Quote:Last financial report I can find from Sony:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070726/bs_afp/japanelectronics

Or were you forgetting how successful MS as a whole is even though the Game division is one giant money pit itself?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...x-ravaging.html

Quote:Thinking more about the issue of the next generation of storage has me torn. On one hand I think a lot of technology (science for that matter) is done for the sake of science alone. But on the other hand, more often than not its necessity that lights the fire that makes technology spill into the main stream. But in this case, really where is the fire?

I'm sure I'll be looking back at this post sooner than I expect and thinking, god did I really say that? But here goes:

What real market is there going to be for large capacity discs in the foreseeable future? 100+ Gig video games are possible if you bump texture quality higher, but there's still significant bottle necks to displaying all those textures at once. The hardware bottlenecks that aren't likely to resolve themselves before more space is needed. 100+ gig movies? Hrm. Not until 'high def' goes through the roof. The only market I can see is for TV series to be released on one disc. Putting all seasons of Seinfeld on one disc would certainly call for some monstrous storage.

Internal HD's are already at 1TB (what are they up to now, +200 gig plus single platters?). Solid State drives promise more reliable backup than their spinning counterparts, and better long term storage than plastic cds/dvds/hddvds/blu-rays.

All of this is to say, I give up on speculating on the future technology. I don't think the need for a new data storage type will come soon enough, and with the fast (and set-back haunted) pace of technology these days the next true storage may be something entirely incomprehensible to me at this date.

Cheers,

Munk

PS. I'm getting old - I still can't get over how cool the idea of a blue laser is!:P

Quote:Going with HD is them trying to gain control over the console market.

Quote:I think this is the core of our disagreement. You think people pick consoles based on what HD format they support. If that is the case, then backing HD-DVD will help them dominate that space, "bury Sony", etc.

I don't think that's a significant factor. I think folks get consoles to play games. The content of those games is the determining factor. I can't imagine someone picking an XBox over a PS3 because the PS3 won't play "300". I can imagine picking an XBox to play Halo.

To support my point, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...pabilities.html

If they want to eat Sony's lunch, forcing them to use Microsoft technology and services to distribute their movies would be a nice way to do it. So much better than winning the format war and watching all that money go to Toshiba, no? So, the Paramount deal could be taken as a swipe at Sony, but I don't think it has much effect on the console war.

Quote:I think this is the core of our disagreement. You think people pick consoles based on what HD format they support. If that is the case, then backing HD-DVD will help them dominate that space, "bury Sony", etc.

I don't think that's a significant factor. I think folks get consoles to play games. The content of those games is the determining factor. I can't imagine someone picking an XBox over a PS3 because the PS3 won't play "300". I can imagine picking an XBox to play Halo.

To support my point, http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...pabilities.html

If they want to eat Sony's lunch, forcing them to use Microsoft technology and services to distribute their movies would be a nice way to do it. So much better than winning the format war and watching all that money go to Toshiba, no? So, the Paramount deal could be taken as a swipe at Sony, but I don't think it has much effect on the console war.

Quote:I think you're missing what I'm saying Bun. MS is supporting HD to hurt Sony, not just in the console market, but in other markets too. Sony and MS share more than just the console space where each company's finger touch different pies. If MS can get Sony to go under, that gives them more ability to sell in those area that the two are competitors. This is MS going after Sony to get them out of markets they share (and it's more than consoles). Sony has wrapped up a lot of their monies in Blu-ray and if it fails, Sony is going to fail as well (this is just like the VHS/Betamax war, the Betamax people ended up dying off because of Sony who was the originator of VHS).

Quote:I think you're missing what I'm saying Bun. MS is supporting HD to hurt Sony, not just in the console market, but in other markets too. Sony and MS share more than just the console space where each company's finger touch different pies. If MS can get Sony to go under, that gives them more ability to sell in those area that the two are competitors. This is MS going after Sony to get them out of markets they share (and it's more than consoles). Sony has wrapped up a lot of their monies in Blu-ray and if it fails, Sony is going to fail as well (this is just like the VHS/Betamax war, the Betamax people ended up dying off because of Sony who was the originator of VHS).

Quote:Starting a new tangent, does anybody have anything good to say about this game? From what I've read, I won't be picking it up, partly because of their draconian anti-pirate measures but also the overall look of the game if you're not lucky enough to have DX10. I'd love to hear from anyone who got the game and is loving it :)

Link to massive complaints about anti-pirate measures:
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5527

Mind you, it's a public company-run forum, so it reads sorta like blizzard's WoW-General:P

Quote:I think part of the problem is you're looking specifically at the home market. Data warehousing is starting to really take off in business. In order to have a good data warehouse you need space, lots of it. This is why things like SANs, NAS, and DAS have taken off (espeically SAN). As various business applications get more and more intricate, the need for more space becomes apparent (I've worked with SQL databases that were growing at 500% per year after routine compression done daily and sometimes hourly). While the general home user may not need this kind of space, business are screaming for it to try and keep down the foot print of their equipment in their data centers (along with the operating costs as less equipment requires less power, less personnel, and less maintenance).

Quote:Link to massive complaints about anti-pirate measures:
http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5527

Mind you, it's a public company-run forum, so it reads sorta like blizzard's WoW-General:P

Quote:Anyone heard anything about Two Worlds? Looks to be almost Morrowind/Oblivion like (in the non-linear, go wherever and do whatever sense) but with an online component.

Quote:Of course, if you want to forego all that copy protection malarky and have the game available for you on whatever number of computers you have access too (And are meaty enough to run it), then buy it on Steam. Simple as that. Set up a Steam account if you haven't got one already, buy Bioshock, then run a Steam backup of Bioshock and only Bioshock, burning the backup file on a DVD-R.

