@Cgoodno, it only takes a second to delete any email... but that the excuse every single spammer uses. Complaining about it now will keep Sony from elevating this to the level of regular spam.
Last year, on the coldest day of 2008, I went to pull money from an ATM to buy xmas presents for my wife. I had to click through an ad while standing in freezing winds. I went into the bank, got the corporate number, and spoke to the assistant to the president of marketing. Turns out it was...
@Cgodno: Horrible? No. Annoying and an unnecessary waste of time? Yes.
And as it turns out, I don't pay my wife for her services - discount coupons would be unnecessary in an entirely different way.
...I have a business relationship. They want to 'thank' me, they can offer a coupon or a discount or something business-related. I get 'thinking of you' emails from my wife, I don't need one from a console maker.
Happened to me - backed up my hard drive to an external USB one, reformatted to make a Linux partition, and the restore always failed 26% in, no matter what I did. Lost a fair number of my and my son's saved games. (Should have backed them up separately, grr. I now back up saved games regularly to a USB stick. Thankfully, I don't have any games that won't let you do that.)
One of the first if not the first 'hacker' games, and definitely one of the best.
@1.21 - Well, I counteract at least one sub-18er. I just turned 40. But I'm educated and economically all right, so I fit that part of the mold. And you know, to a limited extent I'd even agree with LazyDevs. I know I can't match the reflexes of a caffienated 13-year-old, or waste hours/day practicing a game.
But strategy, on the other hand... heh heh heh.
I played about an hour of inFamous last night, no problems. I'm thinking about going back to the "classic" theme, though. The sparkles just aren't doing it for me. As Penny Arcade put it, I don't need my console "tarted up like a gay disco": http://www.penny-arcade.com...
Misspelling his name. Oh, wait, I see you've got that covered.
@Meerkat - Because the U.K. is the size of a largish U.S. state (Michigan is slightly larger, with 1/6th the population), and the U.S. has fifty states. Running an order of magnitude more fiber costs $$.
The U.S. will lag Japan and Europe in streaming video as well as phones for a long time to come.
The article seems to equate inFamous and Prototype in terms of choice, but they're actually very different. In Prototype, you almost inevitably slaughter civilians by the hundreds. Prototype's designers said they wanted to give the player the feeling of being a badass. That can be fun, but there isn't a whole lot of ambiguity there.
On the other hand, inFamous really does give you a choice of being good or evil. I enjoyed my playthrough on good - minimizing civilian casualties, t...
Sorry, FamilyGuy, OtherOS is *gone* in the Slim, even on an external drive.
Though as you say, the Linux option only appeals to a tiny fraction of the market. Almost certainly less than the number of people who own Bravia TVs, really.
I'm glad I have a phat, because I'm one of those weirdos who put Linux on their machine, and I don't have a Bravia. For most people, I agree that the Slim's a better fit.
How about you can download and pay to play, or you can download and play as long as the PS2 disc is in the drive?
...inFAMOUS (only on PS3) has outsold Prototype (PS3 and 360 combined) for the last two weeks. Prototype's sold about 9K each on PS3 and 360, while inFAMOUS has sold ~23K on just the PS3. Looks like this week Prototype did slightly better, though.
Of course, inFAMOUS was released earlier...
C64, yes, yes, we do get it. But there are a few things you're not getting.
1) The loss for the PS3 is hard to determine because the games division was rolled into another division and teasing out how much loss comes from what parts ain't easy.
2) Recent cost reductions on the PS3 won't necessarily show up even in "Sony's MOST recent report".
3) If the "70% reduction" figure applies to the Slim, then the future looks bright - Sony can...
Sorry, I'm a big Linux fan, I have Ubuntu on my PS3... and even I can't buy that. The article lays out a pretty good case. (a) PS3s bought for supercomputers don't add to Sony's profit margins, and (b) it keeps people from using PS3s to rip Blu-ray disks. I'll add (c): porting the hypervisor to new hardware costs money, for little benefit.
This is exactly the kind of chin Occam's Razor was meant to shave.
In computers, there's the 80-20 rule. The first 80% takes about 20% of the effort, and the last 20% takes 80% of the effort. Writing a PS2 emulator that handles the common stuff on the PS3 isn't that hard. It's handling ALL the corner cases and weird crap the developers did that makes it tough.
So, the most sensible thing for Sony to do is write a basic emulator that handles 80-90% of the emulation job. Then, take the games and 'port' them to this emulator - change the games so t...
@c64: The "70% reduction" wasn't really given a timeframe. They never said exactly when it was reached or at what rate it was reached. It seems likely that manufacturing costs were quite a bit higher until fairly recently, and a recent large reduction wouldn't show up in the financials.
There's also the possibility that Sony's putting spin on things - that the 70% figure applies to the Slim. The wording I've seen reported is just vague enough to make that possible.
...but Linux on the PS3 runs under a 'hypervisor', a software layer between Linux and the hardware. Sony probably just didn't want to spend the time (and therefore money) it would take to modify that hypervisor for the Slim hardware.
I can't blame them, really, though I'm a little sad. Not may people used it. I like Linux and even I don't use it on my PS3 much.
...he was assuming it would take time ("it'll take a while for Sony to overcome that first-year advantage" [of the 360]) and there would be backward compatibility. "When Sony launches the PS3, if the lineup is comparable, and if it's fully backward compatible, plug and play without a software patch, then I think Sony keeps most of their customers."
Like everyone else, he failed to predict the Wii's runaway success, though.
...but I just saw a study not long ago that confirms that men tend to make a lot more errors right after they see an attractive woman. Not that you can't see it in action in any online game, as you point out.