This is a fairly comprehensive comparison of the XBOX 360 and the PS3 by a developer who has experience developing for both SONY and Microsoft. Very good read and I highly recommend it for anyone considering buying one either of these 2 systems

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-348-1.htm 

In a courageous line camping operation smashmyps3.com accomplished their goal of obtaining and gleefully destroying a PS3 in front of a line of horrified SONY hype addicts. I can’t help but think how would it feel to be the first person in the line not to get a PS3 and then see that. I can’t help but think it’s a small piece of payback for sipping the SONY koolaid. Anyways check out the pics and video over at http://www.smashmyps3.com

It’s pure beauty!

Well as you can probably tell from previous posts my say is “DON’T BUY” both for multiple reasons

1. It’s a ripoff! Price to Fun factor is WAY out of wack.
2. You’re supporting the MPAA’s quest to take away consumers rights with Blu-Ray
3. You’re not going to see as many games developed for PS3 as you’ll see for the XBOX 360 or Wii as SONY has traditionally treated developers badly and had crappy dev tools. (see Interview With Nolan Bushnell ) so a lot of them are jumping ship and developing for other systems.

But my great joy of this morning was this article from Time again reiterating my feelings about the PS3 It’s a good read and has a lot of good advice.

“the PS3 simply doesn’t deliver” – Lev Grossman Time.com

“SONY Playstation 3 is not worth the hype” Time.com article

Well as many of you may or may not know I have a great distaste (bordering on hatred) of SONY. Don’t get me wrong I used to be a fan but with the declining quality of the SONY products I’ve purchased and the seeming lack of respect for long time customers and fans they’ve pushed me away.
The purpose of this post is to try to enlighten the would be fanboys of why they shouldn’t buy a PS3.

First to get a real impression of people lack of reasoning watch ‘Stuttering Craig’ interview a couple of the line camping mouth breathers waiting for a pre order. Pay special attention to the genius who’s big killer feature is Blu-Ray.

Stuttering Craig

On the subject of Blu-Ray if you’re even considering purchasing a PS3 or any other product that supports Blu-Ray you really need to read this article in ‘Business Week’ about the Extensive anti-consumer DRM your supporting. If you’re not already aware DRM (Digital Rights Management) is schemes that companies use to protect their content bi it music, video etc. Now both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have AACS which drops the resolution of the picture if the player isn’t connected to a trusted device (HDCP compatible display). But Blu-ray goes far beyond that giving SONY the ability to shut down your player if the encryption is ever broken by anyone anywhere in the world. Read more in the BW article
BusinessWeek Article

I sure hope so. As a Linux user I dread the time consuming process of booting back into windows to play my favorite games. I’ve tried things like wine and Transgamings Cedega but as these things usually go it ends up requiring too much forum browsing or fiddling to get them to work just right and you usually take either a performance hit or a visual quality hit. Well Transgaming has announced a new product marketed at developers and publishers called Cider.

What cider is is a development tool that from what I’ve read encapsulates (and/or compiles) the windows source into a Intel Mac Friendly package. The way it’s described in the press release is as follows

” Cider works by directly loading a Windows program into memory on an Intel-Mac and linking it to an optimized version of the Win32 APIs. Games are simply wrapped up in the Cider engine and they work on the Mac.”

A new study from researchers here in Canada shows that regular video game usage promotes the ability of the mind to multi task, block out external distractions and causes the brain to age at a slower pace. The study reports that the effects of regular gaming shows similar effects a bilingualism as an exercise of the mind. The study notes that it is the inability to silence mental “noise” that makes the elderly prone to distraction and poor multi taskers. It is thought that this generation of gamers may be more functional mentally in our latter years due to this. In their test gamers preformed better and faster than their non gaming counterparts. The highest scorers were bilingual gamers.
Please read the full article at the Globe & Mail – http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060209.wxbrains09/BNStory/Science/home