Even if the PS3 itself sucks, it can still play some of the great PS2 games I own and upcoming PS2 titles that shouldn't disappoint
So you've just replaced your $100 PS2 with a $600 PS3? Genius!!
Vaporware: As far a vaporware, there were working PS3's casing and all, not dev kits, at E3 this year. They were in those back rooms that are reserved for industry insiders
Interesting - I didn't see any. Sega didn't have any. They were just in the Sony booth? So they had what - 4 or 5 units? That's just an engineer spending a couple of days cramming a dev kit in a plastic box.
IMO the PS3 looks cleaner and has more detail. That may sound like there is not big difference but when you consider that the 360 is on 2nd gen titles while the PS3 is running unfinished ones, I would say at the end of the day the gap is going to be very wide and very noticeable.
The 360 wasn't really on 2nd gen games at E3, there was a big drought in new releases after Christmas. Given also that the PS3 demos were just that, demos, not full games (ask a Forza developer what they think of the GT-HD "demo" if you want a laugh).
I'll wait and see what Sony can come up with, but so far I'm unimpressed.
I own a HDTV and I have the means to afford it
Me too. Isn't it great? Any particular reason you haven't spent the last 6 months playing HD games then? If you're so rich why not buy all 3 consoles?
All the E3 demos were running on dev kits, not final PS3 hardware (and before any uninformed PS3 fans deny this, I was there, I saw them and I posted photos on flickr). Having said that, at this stage in the game I'd expect devkits to pretty much exactly match final specs (although I've heard rumors lately of a speed drop on the cpu). Anyway, regardless of all that games were running and were playable. And they were decent looking - but certainly not obviously better than anything the 360 can do. I spent a few minutes studying Virtua Tennis running side by side on a 360 and a PS3 and couldn't tell the difference. I even asked the producer if there was a difference and he said "basically, no". That's only one game and only one developer (Sega), but I'm personally not holding my breath for any major jump in graphics over the 360.
Well how about this for a rule of thumb - if the you can't spell the username you shouldn't be given the password. Why are you having users log in as admin rather than logging in remotely and fixing whatever needs fixing?
Actually I've had more luck getting discounts since moving to the US than I ever did in the UK. Over there, the best I'd get would be a free extended warranty or free delivery or something. The trick, by the way, is to ask if there's a better price available "for cash". The store saves the 3% CC handling fee which can be significant on a large item and will often find a way to split it with you. That worked a number of times buying things like TVs from John Lewis.
Anyway, here in the US pretty much every big store (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc) will price match. They'll also frequently accept competitors coupons. Combine those with scanning the weekly ads and you can get some great deals. They're not quite the "negotiated discount" you might get in many asian countries, but I got a $300 Roomba for around $140 a while ago - over 50% off the sticker price - by combining price matching, rebates and coupons.
I think that depends entirely on which part of Japan or Australia you're talking about. I'm sure central Tokyo is more than that, likewise Sydney Harbour. Just within my state (NJ) prices for comparable apartments range from $600 to $3500 depending on location.
Firstly, as many people have already pointed out, the 360 has over 40 games available right now. Not 8 or 9 by christmas.
Secondly, the Wii is graphically weak compared to PS3 or 360. Nintendo have agreed on this point. I've played the games you linked to, and they're better than NGC for sure - and not terrible by any means, but they're nowhere near as good looking (from a technical point of view) as the current 360 titles. What is questionable is how much this matters - Nintendo seem to think not much - and I agree with them to a point. What they're good at is creating great visual style without relying on technical bells & whistles. However, I think the simple lack of horsepower will affect 3rd party developers trying to port from the other machines. That coupled with the 13 year old rabid Halo fanboy crowd who are spec obsessed will cut into the Wii's appeal in the traditional gaming markets. The gamble is whether they can make that up in the new casual markets they're going after. We'll see.
Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD? Why not? It adds nothing to the cost, in comparitive terms.
If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities Except that dual head cards are now entirely standard (virtually all cards over $30 are dual head capable) and so we're not talking small production quantities we're talking huge quantities. The cost is utterly negligible.
In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers No, it really doesn't. Distributed computers work well (for certain problems) because of huge scale - hundreds or thousands of nodes. This lets you scale easily by adding more nodes, and replace dead nodes without adversly affecting performance. Clustering can also be used to make use of cheaper components at the expense of some performance - 16 single CPU nodes will not perform as well as one 16-cpu beast.
