You don't get visas at the immigration desk in the US, you get visas at the US embassy in your home country before you leave. I have a US visa and I have to travel back to my home country every few years to get it renewed. However, most EU citizens on short trips to the US don't need visas, they travel on what's called the visa waiver program. That requires you to fill in a short form essentially stating you're a "normal person" and you get a stamp at immigration and in you go.
And yes, the US - like every other country - can deny anyone entry even if they have a visa. That's one of the risks of international travel.
The point however is that these regulations aren't to prevent terrorists entering the US through an airport, they're to prevent them entering through a skyscraper (think 9/11) so collecting the personal info on the ground after they land is too late.
I'm not saying I think they're effective - obviously not, they're dumb like most of the recent security measures - but the whole point is to know about the incoming passengers before they hit US airspace.
Simple, Sony don't rent games - Blockbuster do. In other words, the rental transaction happens at the lowest level of the chain - between the consumer and the rental location. For Sony to allow rentals ONLY they'd have to either (a) handle all the consumer relationship themselves - in other words shut out all retail outlets from getting stock or (b) persuade the retail stores to handle their rentals. I'm not sure either is very likely.
And of course beatport, audiojelly, playittonight and many others. All the dance labels seem remarkably sensible about this kind of thing, which is great.
Yeah, I was just going to mention those. Plus audiojelly.com & playittonight.com. I'm eternally grateful that the dance labels (even what I would consider "majors") understand that their customers are not criminals and just want to listen to the music.
Did you have a chance to play the Wii while you were at E3?
I did not and I wanted to. I've been reserving judgment on it completely until I get hands on time with it and I just want to, just control it. My schedule was so jam-packed that there was no way I'd be able to hang out in line like that and I'm not that well connected with Nintendo to be able to skip through the line like Robin Williams is.
Hell, I was able to skip the 4 hour line into the Nintendo booth and get a guided tour and I'm no-one. I can't imagaine for a second the nice girl at corporate relations wouldn't extend the same courtesy to someone like CliffyB. Not only that, but if you were happy to restrict yourself to just one or two titles at a time, most of the major dev houses had Wii's backstage for private demos of their titles. I had a nice uninterrupted 20 minutes with the upcoming Sega games - and again, I'm nothing in this business so if I can get in there anyone can.
The XBox360 was supposed to have HD-DVD and it doesn't. (Of course that's coming this year though who knows what port it'll hook up to. If I'm using the wireless adaptor and have two wired joysticks I have no spare USB ports for an HD-DVD player... oops, guess I'll have to get an XBox360 branded hub.) The HD-DVD drive connects to the rear USB port. It includes a couple of extra USB ports on the drive itself, so your wireless adapter would connect to that. There's even a clip on the back of the drive to attach the adapter to.
Or, of course, you can use a hub. Any hub - there are no plans (that I'm aware of) for a 360 branded one.
This is a pretty comprehensive listing, it shows the PS as having 12 titles at the US launch.
As for the Wii, it's currently showing 18 titles. I didn't see 27 titles at E3 (far from it) but there were a number of tech demos (which won't be released) and each of the sub-games of Wii Sports was being shown on a different stand - I imagine this accounts for the disparity. 15-18 seems like a good average number for the new console launches.
What's the "turning setup"? Do you mean the tech demos like the obstacle course? I was in the Nintendo booth for a good 30 minutes, as well as spending a while back stage with Sega on the new Sonic and Monkey Ball. I didn't play Zelda, or Metroid, or Mario, but I did have a quick go on Red Steel. I stand by my opinion, you're welcome to yours.
I played Red Steel for a couple of minutes, Zelda isn't my kinda game and the line was crazy for Metroid. It was good, but I didn't feel a massive difference from, say, an arcade light gun game.
The Wii is cool no doubt (it's certainly the best looking of the new consoles) and the controller is a nice idea, but I'm still concerned about it's sticking power. All the games I've tried with the Wii have essentially used it as a gimmick, in other words the game is built around the controller. So you can bang drums, or play tennis, or guide a character down a course. But it all still felt a little "bolted on"...like it was fun at first because of the novelty but who knows when that will wear off? So I'm all for the Wii and I'm sure I'll buy one, but I'm still not 100% sold that it's the greatest thing ever.
