination of the Wiimote (which it independently senses) and then integrating through the accelerations. (You would, of course, need to continually recalibrate each Wiimote by pointing it at the sensor bar -- a little stretch for the Wiimotes on your legs!)
Alright, so here's an idea: tell them you're turning it back on just to "see if the effects happen again". Then put fake routers in so it looks like there's a wireless network, but don't actually turn it on. See how many people complain about the illness they're getting from the non-existent wireless network.
Overall, very easy, although so far I've only actually put money in (over the last four months) and done a transfer from another brokerage. I haven't tried to pull any money out yet, although I have talked to their customer support, which has been generally helpful, except for the time they got a check for me from my former brokerage, called me to ask me what to do with it, and then thought I asked them to do something in contrvention of their required minimums... and obeyed that!. But it was easy to get that corrected.
Vanguard.com is helpful in that they have index funds for pretty much everything, and it explains very clearly who should invest and what the tax consequences are.
what is your association with them?
Just an investor who defected to them after realizing how much full-service financial-planner brokerages screw you over. I currently have about $20,000 there ($4000 in a Roth and the rest in a taxable account.)
Believe me, the fees there are so low there's not enough room to give anyone a cut for directing them there:-P
I disagree. The most sensible advice can be freely given, because so few people will listen to it. Here is the advice:
1) Don't try to beat the market through picking individual stocks.
2) Buy only index funds. (An index fund is a completely transparent mutual fund that just buys what's in an index, such as the S&P 500, rather than relying on some "hotshot" fund manager who uses a proprietary screening process or something like that.) After fund fees, stock index funds* beat something like 80% of actively managed mutual funds, and more if you factor in taxes.
I always though that, since trasparency has an advantage here, investing would be a good project for the open source community to tackle, but places like vanguard.com already do a tremendous job of it. They offer access to a huge variety of index funds, each of which will tell you exactly what it's investing in (so you don't have to trust any fund manager's expertise), with low fees and low minimums (only $3000 to start one).
*Actively managed bond funds are tolerable if it's in a tax-deferred account with limited choices like a 401k, since taxes are on exchanges are zero there, and the difference is smaller.
Well, to be honest, I don't really like black metal. I heard it's less reliable, and doesn't act appropriately, despite all we've done to help it perform. Once black metal is in your neighborhood, property values go down and people try to leave ASAP. I've never seen a black metal do a job right without having to be replaced. If my daughter were interested in a black metal, I'd steer her another way as best I could. I don't serve black metal either.
You know, I've seen those studies, plus the one a sibling poster gave about retail, and I really don't think they prove what people think they prove. It seems they're more showing the harm of choice presentation. Do you think, for example, that that "low-choice" 401(k) would revert back to the low participation of the "many-choice" 401(k) if they put a little note in it that said "Experienced investors my request access to additional options by talking to $PERSON in HR." ? Seems this "overload" problem of "too many choices" can be solved simply by stuffing away the choices so that you have to specifically request that they be shown. It's for this reason that most software programs have a button for "advanced" options or can run in "simple" mode.
All I know is, if you removed the domestic stock index from my 401(k) (the only stock fund worth buying in it), I definitely would put less in. Luckily, the amount I put in is about the amount I would want to put in anyway (and is already maxed). And if my only choice were company stock? No way in hell I would put a dime in.
Long story short, the occam's razor in me says to reject the "more choices is better" only as a last resort. I mean, worse comes to worst, you can just ignore choices, right? So it just seems that the "poor presentation of choices" alternative is a better explanation for these.
Yeah, this is what ticks me off about the Wii, at least until I get some new information. They quite clearly could have made it so you could "help out the Wii" by telling the system what the boundaries of your actual screen are. i.e., you pick an approximate TV screen size and sensor location, and it shows you a rectangle that you expand to the boundaries. It could then figure out where you're really pointing based on that offset/scale, and the locations of the IR emitters on the sensor bar as they appear in the camera.
Instead, the most I can help it out with is "sensor bar is above/below the screen". =-(
Sadly, it's not easily fixable with a patch. I mean, don't get me wrong -- I've had endless fun with it. But man, they could have made it so much better with just a little trigonometry.
I agree. Before buying, I had assumed the setup would be something like speakers in Windows. That is, you first tell it roughly where your sensor bar is and how big your TV is. Then, it would show you some box where it "thinks" the screen boundaries are, and then you adjust it until it fits your screen.