On the other hand, with graphics we're looking at a typical maximum of what, 8 screens? With the average being between 1 and 2? That's just not comparable. It's not a "distributed" GPU, it's a "remote" GPU. The average user with one screen will still have one GPU, it'll just be on the end of a wire. What does that buy him? Nothing. In the case of a laptop user who occasionally uses a monitor and projector - he now needs 3 GPUs. Again, why? One works just fine for him today. Where you get into people with multiple screens in use at once, like myself, again - what does it buy me? I currently have one GPU - why have two? Each would need the same amount of texture ram as my current single card, so there's double the cost right away. They'll also need some way to communicate with the host and each other which just adds to the bandwidth requirements and complexity of your communications solution. All this to replace a simple uni-directional cable which works perfectly well. I simply don't get it.
And as a final point, I still think you underestimate the bandwidth requirements. Look at this page. We can see that PCIe x16 is 40GBit/s. That's huge - it's 8 times faster than the fastest SCSI standard and 30 times faster than fiber channel - in fact it's faster than most ram interfaces. Now I'm no electronics expert, so I'm not saying it's impossible, but getting that kind of speed in a 2 or 3 meter cable which is (a) cheap and (b) reliable seems non-trivial. The only cabled standard I can find with comparable speeds is OC768 which is far from cheap or commonplace.
Nintendo did very well at grabbing the limelight, but a lot of their plans were still rather vague. Microsoft put out a very strong software lineup and some interesting ideas on pervasive cross-platform gaming, the buzz around the floor was more MS than I expected, given that they didn't have any significant new hardware announcements. Sony crashed and burned.
But that's just my interpretation of what I heard and saw.
Do you know how fast PCI-Express is? Now explain why that standard even exists if PCI or ISA would do the job. Hint: I think you're forgetting about textures.
Besides that, I have dual screens on my desk. At $300, I'm quite glad I also don't have to buy dual video cards (although, that is of course an option with SLI). And, to be quite honest, I simply don't see what advantage there would be to putting the rendering hardware in the display. Why do it? Similarly, there is very little advantage (none in most cases) to putting audio hardware in speakers - which is why USB speakers are still quite rare despite having been on sale for years.
How on earth is JBoss a competitor of Sun?? JBoss is a flagship of the Java community and has certainly helped cement Java's position as an enterprise platform.
/me looks at Computing degree certificate hanging on wall....
It says there I'm an Engineer, in fact it says I'm a "Master of Engineering, First Class". But I don't design circuits and know little about electronics. In fact, if you're in the UK you can get full Chartered Engineer status (CEng) from the BCS - and that's as Engineery as it's possible to get.
I liked the two Sega games - Sonic and Monkey Ball. Both worked pretty well with the controller and the Monkey Ball minigames in particular were a lot of fun. Although, for several of them you'd need 2 controllers per player. We haven't yet seen the pricing on additional controllers...
You're right of course, dedicated distribution systems only make sense in dense areas. But the regular distribution methods are available everywhere right? Like USPS, FedEx etc? So the shipping of non-perishable goods should be possible - I guess I'm surprised that Amazon are pioneers in this sense. I think my main surprise was not that these services aren't available everywhere but that whoever wrote and posted this article (and a lot of the commenters) seemed to think they didn't exist anywhere. As you point out, in the UK & Europe, as well as NYC & surroundings - it's both available and popular.
That's how ShopRite work in my area. It's nice in that the local stores keep the business and aren't at risk of being closed down (online shopping is very popular around here) but the downside is that retail employees just aren't trained properly for dealing with online orders and service is patchy. We've had late deliveries, missing items, wrong items, etc. Switching to Fresh Direct who use dedicated distribution centers made a huge difference in the service quality, whilst keeping the food quality and pricing pretty much the same.
Who said canned goods? I buy all my groceries online, fresh meat, vegetables, cheese etc. And yes, the selection and quality is better than I get from local stores.
In the US, FreshDirect.com are great so if you're in an area they serve try them. Otherwise, ShopRite supermarkets (tri-state area) deliver and most accept orders online. In the UK I used to use Ocado (linked to Waitrose) which was excellent, I've also used Tesco online which was fine as well. I've really had very few really bad experiences with any of the services I've used over the years.