Halo 2 continues to be the top game on Live. Not a 360 title.
Hardly surprising, there are what - 22 million Xbox units out there compared with maybe 4 million 360s? What surprises me is how many 360 titles ARE in the overall top 10.
Likewise, I find it interesting that to this date MS refuse to state how many Live subscribers and users they have Some facts from Microsoft:
This quarter, we shipped 1.7 million Xbox 360 consoles, bringing our cumulative sales to date to 3.2 million consoles with 1.8 million in North America, 1.1 million in Europe and 300,000 in the rest of the world.
Attach rates on the Xbox Live service remain strong, with more than half of all Xbox 360 consoles sold connected to the service either via Silver or Gold tier memberships.
Gamers have downloaded 10 million pieces of digital content from Xbox Live Marketplace in less than five months. Over 4 million downloads have been made from Xbox Live Arcade since launch.
So there you have it. 4 million consoles (let's be generous, the figures are a little old), and "more than half" are connected to Live. So 2+ million on the 360 alone. I seem to remember the Live attach rate for Xbox 1 being around 10%, so figure another couple of million there. Plus there's been 10 million downloads (5 per user on average) and 4 million game downloads (2 per user). The download-to-sale ratio for XBLA is also very high (can't find the quote right now) - something like 30%. For me the success of XBLA is huge, and not as significant for MS as for the indy game developers who now have a very large paying audience.
Relatedly, Live's downtime yesterday has resulted in an underwhelming feature addition: messaging.
This is a myth. Microsoft have said repeatedly that the downtime was not for any specific new features but to prepare the various systems (Xbox Live, xbox.com, forums, etc) for future upgrades and the onslaught of E3 (masses of trailers, demos, etc). The messaging addon is nice, but you can't seriously believe they took down the entire network for a day to add a feature like that.
I can understand the 13 year olds on the forums not understanding the need for downtime for infrastructure upgrades and rework, but I'd expect a little more from the/. crowd.
me of when I could order groceries online, but that was cancelled due to the lack of popularity. I suppose America isn't ready to take the final step to pure laziness.
Well I live just outside New York and have been using online grocery delivery for several years. All the local supermarkets offer the service, plus there are independent operators like FreshDirect. And it's not laziness, it's convenience. I have better things to do with my extremely limited spare time than stand in line at the supermarket.
Online groceries are doing just fine. In my area the local supermarkets all offer "order online & deliver next day" options, plus there's independent competition like FreshDirect. We haven't done our main grocery shopping in a B&M store for years.
Oh please. That works for the initial delivery, sure. But the 360 shortage was very real and lasted way beyond the limit of any hype benefit to the point where MS admit it hurt them. And as for your second assertion, well it's crap. Most resellers got far less units shipped than they had preorders for, so selling out really didn't require a contract.
I've been through the same thing - I feel your pain. A couple of points. I found that adding SPF records to my domain helped somewhat. Secondly, it stopped in the end. In my case I now get no bounces (and no spam, thanks to greylisting) - all in all I was being swamped for probably 2 months.
Xbox 360 was released on Nov 22. That's about 5 months ago. So it hasn't been sitting on shelves for 6 months ANYWHERE. Add that to the fact that consoles have only been freely available (in the US) for about a month at most, and well, you can see what rubbish you're spouting.
What's more, MS recently INCREASED their sales forecast for year end (June 30) from 4.5-5.5M to 5.0-5.5M. As of about now, they say they've shipped 1.8M in the US/Canada and 3.2M worldwide. 2M more in 2 months? Easy.
When the PSP writes a 256 KB file to the Memory Stick, is it any faster? Yes, 256K is nothing whatsoever. PSP writes to MS at between 1.5-4MB/s, depending on the speed of card used.
Exactly the same problem here, I've seen it push over a gig and the machine grinds to a halt. Really really frustrating. In fact, I just bought more RAM purely to try and keep firefox running a little longer. I must be insane...