But of course, instead, it's just "above or below?". It could just have been to shorten setup time, but not even have that as an "advanced option"? That said, it's still accurate enough not to have major problems.
Okay, but on my wireless router monitor on my computer, I don't know how to change anything. It doesn't mention how to do any of that, even in help files. I don't know how to add/remove/change encryption, or see who else is on, or what. There's no option to look at any of that, even after putting in the CD's that come with it. I use a linksys b/g or whatever. Or do you switch channels on the router itself? Help!
However, the update on the night I used the Wii store was slow, but not that much. It took maybe 5mins to download the update. Perhaps that was before most people where doing their updates, but I didn't find it too bad.
Okay, give me a teensy weensy bit of credit here. I didn't give up after five minutes. I supsect most people didn't either, as the progress bar would be filling up rapidly. When I say slow, I mean: "Leave, come back 30 minutes later, it's 10% complete. Come back 30 minutes later, it's... still 10% complete. 30 minutes later... yay, it's advanced a few pixels! Wait... *gets out ruler*... Damn!"
If you want to see someone disapointed give them exactly twice as much stuff for exactly twice the price... If you want to see someone excited give them exactly half as much stuff for half the price... I'm not sure if it is human nature,
It's the law of diminishing marginal utility*. Increase the stimulus linearly, perception (or appreciation) of it increases logarithmically. Increase the stimulus exponentially, perception increases linearly. That's why sound (among other things) is usually reported on a logarithmic scale.
The corollary is increasing marginal disutility. Decrease the stimulus linearly, perception decreases exponentially. (Flip the logarithm curve over.) That's why half the stuff at half the price is attractive, and it explains why people pay more than the actuarially expected loss (loss times probability) to avoid the loss, i.e., buy insurance.
*Yes, I'm simplifying the part about where the law applies. Bear with me.
I didn't have that issue (luckily) but I did have similar problems. For one, as most Wii users have noted, starting from Sunday (11/19) the updating process takes a LONG time. What's more, when I got tired of waitng and turned off the power and back on again, it brought me right back to the same screen. The only way I could get back to gaming was to disconnect the wireless router's power so there was no internet access, forcing it to abort back to the Wii menu. Luckily, updates finished last night when I tried and didn't take forever then.
People say the delay was from the huge number of Wiiners coming online and downloading, but, uh... isn't the same thing going to have to happen in the future, and with more people, since they have to do more similarly-sized updates then?
Don't misunderstand me -- I *love* the Wii, and I've had a lot of fun with it since Sunday. It's worth its purchase price several times over. I'm not trying to stir up anti-Wii fud.
I work with a few 70+ year old contract employees, and I've had success with making things easy for them, in that they're always ecstatic when I show them what they can do and make it easy. I agree that just having them go to bookmarks would be a tremendous help. Another idea is to put shortcuts on the desktop with clear descriptions, which is what I often do for them (though only so far for directory locations). And take the time to show them the steps and make sure they can do it.
Also, let them know that if anything is difficult or otherwise unpleasant, let you know. This is because you probably know a trick that obviates that problem, but didn't know to tell them before. It's hard to anticipate everything they might find useful.
Oh, and increasing the text size would be a great idea if you didn't already think of it.
But I will add this: those numbers are what is required to make up manufacturing costs. That doesn't say anything about pre-manufacturing R&D or marketing, which are not amortized across all consoles in those calculations.
So let's make a conservative estimate: $30 licensing revenue for Sony per game sold. Then you have to sell, on average, 8-10 games per console, NEW. And if you manage that feat, you've still lost the full R&D and marketing costs. And the fewer consoles they sell, the more each would have to buy to cover his "share" of those costs.
I don't see how it can happen, but at the same time, I can't convince myself that they didn't do this calculation in advance.
That's a good point, and I wish fewer people would neglect the "ownership value" (e.g., including voting rights) that come with stock when talking about it's value. Still, I wish you wouldn't keep describing stock ownership as "having something", when the difference you were actually trying to highlight was that buying stock gives you ownership rights, while Sony's "investment" gives it no similar right. However, it can still "sell" what it "bought": Sony could sell to someone else the stream of software license revenues that result from such a loss leader, although that would be impractical due to the difficulties in differentiating sales that would vs. would not accrue from selling at a loss.
there is a difference. If you invest in stock you get something, stock. You made a purchase that may or may not increase in value. When Sony loses money selling consoles they don't have anything. They have arguable increased their potential of selling games and movies.
Well, true, until you realize that the "something" that is stock, is itself just the potential of it having future value -- just like the $306 loss "investment".