I've been buying my groceries online for years, and I intend to continue doing so. The food is better quality, there's more choice than my local supermarket and it's way more convenient. In my area right now there are 2 competing online services (that I'm aware of, might be more) so there's even a choice. I'd assumed this kind of service was available everywhere - I guess not.
I (and several friends) spent an evening in hospital on oxygen after an accidental "over-fogging" at a local laser tag arena a few years ago. We were holding a small room in a complex made from an old bank vault when the fog machine went crazy and filled the whole space with fog. Of course sensible people would have left when the breathing became hard but we had a position to defend:) Cue collapse, paramedics and aformentioned hospital stay. Fortunatly the match was a team training event not a public game so there were no small kids about, otherwise it could have been much nastier.
I'm sure the problem was mainly due to a lack of oxygen rather than any toxic effects of the fog itself, but it does sting your eyes and throat at high concentrations.
I'm not sure what you mean. The Illinois law was struck down as unconstitutional, just like the others - so that's another win for the ESA. The Maryland one, on the other hand, was actually supported by the ESA because it only concerned itself with explicit sexual content rather than vague terms like "unsuitable" or "violent". As far as I know, there are no games published in the US which would even qualify under the Maryland law (including Hot Coffee), so it seems more like it's simply trying to bring existing "don't sell porn to kids" laws up to date by including video games as well as existing media like DVD. Seems sensible to me. To quote the ESA:
"The ESA has always been supportive of the inclusion of video games to 'harmful to minor' statues that meet the Supreme Courts obscenity standards. We believe that video games should be treated in the same way that books and movies are treated under the law."
My fiance had her purse stolen while travelling in Italy a couple of weeks ago. Her debit card was used to spend over $600 at a clothing store a few hours later. The money was back in her account a couple of days later after we called the bank, and a new card was waiting when she got home. Sure a pain in the ass, but really not a big problem overall.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the PS3 itself sucks, it can still play some of the great PS2 games I own and upcoming PS2 titles that shouldn't disappoint
So you've just replaced your $100 PS2 with a $600 PS3? Genius!!
Vaporware: As far a vaporware, there were working PS3's casing and all, not dev kits, at E3 this year. They were in those back rooms that are reserved for industry insiders
Interesting - I didn't see any. Sega didn't have any. They were just in the Sony booth? So they had what - 4 or 5 units? That's just an engineer spending a couple of days cramming a dev kit in a plastic box.
IMO the PS3 looks cleaner and has more detail. That may sound like there is not big difference but when you consider that the 360 is on 2nd gen titles while the PS3 is running unfinished ones, I would say at the end of the day the gap is going to be very wide and very noticeable.
The 360 wasn't really on 2nd gen games at E3, there was a big drought in new releases after Christmas. Given also that the PS3 demos were just that, demos, not full games (ask a Forza developer what they think of the GT-HD "demo" if you want a laugh).
I'll wait and see what Sony can come up with, but so far I'm unimpressed.
I own a HDTV and I have the means to afford it
Me too. Isn't it great? Any particular reason you haven't spent the last 6 months playing HD games then? If you're so rich why not buy all 3 consoles?
Obvious 360 games which spring to mind that you might enjoy include:
Tomb Raider
Saints Row (out soon) which is a sandbox game in a similar vein to GTA3 (GTA4 will be on 360 as well)
The (many) puzzle games on XBLA
There's nothing quite like MGS, but there are a few "thinking shooters" coming along.
All the E3 demos were running on dev kits, not final PS3 hardware (and before any uninformed PS3 fans deny this, I was there, I saw them and I posted photos on flickr). Having said that, at this stage in the game I'd expect devkits to pretty much exactly match final specs (although I've heard rumors lately of a speed drop on the cpu). Anyway, regardless of all that games were running and were playable. And they were decent looking - but certainly not obviously better than anything the 360 can do. I spent a few minutes studying Virtua Tennis running side by side on a 360 and a PS3 and couldn't tell the difference. I even asked the producer if there was a difference and he said "basically, no". That's only one game and only one developer (Sega), but I'm personally not holding my breath for any major jump in graphics over the 360.
Well how about this for a rule of thumb - if the you can't spell the username you shouldn't be given the password. Why are you having users log in as admin rather than logging in remotely and fixing whatever needs fixing?
Actually I've had more luck getting discounts since moving to the US than I ever did in the UK. Over there, the best I'd get would be a free extended warranty or free delivery or something. The trick, by the way, is to ask if there's a better price available "for cash". The store saves the 3% CC handling fee which can be significant on a large item and will often find a way to split it with you. That worked a number of times buying things like TVs from John Lewis.