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And that's why I said they were dumb. However, that doesn't change the fact of why these rules were put in place.
You don't get visas at the immigration desk in the US, you get visas at the US embassy in your home country before you leave. I have a US visa and I have to travel back to my home country every few years to get it renewed. However, most EU citizens on short trips to the US don't need visas, they travel on what's called the visa waiver program. That requires you to fill in a short form essentially stating you're a "normal person" and you get a stamp at immigration and in you go.
And yes, the US - like every other country - can deny anyone entry even if they have a visa. That's one of the risks of international travel.
The point however is that these regulations aren't to prevent terrorists entering the US through an airport, they're to prevent them entering through a skyscraper (think 9/11) so collecting the personal info on the ground after they land is too late.
I'm not saying I think they're effective - obviously not, they're dumb like most of the recent security measures - but the whole point is to know about the incoming passengers before they hit US airspace.
Simple, Sony don't rent games - Blockbuster do. In other words, the rental transaction happens at the lowest level of the chain - between the consumer and the rental location. For Sony to allow rentals ONLY they'd have to either (a) handle all the consumer relationship themselves - in other words shut out all retail outlets from getting stock or (b) persuade the retail stores to handle their rentals. I'm not sure either is very likely.
And of course beatport, audiojelly, playittonight and many others. All the dance labels seem remarkably sensible about this kind of thing, which is great.
Yeah, I was just going to mention those. Plus audiojelly.com & playittonight.com. I'm eternally grateful that the dance labels (even what I would consider "majors") understand that their customers are not criminals and just want to listen to the music.
Did you have a chance to play the Wii while you were at E3?
I did not and I wanted to. I've been reserving judgment on it completely until I get hands on time with it and I just want to, just control it. My schedule was so jam-packed that there was no way I'd be able to hang out in line like that and I'm not that well connected with Nintendo to be able to skip through the line like Robin Williams is.
Hell, I was able to skip the 4 hour line into the Nintendo booth and get a guided tour and I'm no-one. I can't imagaine for a second the nice girl at corporate relations wouldn't extend the same courtesy to someone like CliffyB. Not only that, but if you were happy to restrict yourself to just one or two titles at a time, most of the major dev houses had Wii's backstage for private demos of their titles. I had a nice uninterrupted 20 minutes with the upcoming Sega games - and again, I'm nothing in this business so if I can get in there anyone can.
The XBox360 was supposed to have HD-DVD and it doesn't. (Of course that's coming this year though who knows what port it'll hook up to. If I'm using the wireless adaptor and have two wired joysticks I have no spare USB ports for an HD-DVD player... oops, guess I'll have to get an XBox360 branded hub.)
The HD-DVD drive connects to the rear USB port. It includes a couple of extra USB ports on the drive itself, so your wireless adapter would connect to that. There's even a clip on the back of the drive to attach the adapter to.
Or, of course, you can use a hub. Any hub - there are no plans (that I'm aware of) for a 360 branded one.
This is a pretty comprehensive listing, it shows the PS as having 12 titles at the US launch.
As for the Wii, it's currently showing 18 titles. I didn't see 27 titles at E3 (far from it) but there were a number of tech demos (which won't be released) and each of the sub-games of Wii Sports was being shown on a different stand - I imagine this accounts for the disparity. 15-18 seems like a good average number for the new console launches.
What's the "turning setup"? Do you mean the tech demos like the obstacle course? I was in the Nintendo booth for a good 30 minutes, as well as spending a while back stage with Sega on the new Sonic and Monkey Ball. I didn't play Zelda, or Metroid, or Mario, but I did have a quick go on Red Steel. I stand by my opinion, you're welcome to yours.
I played Red Steel for a couple of minutes, Zelda isn't my kinda game and the line was crazy for Metroid. It was good, but I didn't feel a massive difference from, say, an arcade light gun game.
Just like Xbox Live Arcade then? There's nothing new in the virtual console...the emulation and back cat are what make it interesting.