IMHO, the difference is that Sony's loss-leader investment is much less likely to earn a positive return:-P
And a CD is a glorified cassette which is a glorified 8-track which is a glorified record which is a glorified phonograph plate (???) which is a glorified imitation singer which is a glorified minstrel which is a glorified poet which is a glorified storyteller which is a glorified cave wall painting which is a glorified grunt, which was really just to pick up cave chicks anyway before resorting to beating them and dragging them hairwise to your cave.
Good point. A lot of people don't realize that a major (if not primary) driver of urban sprawl and high real estate prices is people using more roundabout means to keep their kids from having to go to school with the riff-raff (which doesn't necessarily mean minority, but usually does). This leads to a zero sum game where people pay more to be in the best school districts, not merely "good ones".
In my opinion, most everyone would be better off if they just accepted that rich people are going to find some way to get their kids into more exclusive schools, and instead focused on increasing school choice (rather than having the school district lock-in) so that this struggle doesn't have the collateral damage of the environment, transportation congestion, and difficulty buying a home.
Well, I noticed the same thing. I think the way they designed it, you turn by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. It probably has some algorithms dependent upon some kind of timing related to this. The upshot is, if you point it away from the screen too far or too long, it doesn't know what to do, so you have to keep it pointed at the screen. Kind of tires my arm.
Whenever it goes haywire, I'm always able to fix it by just pointing the Wiimote at the center of the screen, and it'll "recenter" you and quit moving.
There's a lot of "I like the Xbox360 better" in this review. Ok, great. Good luck with that. But this is supposed to be a PS3 review, not a console buying guide that compares the different features. Buy a 360 if you want one. I hear they're great. But "the PS3 is not an XBOX360" is not a valid criticism.
It's not saying "PS3 != Xbox360". It's saying "PS3 lacks what Xbox360 had at the same point in time". And a review should tell me whether it's a waste of money, and the question of whether something comparable is better speaks directly to that.
His first specific criticism is that there's no cable to hook up a PS3 to an HD TV. This is simply incorrect. Sony includes a cable that works fine. It doesn't do HD, but it does hook up and let you use the system. This kind of untruth is to be expected from the NY Times, which is more about an agenda than about accurately describing the factual situation.
Well, that was more to emphasize a deficiency, but I'll agree it was misleading.
There are some things the reviewer found annoying. These are valid points. But it's the first weekend of the PS3. Did everything go perfectly on the first weekend for the XBOX360? Does everything ever go perfectly? This part of the review was not balanced, but it was useful and therefore adequate.
But it was balanced -- at the time of the Xbox360's launch, it was quick to set up. At the PS3's launch, it wasn't. Apples to apples.
There's a paragraph about televisions and walkmans. Does that tell you if the PS3 is fun?
Please, that's just background info, to acknowledge that this is a deviation from a brand's otherwise good historic reputation.
It's true that bigotry can creep in through many avenues, but you're showing the *harm* here, not the harmlessness, of such non-discrimination laws. Such laws are actually written with the intent to prevent *even those* workarounds you just described. It's called "racial steering" or other things depending on the context. I heard a story about one landlord who offered one prospective tenant a soda, but not another one. The other one was black, and it has an FHA sting. The litigation hurt.
The end result of such laws is that for them to work, you have to regulate a whole litany of human interaction behaviors. You'd have to be told when you can smile, when you have to keep your apartments in good condition, when you can and can't do background checks, etc. Such laws, if implemented, would suck all humanity out of ordinary life. Most "neighborhoods with character", for example, would have to be eviscerated.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem is that the good dance pads out there (cobalt flux, red octane) are made only for xbox and ps2. And I don't want to have to rebuy my pads just to play on the wii. Maybe if there's a usb-to-gamecube converter, I could do it, since there are ps2-to-USB converters out there.
I've long hoped that they would make some realistic dancing game in which you strap a Wiimote to each limb and it infers the absolute location of each Wiimote from the sensor bar and the accelerometer time histories. Then it would give you dance instructions somehow (either with a "dancer" you have to model, or, similar to the Eyetoy's Kinetic, symbols appear that dictate what you have to do) that you have to follow with your arms and legs.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen any game yet use this kind of "dead reckoning" to figure out the absolute position of the Wiimotes, despite what the Wikipedia article says it does. I mean, I've seen games detect your acceleration, and I've seen games detect where you're pointing, but not together in a way that would sense your absolute positiong. Yet you can see how with just a little trigonometry, you can infer the Wiimote's absolute position when it's pointing at the sensor bar by using the apparent locations of the sensor bar lights in the Wiimote's camera and the inclination of the Wiimote (which it independently senses) and then integrating through the accelerations. (You would, of course, need to continually recalibrate each Wiimote by pointing it at the sensor bar -- a little stretch for the Wiimotes on your legs!)