Anyway, here in the US pretty much every big store (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc) will price match. They'll also frequently accept competitors coupons. Combine those with scanning the weekly ads and you can get some great deals. They're not quite the "negotiated discount" you might get in many asian countries, but I got a $300 Roomba for around $140 a while ago - over 50% off the sticker price - by combining price matching, rebates and coupons.
I think that depends entirely on which part of Japan or Australia you're talking about. I'm sure central Tokyo is more than that, likewise Sydney Harbour. Just within my state (NJ) prices for comparable apartments range from $600 to $3500 depending on location.
Firstly, as many people have already pointed out, the 360 has over 40 games available right now. Not 8 or 9 by christmas.
Secondly, the Wii is graphically weak compared to PS3 or 360. Nintendo have agreed on this point. I've played the games you linked to, and they're better than NGC for sure - and not terrible by any means, but they're nowhere near as good looking (from a technical point of view) as the current 360 titles. What is questionable is how much this matters - Nintendo seem to think not much - and I agree with them to a point. What they're good at is creating great visual style without relying on technical bells & whistles. However, I think the simple lack of horsepower will affect 3rd party developers trying to port from the other machines. That coupled with the 13 year old rabid Halo fanboy crowd who are spec obsessed will cut into the Wii's appeal in the traditional gaming markets. The gamble is whether they can make that up in the new casual markets they're going after. We'll see.
Why carry something that can drive a display much heavier-duty than the onboard LCD?
Why not? It adds nothing to the cost, in comparitive terms.
If you've got dual monitors, you're using a dual monitor card, which isn't necessary for the much more common single monitor, and therefore much more expensive in small production quantities
Except that dual head cards are now entirely standard (virtually all cards over $30 are dual head capable) and so we're not talking small production quantities we're talking huge quantities. The cost is utterly negligible.
In other words, distributed GPU provides the same economics and efficiencies as distributed networks of host computers
No, it really doesn't. Distributed computers work well (for certain problems) because of huge scale - hundreds or thousands of nodes. This lets you scale easily by adding more nodes, and replace dead nodes without adversly affecting performance. Clustering can also be used to make use of cheaper components at the expense of some performance - 16 single CPU nodes will not perform as well as one 16-cpu beast.
On the other hand, with graphics we're looking at a typical maximum of what, 8 screens? With the average being between 1 and 2? That's just not comparable. It's not a "distributed" GPU, it's a "remote" GPU. The average user with one screen will still have one GPU, it'll just be on the end of a wire. What does that buy him? Nothing. In the case of a laptop user who occasionally uses a monitor and projector - he now needs 3 GPUs. Again, why? One works just fine for him today. Where you get into people with multiple screens in use at once, like myself, again - what does it buy me? I currently have one GPU - why have two? Each would need the same amount of texture ram as my current single card, so there's double the cost right away. They'll also need some way to communicate with the host and each other which just adds to the bandwidth requirements and complexity of your communications solution. All this to replace a simple uni-directional cable which works perfectly well. I simply don't get it.
And as a final point, I still think you underestimate the bandwidth requirements. Look at this page. We can see that PCIe x16 is 40GBit/s. That's huge - it's 8 times faster than the fastest SCSI standard and 30 times faster than fiber channel - in fact it's faster than most ram interfaces. Now I'm no electronics expert, so I'm not saying it's impossible, but getting that kind of speed in a 2 or 3 meter cable which is (a) cheap and (b) reliable seems non-trivial. The only cabled standard I can find with comparable speeds is OC768 which is far from cheap or commonplace.
Nintendo did very well at grabbing the limelight, but a lot of their plans were still rather vague. Microsoft put out a very strong software lineup and some interesting ideas on pervasive cross-platform gaming, the buzz around the floor was more MS than I expected, given that they didn't have any significant new hardware announcements. Sony crashed and burned.
But that's just my interpretation of what I heard and saw.
Do you know how fast PCI-Express is? Now explain why that standard even exists if PCI or ISA would do the job. Hint: I think you're forgetting about textures.
Besides that, I have dual screens on my desk. At $300, I'm quite glad I also don't have to buy dual video cards (although, that is of course an option with SLI). And, to be quite honest, I simply don't see what advantage there would be to putting the rendering hardware in the display. Why do it? Similarly, there is very little advantage (none in most cases) to putting audio hardware in speakers - which is why USB speakers are still quite rare despite having been on sale for years.
