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  • Sony have released the PSP in Australia, and i have recently had opportunity to play with one recently, I thought I would post a quick summary of my thoughts on it here.

    Unit: Surprisingly larger than expected and quite a bit heavier also.

    Screen: Amazingly vibrant, detailed and so easy to view, it is the singularly best aspect of the unit.

    Speed: Loading times were somewhat laggy (similar to a PS2 really) in the game that I was able to use in it (V8 Supercars 2) but once loaded it was easy to play. In a turnabout for Playstation games I found the analouge controller more difficult to use, as it is very difficult to hold the unit comfortably and ergonomnically and use the controller (not to mention the pad did a better job of controling the vehicle).

    Graphics: For everything but games excellent, especially MPEG4 video, but games themselves are not looking as good as one might expect for such a new device, but somehow are extremely impressive at the same time. V8 Supercars looks about as good as any racing game on the PS2 but having been spoiled with an X800 Pro (World of Warcraft) in my machine and a 7800 GTX (GTR Racing Simulator) in my mates machine they look decidedly crap.

    Price: $400 AUD, expensive for what it is – an entertainment system for use on the bus, in the office or by spoiled brats who will be bought it by their foolish parents.

    Comments: The artificial restriction of the UMD’s that hold the games and Video content on these systems to regions as found on DVD’s is pure profiteering that will NOT benefit any consumer but will certainly line the pockets of Sony and their distributors. Trying to pass of these schemes as beneficial to users is as fallacious as record execs saying that apple not allowing variable pricing in the iTunes music store is hurting consumers and artists. I call bullshit, bigtime – the ONLY people who benefit from these anti consumer SCAMS are the record companies, movie studios and distributors who can artificially create markets and prevent competition to allow prices fall. Personally I would be happy to see the ACCC ban devices/schemes like this that segment the market in this way so that as is my legal right as an Australian I can purchase a UMD, DVD or anything else from any country in the world and use it on my australian purchased system. For this reason, I ask that you all boycott the PSP and its media.

    M

  • While reading my atomic magazine which arrived earlier in the week (which happens to have as its main feature set articles on Windows Vista/Longhorn there was a coverage of the Intel Developer Forum going into details about up and coming chipsets specifically the i945 express chipset which features onboard graphics compatible with the Vistas Windows Graphic Compositing engine (or what ever the hell its called) which got me to thinking…

    As I understand it presently apple need to do the following to build a laptop

    1. Design/Contract Chipset (North Bridge) to be used
    2. Source graphics chip and ram
    3. design motherboard
    4. and so on in the process

    As far as I can see with intel releasing chipsets that support the graphics that vista wants immediatly provides graphics support for the various levels of quartz (extreme, 2d extreme, hyperactive, marchitech of the day) as found in Mac OS X. This leads me to believe that the first mac’s built on the x86 platform will probably be something like the iBooks and Mac Minis. These are aimed at the consumer who is unlikely to have a vast quantity of existing (PPC) Mac software who will be little effected by the architechture change. The (i/power)Book lines have been stagnant for some time now and I would expect the consumer lines rather than prosumer lines to be the least hassle to switch.

    This gives apple an easier design route, less complex supply chain and potentially less expense.

    I think it will be very interesting to see what happens.

  • The nice folks over at opera have freed opera for everyone.

    No more adverts and the like. I must admit that its behaviour is somewhat odd and will probably take a while to get used to, but it is nice to have choice as to running lots of browsers, especially seeing as its very secure compared to others on the market.

    Enjoy.

    M

  • Transforming a molehill into a mountain

    Now I have respect for other people’s religions but seeing something where there is nothing to see (in a picture of an icecream no less) is just beyond silly. The guy who complained about this is just stupid.

    What next – being prevented from eating bacon because the franchise owner of a KFC store does not believe in eating of bacon? Hint – if you are an employee/owner/customer of said stores – dont work there/own it/eat there if you are unhappy with what they sell.

    Malcolm McGrath

  • Well I have been using wordpress on this site for a little while and I thought I should make a comment or two about it when I got the chance.

    Having been required to upgrade from an older version due to some security fixes, I must say I am impressed. It did not break my database, it didn’t nuke my config it just worked flawlessly.

    I’m one happy chappy right about now 🙂

    M

  • Oh what fun and joy it was, but the site has now been successfully migrated from the old G3-300 to a shiny Mac Mini (1.42 w/ 1GB RAM) running Mac OS X 10.4

    Some things that may help people who follow me in setting something like this up:

    1) Migrating databases is icky. But there is lots of information out there on how to accomplish the backup and restore of a My SQL DB.
    2) Passwords and MySQL permissions break, and break nastily.
    3) PHP as shipped with OS X + MySQL 4.1 have some issues – to get around this open up a mysql terminal as the DB Admin and run:

    grant all privileges on *.* to 'wp_user'@'localhost'
    identified by '$PASSWORD';

    flush privileges;

    SET PASSWORD for 'wp-user'@'localhost' OLD_PASSWORD('$PASSWORD');


    This ended up solving the issues I was having at the time.

    M

  • iPod infestation almost dooms New Zealand | The Register

    That explains the iPod Ad’s :P.

    M

  • Solaris 2 FAQ Question 3.4

    Having not played with SunOS (Solaris) for a long time, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to once agian refresh my skills with it. But I had forgotten this little gem:

    SunOS 5.x is delivered with the "automounter" enabled. The automounter is designed for NFS sites, to simplify maintenance of the list of filesystems that need mounting. However it is a burden for standalone sites.

    The automounter takes over /home and in effect becomes the NFS server for it, so it no longer behaves like a normal directory. This is normally a Good Thing as it simplifies administration if everybody's home directory is /home/, regardless of their physical location.

    If you want to continue to use the automounter, edit /etc/auto_master and comment out the line starting with "/home". Then run the "automount" command which will cause automountd to reload the maps.

    With that out of the way I was free to write to /home once again.

    (the way to restart sshd was a bit freaky as well – svcadm -v restart ssh )

  • Live at Viiv – Alpha – Blog.CNET.com – CNET.com

    Exqueese me – but what the hell is the “Viiv” brand intel is now parading supposed to mean exactly? They dont employ stupid people at intel, perhaps they could have come up with something that looked or sounded better than Viiv. :boggle:

  • It seems that Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 is having some issues with mscorsvw taking up 100% cpu usage – none of the currently available fixes to the problem seem to work – in fact I have no idea why its having suck problems :(. If you have the same error as below, please sign up an account and respond with a fix – google turns up nothing relevant presently.

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC>ngen executequeueditems
    Microsoft (R) CLR Native Image Generator – Version 2.0.50215.44
    Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1998-2002. All rights reserved.
    Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80
    0705AA)

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC>