Posts by mrmagoo

BT FON fail: Telco CHARGES customers for FREE Wi-Fi usage

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I don't know if I have just been lucky but I have had 2 home hubs now, a v3 and a v5 on Infinity, and not had any of the problems I constantly see posted about them. My FON is on and we have 2 heavy internet users over 6 or 7 devices including the consoles. I can max out the connection downloading from Steam (though individual connections seem to go no higher than 1.5mb/s) without my flatmate even noticing and he gets very loud if his connection wobbles even slightly.

That said I can understand the BT hate. Every service I have had from them, right back to the dial-up, ISDN or nothing days, has been absolutely terrible until Infinity.

TorrentSpy filters pirated videos

my 2 cents

There are a lot of valid opinions here so here's my take.

If i have downloaded a TV show

1. It's not shown in my country, it may be shown a year from now but it might not. I could wait for it but lets face it if it's available to me now and i want to see it then i will, if you want my money for seeing the show then make it available to me at the same time as people in other countries are telling me how cool it is or stop crying.

2. It will never be shown in my country unless i help spread the word. These are generally foreign shows like Japanese anime. If "fansubbers" had not illegally made Nartuo releases for thousands like me then the American networks would never have realised it's popularity and licensed it for themselves. So we helped make the creators money. Should i feel bad about downloading that?

If i have downloaded a film

Well i don't as a general rule. 95% of movies now are remakes or just utter rubbish that i wouldn't waste bandwidth on let alone hard currency. I do see the odd gem at the cinema but so far this year that has only been the movie 300 and i doubt anything after Transformers (hey, i grew up with these guys) will tempt me. Again i do download the odd foreign film that won't come out over here but as a general rule i have sat through far too much pap over the years to be taken in by "this weeks hit movie" reviews and marketing pitches.

If i have downloaded music

It's a new single/album and i want to hear a bit of it before i spend money on it. Given that music has been price fixed for something like 10 years i don't feel too bad about this. In a similar way to films 95% of what i can find in my local music store is manufactured rubbish that is horribly overpriced, a movie on dvd costs far more to produce than an album and yet they are pretty much the same price (in the UK) which proves price fixing to me. I will generally download, listen and if i like i head to the shop (don't pay and they won't make more) and if i don't then it gets deleted. If the price of music reflected it's value then i would be much more willing to impulse buy music like i did years ago when i could get a single for £3 (~£8 now is not price fixing for a single???). If i could buy the music i like directly from the artists and knew that ALL the profit went to them rather than the record labels i would be more tempted too.

If i have downloaded software

Generally again it's to trial without limitations. I do pay for software i like and use though, again if you don't pay them they won't make more or improve it.

If i have downloaded a game

Again, i have played FPS games, racing games and MMOs and the genres have been done to death so i don't really download games. The "console generation" seems to have killed anything outside these 3 genres presumably because games where you have to figure stuff out is no fun for them and therefore games companies pander to where the biggest profit is. I mostly download old adventure games that require a little grey matter and can't be bought anymore, though i bough every Myst game that came out (i actually have 3 copies of Myst 1 as i kept losing them and finding them again) and most of the other games i like. I could download any PSP game i want but i don't, i buy them and copy them to my memstick so i don't need to carry 30 discs around with me (which sony doesn't like, yet i bought the damn game!).

Big vs small

This one is aimed directly at Sean O'Connor and similar folk. If i like something (even a little bit) by a small author like yourself then it gets bought. Small independent authors are the few that are still willing to do things for the love of doing it rather than "fps games are big profit earners, lets make another" type companies. I will be honest and admit i have no problems cheating Microsoft out of a few pennies but smaller companies or individuals definitely fall into my "don't pay and they won't make more" category as they can't afford to soak up the losses. I may be contradictory but i believe in putting the money into the hands of people who make things i like, not into the hands of a company that has sold me 4 FPS games in the last 3 months and now wants to sell me another which is hardly any different to the last 4 just so they can keep their share price up. I will willingly part with my cash for lovingly created "art", but not to drive a business model based around flogging the same product to me again and again with a different badge.

Five things Sony needs to do save the PS3

RE: Test Man/Theo Pantazi

Yes i do know that a firmware update allowed for higher resolution video (full DVD resolution and not 640x480), however the bitrate allowed is still restricted as far as i know so even with full resolution there is still a drop in quality so i take that update as "you can do it, but it will still look rubbish" rather than addressing the problem.

Many people are still keeping their firmware on 1.50 as that one allows prepared homebrew to run without any hackity tricks, many more use a "firmware emulator" on their 1.50's so they can still play games that require later firmwares and these guys are still locked in.

The very first thing Sony need to do, not just for the PS3 but all of their hardware products, is to realise that people in countries like the UK are not happy to be charged close to double for the same products when compared with other countries. Add the region locking to stop people importing a console at a the same price as other countries and the fact they killed off one of their biggest supporters (Lik-Sang) are proving that Sony want out money more than they want to give us a "killer" console.

That in itself will stop all but the richest and most devout Sony fanboys (and girls) from buying a PS3 in the UK. From the numbers i have seen the UK is the 3rd most expensive country to buy a PS3 in, we're feeling that love Sony.

Back off the PSP

Why does the gaming industry keep attacking the PSP? It's a great mobile platform even if left crippled by the standard Sony firmware, put a custom firmware on it and it truly flies. There is not one single feature or game ob the DS that would even make me think of buying one but i couldn' live without my PSP and even DS owners i know will grudgingly admit that the "features" of the DS pale when compared.

The only 2 issues with the PSP is that Sony have spent so much time concentrating of flogging the PS3 they have largely ignored or alienated the PSP owners, and that they intentionally cripple the device to flog UMD movies.

The best example is the PS1 emulator built into the 3.xx series firmwares. Technically anyone could take their old PS1 games, convert them and run them on the PSP. Sony decides that this is a bad idea and forces people to buy the games again (the games are just an encrypted ISO of the original game), fair enough if a little cheeky. They also decide that you can only enjoy this wonderful emulator by buying the games from the PS3 store, why do i have to buy a very expensive console for this when there is a perfectly function PSP store? I can only assume the reason is to try and drum up more PS3 sales leaving people like me (who don't want one) out in the cold. Anyone in the know is probably aware that the custom firmwares bypass this rather unfriendly decision and allow PSP owners to package the PS1 games they still own.

As for the video, well we can encode our own video and then learn the bewildering foldernames needed to make it play on the PSP but we can only use low bitrate and 320x240 resolution (the PSP screen is 480x272). Why? To make UMD movies look better that's why, again we are crippled to advance sales of another of their projects. Enter the custom firmware again.

Now given that i have a lovely big screen (widescreen format), swappable memory sticks up to 8Gb that i can fill with downloadable demos, my own encoded videos, oddles of MP3's to listen to whilst wandering around and almost any PS1 game i can still buy running on it why would i want a DS with it's limited features? The only possible answer is for games that the PSP doesn't have, and that's Sony's fault for ignoring a very capable mobile platform.

The custom firmware makers have not ignored the PSP and have not only un-crippled the device in terms of the video and the PS1 emulator, but homebrew developers have also created an open-source SDK allowing anyone with some knowledge of C to develop their own software and given games like No Gravity (http://www.realtech-vr.com/nogravity/) you can see that not all of these are cheesy 2d ripoffs of other games. Try that on your DS (oh wait, you need a $100 flash programmer for that making the DS more expensive than the PSP for homebrew)!

I would say that the PSP should not be dropped as it has a very dedicated (if largely ignored) fan community. It just seems that Sony is making the same mistakes with the PS3 that is has with the PSP.