I think you missed the word "Names" in the article title.
How on earth is JBoss a competitor of Sun?? JBoss is a flagship of the Java community and has certainly helped cement Java's position as an enterprise platform.
/me looks at Computing degree certificate hanging on wall....
It says there I'm an Engineer, in fact it says I'm a "Master of Engineering, First Class". But I don't design circuits and know little about electronics. In fact, if you're in the UK you can get full Chartered Engineer status (CEng) from the BCS - and that's as Engineery as it's possible to get.
That's true, and it might work with that, but they were demoing them with 2 wiimotes. I'd have to reserve judgement...
I liked the two Sega games - Sonic and Monkey Ball. Both worked pretty well with the controller and the Monkey Ball minigames in particular were a lot of fun. Although, for several of them you'd need 2 controllers per player. We haven't yet seen the pricing on additional controllers...
You're right of course, dedicated distribution systems only make sense in dense areas. But the regular distribution methods are available everywhere right? Like USPS, FedEx etc? So the shipping of non-perishable goods should be possible - I guess I'm surprised that Amazon are pioneers in this sense. I think my main surprise was not that these services aren't available everywhere but that whoever wrote and posted this article (and a lot of the commenters) seemed to think they didn't exist anywhere. As you point out, in the UK & Europe, as well as NYC & surroundings - it's both available and popular.
That's how ShopRite work in my area. It's nice in that the local stores keep the business and aren't at risk of being closed down (online shopping is very popular around here) but the downside is that retail employees just aren't trained properly for dealing with online orders and service is patchy. We've had late deliveries, missing items, wrong items, etc. Switching to Fresh Direct who use dedicated distribution centers made a huge difference in the service quality, whilst keeping the food quality and pricing pretty much the same.
Who said canned goods? I buy all my groceries online, fresh meat, vegetables, cheese etc. And yes, the selection and quality is better than I get from local stores.
In the US, FreshDirect.com are great so if you're in an area they serve try them. Otherwise, ShopRite supermarkets (tri-state area) deliver and most accept orders online. In the UK I used to use Ocado (linked to Waitrose) which was excellent, I've also used Tesco online which was fine as well. I've really had very few really bad experiences with any of the services I've used over the years.
I've been buying my groceries online for years, and I intend to continue doing so. The food is better quality, there's more choice than my local supermarket and it's way more convenient. In my area right now there are 2 competing online services (that I'm aware of, might be more) so there's even a choice. I'd assumed this kind of service was available everywhere - I guess not.
I (and several friends) spent an evening in hospital on oxygen after an accidental "over-fogging" at a local laser tag arena a few years ago. We were holding a small room in a complex made from an old bank vault when the fog machine went crazy and filled the whole space with fog. Of course sensible people would have left when the breathing became hard but we had a position to defend :) Cue collapse, paramedics and aformentioned hospital stay. Fortunatly the match was a team training event not a public game so there were no small kids about, otherwise it could have been much nastier.
I'm sure the problem was mainly due to a lack of oxygen rather than any toxic effects of the fog itself, but it does sting your eyes and throat at high concentrations.
I'm not sure what you mean. The Illinois law was struck down as unconstitutional, just like the others - so that's another win for the ESA. The Maryland one, on the other hand, was actually supported by the ESA because it only concerned itself with explicit sexual content rather than vague terms like "unsuitable" or "violent". As far as I know, there are no games published in the US which would even qualify under the Maryland law (including Hot Coffee), so it seems more like it's simply trying to bring existing "don't sell porn to kids" laws up to date by including video games as well as existing media like DVD. Seems sensible to me. To quote the ESA:
"The ESA has always been supportive of the inclusion of video games to 'harmful to minor' statues that meet the Supreme Courts obscenity standards. We believe that video games should be treated in the same way that books and movies are treated under the law."
You forgot the "I'm feeling suicidal" button :)
My fiance had her purse stolen while travelling in Italy a couple of weeks ago. Her debit card was used to spend over $600 at a clothing store a few hours later. The money was back in her account a couple of days later after we called the bank, and a new card was waiting when she got home. Sure a pain in the ass, but really not a big problem overall.
Nudity != pornography. Case in point, you mention schools. Art departments have more nudity than your average issue of Hustler, and rightly so.