Quote:That's my major concern. The other is DX9, because all the reviewers undoubtedly have DX10 versions, and the other people I've talked to running DX9 are "meh" about the "uber graphics", and choppy. But I was interested in hearing from anyone here who's played it and loved it, c'mon I know you have to exist :lol:

Quote:I have played the game although on the 360. I love it. it is undoubtably the best game of the year. the problems with the PC however put me in the category that if i was looking into the PC version, i would not purchase it. the only real problem with the 360 version is the Widescreen issues that are in both PC and 360 version. (that being that the widescreen isn't really widescreen. just fullscreen with the top and bottom chopped off. Which is absurd that they would pull something like that in this day and age.)

My personal rating scores:

Xbox 360: 9.2ish (would be higher if they give an update fixing the widescreen issues. but probably not much)

PC: 6ish (only because the copyright etc. etc. etc. I would give it the same rating as the 360 version but this copyright stuff is totally getting out of hand. SecureROM, StarForce, it's all BS. it doesn't stop the cracks and the only people it hurts are the real customers. That being the case, i cannot recommend the PC version to anyone.)

Quote:UPDATES ON SECUROM™, PC ACTIVATION, AND A TECHNICAL FAQ
August 23, 2007
We have been reading and listening to your frustrations over SecuROM, PC activation problems, and technical support issues since BioShock launched on Tuesday, and we've devised a plan to help.

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times. Also, we have in the works a revoke tool which you will be able to run on your machine if you want to free up that key and move it to to another computer (this works very much like Steam or iTunes system). We are also working with SecuROM and 2K customer service, so that when you do need to call in support problems, you get answers to your questions faster, without much waiting or being bounced around. SecuROM has been given much more autonomy to help fix your problems quickly and effectively. I am personally sorry for anyone who got bounced around in the past couple days (I even think I contributed to this problem) and we're going to make sure that does not happen in the future.

As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base.

Also, we are aware that our activation server went down last night, stopping some of you from finishing your installs. The server is up and running now and we have corrected the problem that caused that crash.

Finally, we have released a FAQ, which you can view in full below (and will also be posted on the 2K Forums in the Technical Support area) that will help clear up a lot of questions and misinformation that has been floating around about SecuROM and PC activation.

And as for widescreen, we also want to say we completely understand a user's desire to augment their FOV. BioShock is a harrowing experience, but we don't want anyone to feel limited (or motion sick!). So we are in the process of working on an official PC patch to give widescreen PC users a choice to expand their horizontal FOV, and are investigating creating a similar update for the 360.

And finally, I want to personally congratulate Racer_S from the Widescreen Gaming Forums, and his awesome user patch to expand the widescreen FOV in BioShock. I'm currently tracking him down via email, but hopefully, he'll accept my gratitude, and maybe an Nvidia 8800 to boot.

Quote:New DVD-sized disc to hold 1 to 5 terabytes of data

The optical disc revolution started with CDs and then moved on to DVDs, and we're in the midst of the next-gen battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Since the birth of the CD 25 years ago, we've gone from 600MB to a whopping 50GB of storage capacity on these little, convenient and versatile discs.
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But for those who desire more space on a highly portable medium, a new technology from a company called Mempile in Jerusalem promises to blow these limits away. The company claims that they can store up to 1TB (1,000GB) on an optical disc with the same dimensions—only slightly thicker—than a regular DVD and will be able to store 5TB once the jump to blue lasers is made.

The 1TB disc is divided into 200 different layers, each comprising 5GB of storage space. Unlike standard multilayer DVDs, the layers aren't physically stacked and stuck together. The Mempile discs are solid and use a specially developed variant of the polymer polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)—a mixture of Perspex, Lucite, and Plexiglass—known as ePMMA. It's this polymer that gives the discs a distinctive yellow color.

When recording data to the disc, the laser focuses on one of the virtual layers and, using a photochemical reaction, modifies only a part of the plastic to represent a "1" or leaves it alone to represent a "0". This approach uses three dimensions in the polymer to store data rather than the two dimensions used by DVD. The technology is currently limited to WORM (write once, read many) although the company hopes to have read/write drives available in the future.

Mempile was incorporated as a company in 2000 in both the US and Israel, and it received an initial funding of $1 million from private investors and $3 million from the investment firm Millennium Materials Technologies. Further funding to the tune of $11.6 million came in 2004 from Kodiak Ventures, Israel Seed Partners, JVP, Hitachi CSK, Portview, and Alta Berkeley, so there is clearly some outside interest in the technology.

However, the key for Mempile will be whether or not the company can get the discs and drives to market in a reasonable timeframe. The idea itself is not new: other firms have been claiming to be developing this sort of technology for a few years now, but Mempile says that its prototypes are reaching 600-800GB now with 1TB coming soon, and it plans to follow the product up with a blue-laser version that could store up to 5TB. According to a company spokesperson, the discs have a life span of 50 years, and the drives themselves could be on the market in two to three years. By that time, either HD DVD or Blu-ray may have captured the optical storage market, so Mempile has its competition cut out for it.

Quote:An article from Arstechnica.com, fresh off the digital presses:

You can read it here, or read the quoted version below.
Whatever the new technology may be in the future, it looks like blue lasers are going to breath a little more life (and a few more generations) into the CD-type format.

Cheers,

Munk

Quote:Stay tuned for this exciting episode of, "Why can't consumers use their brains and support the better of the two technologies?"

Quote:Starting a new tangent, does anybody have anything good to say about this game? loving it :)