The xbox crashing meme has reached slashdot.
Sony is huge. Their Music division probably messed up on a scale that will be stellar for times to come. But their Playstation 3 dept. does rather well: For the XBox 360 this week is really really important. People listen to what people have to say. If the bad news continues to stick with the XBox 360 then this could be tricky for those brave people in Redmond that took on the gaming market. All the pre order sales have been done by hard core gamers. I don’t numbers on this, but my guess is that you really start making money with games (and therefor the consoles) once you reach the broader range of the not so hard core gamers. And for those people it matters if they spend 400 now or 400 later. These people might just wait for the PS3. If they do then Micosoft just lost a big part of the head start bonus. Looking at those ‘internets’ right now it appears as if Sony does an excellent job in putting bad word of mouth around the 360.
Just don’t think that the Music division could benefit from Sony’s PS3 underground marketing skills. They will simply never find the person who might in charge for this. That has nothing to do with the cladestine nature of this. It’s just that Sony is as broken as most big companies are.
Month: November 2005
When the good people at fxguide started to podcast this summer I thought to myself: Another podcast nobody is gonna listening too.
Turns out: I was wrong. What changed? I spend more time in the car now since my clients are spread out over town. So I bought a Monster iPod car connector (they are able to charge 80$ for that!) and suddenly I find myself always having a freshly filled iPod with me. Living in LA was great because of KRCW. The first nine years. Now the tuner only is set to the frequency of the iPod and I am loving it. Mike, Jeff & John: keep it up. It is simply great. Of course fxguide is not the only podcast in my mix, but it certainly stands out in the quality. And it exemplifies the potential of podcasts:
There is room for a million radio stations if turning that dial with a million stops is easy. I would miss those voices from fxguide if they should fall out of the long-tail.
of course I am not a gamer. Let’s put it that way: the last time I looked a t fps (-> that also could mean “First Person Shooter” I have learned) was when it was called doom. I think doom runs on cellphones and/or iPods these days.
So, back to the Xbox 360: It really looks, well, not that great. The power supply is a big black brick. The thing itself is oddly shapped.
It has surprisingly few connections: A 7(?) ended whiplash for the video. USB and ethernet. And some memory thingy in the front.
HD is nice. 1080i and 720p look alright. Only looked at so-so Panasonic Plasma. That top of the line stuff from two years ago.
The aliasing was the biggest dissapointment. Some Racing game and it was PS1 all over again. But maybe I just have not see enough games. Never really get used to it. I am surprised though.
Modeling and texturing was so nicely done in this particular games. Just a shame that the anti aliasing was making every sizzle.
Glad I am not a gamer. Didn’t look like fun to me …
Matt Drudge has a huge audience. Somebody somewhere misrouted a video signal or was unable to operate a switcher correctly.
People found quickly that there is not only an “X” over the image but also a message saying “Transition begins after 5 frames of black”.
Which is why the text below his face is not that readible.
Still, the white is concerned (according to Drudge and some ‘source’).
Maybe this was an ‘counter image’ attempt. After all George
not being able to walk away from a press conference was a very
telling one.
I really really hope that Apple keeps it’s OS clean. Again: There are no viruses or other scamware for OS X.
And I like that, since I can focus on other things. How can people still use Windows and keep up with this kind of ongoing junk?
3 on a match
almost should start smoking because of stories like this.
we are dead
what a weird hack! OS X comes with the sar command, which I found to be very helpful to look at what a machine is doing.
Just running
sar
Will look for todays performance. You have to collect it first. Traditionally this gets done via a cron job. OS X really likes to use launchd instead. But I need to get some work done, I don’t have the time to learn another propriatary solution for a very common problem: Running things periodically. So I stick with cron. Not sure why it is running on some of the systems and not on others. If you follow this make sure cron shows up in a ps ax | grep cron command. If it does then you could enable daily performance traces reportable by “sar” by adding
# run system activity accounting tool every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa1 1 1
# generate a daily summary of process accounting at 23:53
53 23 * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -A
to /etc/crontab. If cron runs then it will reread the file automatically. The remaining problem for me and under
OS X 10.4.3 was that sa1 overwrote instead of appended the performance data. A really terrible hack that fixed this was to change the lines in /usr/lib/sa/sa1 from
exec ${ENDIR}/sadc 1 1 ${DFILE}
to
exec ${ENDIR}/sadc 1 1 >>${DFILE}
This works, but generates error messages like:
sar: drivepath sync code error -4
when I retrieve the daily performance data.
This is good enough for me. All I am after is to find out what that 30TB Xsan has been doing.
surprisingly simple yet nice.