Alright, so here's an idea: tell them you're turning it back on just to "see if the effects happen again". Then put fake routers in so it looks like there's a wireless network, but don't actually turn it on. See how many people complain about the illness they're getting from the non-existent wireless network.
How have you found vanguard.com to deal with
... and obeyed that!. But it was easy to get that corrected.
:-P
Overall, very easy, although so far I've only actually put money in (over the last four months) and done a transfer from another brokerage. I haven't tried to pull any money out yet, although I have talked to their customer support, which has been generally helpful, except for the time they got a check for me from my former brokerage, called me to ask me what to do with it, and then thought I asked them to do something in contrvention of their required minimums
Vanguard.com is helpful in that they have index funds for pretty much everything, and it explains very clearly who should invest and what the tax consequences are.
what is your association with them?
Just an investor who defected to them after realizing how much full-service financial-planner brokerages screw you over. I currently have about $20,000 there ($4000 in a Roth and the rest in a taxable account.)
Believe me, the fees there are so low there's not enough room to give anyone a cut for directing them there
I disagree. The most sensible advice can be freely given, because so few people will listen to it. Here is the advice:
1) Don't try to beat the market through picking individual stocks.
2) Buy only index funds. (An index fund is a completely transparent mutual fund that just buys what's in an index, such as the S&P 500, rather than relying on some "hotshot" fund manager who uses a proprietary screening process or something like that.) After fund fees, stock index funds* beat something like 80% of actively managed mutual funds, and more if you factor in taxes.
I always though that, since trasparency has an advantage here, investing would be a good project for the open source community to tackle, but places like vanguard.com already do a tremendous job of it. They offer access to a huge variety of index funds, each of which will tell you exactly what it's investing in (so you don't have to trust any fund manager's expertise), with low fees and low minimums (only $3000 to start one).
*Actively managed bond funds are tolerable if it's in a tax-deferred account with limited choices like a 401k, since taxes are on exchanges are zero there, and the difference is smaller.
Well, to be honest, I don't really like black metal. I heard it's less reliable, and doesn't act appropriately, despite all we've done to help it perform. Once black metal is in your neighborhood, property values go down and people try to leave ASAP. I've never seen a black metal do a job right without having to be replaced. If my daughter were interested in a black metal, I'd steer her another way as best I could. I don't serve black metal either.
You know, I've seen those studies, plus the one a sibling poster gave about retail, and I really don't think they prove what people think they prove. It seems they're more showing the harm of choice presentation. Do you think, for example, that that "low-choice" 401(k) would revert back to the low participation of the "many-choice" 401(k) if they put a little note in it that said "Experienced investors my request access to additional options by talking to $PERSON in HR." ? Seems this "overload" problem of "too many choices" can be solved simply by stuffing away the choices so that you have to specifically request that they be shown. It's for this reason that most software programs have a button for "advanced" options or can run in "simple" mode.
All I know is, if you removed the domestic stock index from my 401(k) (the only stock fund worth buying in it), I definitely would put less in. Luckily, the amount I put in is about the amount I would want to put in anyway (and is already maxed). And if my only choice were company stock? No way in hell I would put a dime in.
Long story short, the occam's razor in me says to reject the "more choices is better" only as a last resort. I mean, worse comes to worst, you can just ignore choices, right? So it just seems that the "poor presentation of choices" alternative is a better explanation for these.
Yeah, this is what ticks me off about the Wii, at least until I get some new information. They quite clearly could have made it so you could "help out the Wii" by telling the system what the boundaries of your actual screen are. i.e., you pick an approximate TV screen size and sensor location, and it shows you a rectangle that you expand to the boundaries. It could then figure out where you're really pointing based on that offset/scale, and the locations of the IR emitters on the sensor bar as they appear in the camera.
Instead, the most I can help it out with is "sensor bar is above/below the screen". =-(
Sadly, it's not easily fixable with a patch. I mean, don't get me wrong -- I've had endless fun with it. But man, they could have made it so much better with just a little trigonometry.
I agree. Before buying, I had assumed the setup would be something like speakers in Windows. That is, you first tell it roughly where your sensor bar is and how big your TV is. Then, it would show you some box where it "thinks" the screen boundaries are, and then you adjust it until it fits your screen.