The Wii is cool no doubt (it's certainly the best looking of the new consoles) and the controller is a nice idea, but I'm still concerned about it's sticking power. All the games I've tried with the Wii have essentially used it as a gimmick, in other words the game is built around the controller. So you can bang drums, or play tennis, or guide a character down a course. But it all still felt a little "bolted on"...like it was fun at first because of the novelty but who knows when that will wear off? So I'm all for the Wii and I'm sure I'll buy one, but I'm still not 100% sold that it's the greatest thing ever.
Hardly surprising, there are what - 22 million Xbox units out there compared with maybe 4 million 360s? What surprises me is how many 360 titles ARE in the overall top 10.
Likewise, I find it interesting that to this date MS refuse to state how many Live subscribers and users they have
Some facts from Microsoft:
So there you have it. 4 million consoles (let's be generous, the figures are a little old), and "more than half" are connected to Live. So 2+ million on the 360 alone. I seem to remember the Live attach rate for Xbox 1 being around 10%, so figure another couple of million there. Plus there's been 10 million downloads (5 per user on average) and 4 million game downloads (2 per user). The download-to-sale ratio for XBLA is also very high (can't find the quote right now) - something like 30%. For me the success of XBLA is huge, and not as significant for MS as for the indy game developers who now have a very large paying audience.
I see a lot of positives here.
Relatedly, Live's downtime yesterday has resulted in an underwhelming feature addition: messaging.
/. crowd.
This is a myth. Microsoft have said repeatedly that the downtime was not for any specific new features but to prepare the various systems (Xbox Live, xbox.com, forums, etc) for future upgrades and the onslaught of E3 (masses of trailers, demos, etc). The messaging addon is nice, but you can't seriously believe they took down the entire network for a day to add a feature like that.
I can understand the 13 year olds on the forums not understanding the need for downtime for infrastructure upgrades and rework, but I'd expect a little more from the
me of when I could order groceries online, but that was cancelled due to the lack of popularity. I suppose America isn't ready to take the final step to pure laziness.
Well I live just outside New York and have been using online grocery delivery for several years. All the local supermarkets offer the service, plus there are independent operators like FreshDirect. And it's not laziness, it's convenience. I have better things to do with my extremely limited spare time than stand in line at the supermarket.
Online groceries are doing just fine. In my area the local supermarkets all offer "order online & deliver next day" options, plus there's independent competition like FreshDirect. We haven't done our main grocery shopping in a B&M store for years.
Whichever made me the most profit. Units shipped != profit.
Oh please. That works for the initial delivery, sure. But the 360 shortage was very real and lasted way beyond the limit of any hype benefit to the point where MS admit it hurt them. And as for your second assertion, well it's crap. Most resellers got far less units shipped than they had preorders for, so selling out really didn't require a contract.
I've been through the same thing - I feel your pain. A couple of points. I found that adding SPF records to my domain helped somewhat. Secondly, it stopped in the end. In my case I now get no bounces (and no spam, thanks to greylisting) - all in all I was being swamped for probably 2 months.
And those mid-range rigs will still cost significantly more than a 360.
Xbox 360 was released on Nov 22. That's about 5 months ago. So it hasn't been sitting on shelves for 6 months ANYWHERE. Add that to the fact that consoles have only been freely available (in the US) for about a month at most, and well, you can see what rubbish you're spouting.
What's more, MS recently INCREASED their sales forecast for year end (June 30) from 4.5-5.5M to 5.0-5.5M. As of about now, they say they've shipped 1.8M in the US/Canada and 3.2M worldwide. 2M more in 2 months? Easy.
When the PSP writes a 256 KB file to the Memory Stick, is it any faster?
Yes, 256K is nothing whatsoever. PSP writes to MS at between 1.5-4MB/s, depending on the speed of card used.
They're charging no more than people appear to be willing to pay. The problem?
Well I have never had a virus in 15 years of running Windows. Does that mean that viruses on Windows are impossible? or a myth?
Exactly the same problem here, I've seen it push over a gig and the machine grinds to a halt. Really really frustrating. In fact, I just bought more RAM purely to try and keep firefox running a little longer. I must be insane...