But of course, instead, it's just "above or below?". It could just have been to shorten setup time, but not even have that as an "advanced option"? That said, it's still accurate enough not to have major problems.
Er...
1) I don't run Ubuntu.
2) I don't run any Linux distro.
3) My 802.11 is working, I just don't know how to use some of the features.
4) I do know how to connect to my router, and am currently connected to it, both with a PC and with the Wii.
5) The name is UbuntuDupe, not UbuntuDope.
That's quite a bit you managed to get wrong.
And I'd explain the basis for my name, if I were willing to trash this account's karma.
Okay, but on my wireless router monitor on my computer, I don't know how to change anything. It doesn't mention how to do any of that, even in help files. I don't know how to add/remove/change encryption, or see who else is on, or what. There's no option to look at any of that, even after putting in the CD's that come with it. I use a linksys b/g or whatever. Or do you switch channels on the router itself? Help!
However, the update on the night I used the Wii store was slow, but not that much. It took maybe 5mins to download the update. Perhaps that was before most people where doing their updates, but I didn't find it too bad.
... still 10% complete. 30 minutes later ... yay, it's advanced a few pixels! Wait ... *gets out ruler* ... Damn!"
Okay, give me a teensy weensy bit of credit here. I didn't give up after five minutes. I supsect most people didn't either, as the progress bar would be filling up rapidly. When I say slow, I mean: "Leave, come back 30 minutes later, it's 10% complete. Come back 30 minutes later, it's
If you want to see someone disapointed give them exactly twice as much stuff for exactly twice the price ... If you want to see someone excited give them exactly half as much stuff for half the price ... I'm not sure if it is human nature,
It's the law of diminishing marginal utility*. Increase the stimulus linearly, perception (or appreciation) of it increases logarithmically. Increase the stimulus exponentially, perception increases linearly. That's why sound (among other things) is usually reported on a logarithmic scale.
The corollary is increasing marginal disutility. Decrease the stimulus linearly, perception decreases exponentially. (Flip the logarithm curve over.) That's why half the stuff at half the price is attractive, and it explains why people pay more than the actuarially expected loss (loss times probability) to avoid the loss, i.e., buy insurance.
*Yes, I'm simplifying the part about where the law applies. Bear with me.
I didn't have that issue (luckily) but I did have similar problems. For one, as most Wii users have noted, starting from Sunday (11/19) the updating process takes a LONG time. What's more, when I got tired of waitng and turned off the power and back on again, it brought me right back to the same screen. The only way I could get back to gaming was to disconnect the wireless router's power so there was no internet access, forcing it to abort back to the Wii menu. Luckily, updates finished last night when I tried and didn't take forever then.
... isn't the same thing going to have to happen in the future, and with more people, since they have to do more similarly-sized updates then?
People say the delay was from the huge number of Wiiners coming online and downloading, but, uh
Don't misunderstand me -- I *love* the Wii, and I've had a lot of fun with it since Sunday. It's worth its purchase price several times over. I'm not trying to stir up anti-Wii fud.
Well, it's not a truck, that's for damn sure.
I work with a few 70+ year old contract employees, and I've had success with making things easy for them, in that they're always ecstatic when I show them what they can do and make it easy. I agree that just having them go to bookmarks would be a tremendous help. Another idea is to put shortcuts on the desktop with clear descriptions, which is what I often do for them (though only so far for directory locations). And take the time to show them the steps and make sure they can do it.
Also, let them know that if anything is difficult or otherwise unpleasant, let you know. This is because you probably know a trick that obviates that problem, but didn't know to tell them before. It's hard to anticipate everything they might find useful.
Oh, and increasing the text size would be a great idea if you didn't already think of it.
I don't.
But I will add this: those numbers are what is required to make up manufacturing costs. That doesn't say anything about pre-manufacturing R&D or marketing, which are not amortized across all consoles in those calculations.
So let's make a conservative estimate: $30 licensing revenue for Sony per game sold. Then you have to sell, on average, 8-10 games per console, NEW. And if you manage that feat, you've still lost the full R&D and marketing costs. And the fewer consoles they sell, the more each would have to buy to cover his "share" of those costs.
I don't see how it can happen, but at the same time, I can't convince myself that they didn't do this calculation in advance.
I can't wait to hear Microsoft's explanation why the project should use one of their proprietary formats.
That's a good point, and I wish fewer people would neglect the "ownership value" (e.g., including voting rights) that come with stock when talking about it's value. Still, I wish you wouldn't keep describing stock ownership as "having something", when the difference you were actually trying to highlight was that buying stock gives you ownership rights, while Sony's "investment" gives it no similar right. However, it can still "sell" what it "bought": Sony could sell to someone else the stream of software license revenues that result from such a loss leader, although that would be impractical due to the difficulties in differentiating sales that would vs. would not accrue from selling at a loss.
there is a difference. If you invest in stock you get something, stock. You made a purchase that may or may not increase in value. When Sony loses money selling consoles they don't have anything. They have arguable increased their potential of selling games and movies.
:-P
Well, true, until you realize that the "something" that is stock, is itself just the potential of it having future value -- just like the $306 loss "investment".
IMHO, the difference is that Sony's loss-leader investment is much less likely to earn a positive return
And a CD is a glorified cassette which is a glorified 8-track which is a glorified record which is a glorified phonograph plate (???) which is a glorified imitation singer which is a glorified minstrel which is a glorified poet which is a glorified storyteller which is a glorified cave wall painting which is a glorified grunt, which was really just to pick up cave chicks anyway before resorting to beating them and dragging them hairwise to your cave.
Good point. A lot of people don't realize that a major (if not primary) driver of urban sprawl and high real estate prices is people using more roundabout means to keep their kids from having to go to school with the riff-raff (which doesn't necessarily mean minority, but usually does). This leads to a zero sum game where people pay more to be in the best school districts, not merely "good ones".
In my opinion, most everyone would be better off if they just accepted that rich people are going to find some way to get their kids into more exclusive schools, and instead focused on increasing school choice (rather than having the school district lock-in) so that this struggle doesn't have the collateral damage of the environment, transportation congestion, and difficulty buying a home.
Well, I noticed the same thing. I think the way they designed it, you turn by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen. It probably has some algorithms dependent upon some kind of timing related to this. The upshot is, if you point it away from the screen too far or too long, it doesn't know what to do, so you have to keep it pointed at the screen. Kind of tires my arm.
Whenever it goes haywire, I'm always able to fix it by just pointing the Wiimote at the center of the screen, and it'll "recenter" you and quit moving.
(grr, browser deleted first attempt at response)
There's a lot of "I like the Xbox360 better" in this review. Ok, great. Good luck with that. But this is supposed to be a PS3 review, not a console buying guide that compares the different features. Buy a 360 if you want one. I hear they're great. But "the PS3 is not an XBOX360" is not a valid criticism.
It's not saying "PS3 != Xbox360". It's saying "PS3 lacks what Xbox360 had at the same point in time". And a review should tell me whether it's a waste of money, and the question of whether something comparable is better speaks directly to that.
His first specific criticism is that there's no cable to hook up a PS3 to an HD TV. This is simply incorrect. Sony includes a cable that works fine. It doesn't do HD, but it does hook up and let you use the system. This kind of untruth is to be expected from the NY Times, which is more about an agenda than about accurately describing the factual situation.
Well, that was more to emphasize a deficiency, but I'll agree it was misleading.
There are some things the reviewer found annoying. These are valid points. But it's the first weekend of the PS3. Did everything go perfectly on the first weekend for the XBOX360? Does everything ever go perfectly? This part of the review was not balanced, but it was useful and therefore adequate.
But it was balanced -- at the time of the Xbox360's launch, it was quick to set up. At the PS3's launch, it wasn't. Apples to apples.
There's a paragraph about televisions and walkmans. Does that tell you if the PS3 is fun?
Please, that's just background info, to acknowledge that this is a deviation from a brand's otherwise good historic reputation.
I give your review review a 3.5.
"Who reviews the reviewer reviewers? Reviewer reviewer reviewers review reviewer reviewers."
It's true that bigotry can creep in through many avenues, but you're showing the *harm* here, not the harmlessness, of such non-discrimination laws. Such laws are actually written with the intent to prevent *even those* workarounds you just described. It's called "racial steering" or other things depending on the context. I heard a story about one landlord who offered one prospective tenant a soda, but not another one. The other one was black, and it has an FHA sting. The litigation hurt.
The end result of such laws is that for them to work, you have to regulate a whole litany of human interaction behaviors. You'd have to be told when you can smile, when you have to keep your apartments in good condition, when you can and can't do background checks, etc. Such laws, if implemented, would suck all humanity out of ordinary life. Most "neighborhoods with character", for example, would have to be eviscerated.